This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions – typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others – based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated in tandem with other discursive paradigms – scribal, humanistic, antiquarian, historical, and literary, to name but a few – for the connection, complementary or otherwise, between verbal and visual media. The Authority of the Word discusses the ways in which the mutual form and function, manner and meaning of texts and images were conceived and deployed in early modern Europe. Contributors include James Clifton, John R. Decker, Maarten Delbeke, Wim François, Jan L. de Jong, Catherine Levesque, Andrew Morrall, Birgit Ulrike Münch, Carolyn Muessig, Bart Ramakers, Kathryn Rudy, Els Stronks, Achim Timmermann, Anita Traninger, Peter van der Coelen, Geert Warnar, and Michel Weemans.

By clothing the Word with her flesh, the Virgin Mary made God visible, manifesting Christ as a perfect “image” of the Father. By virtue of this archetypal “artistry” of Incarnation, Mary mediates the tradition of Christian image-making. This volume explores images of the Mother of God in early modern devotion, piety, and power. The book is divided into four sections, the first three of which link the subjects thematically and geographically in Europe, while the last one follows Mary’s legacy. Contributors include: Elliott D. Wise, Anna Dlabačová, James Clifton, Kim Butler Wingfield, Barbara Baert, Steven Ostrow, Barbara Haeger, Shelley Perlove, Cristina Cruz González, and Mehreen Chida-Razvi.