Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages

While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct it was also the most pervasive whether planned or unplanned instrumental or vocal occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art architecture and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound space and image in the long Middle Ages.

The Gothic style is now one of the supreme products of Medieval and Renaissance visual culture. Subject to multiple readings and (re)interpretations from ca. 1500 to the present Gothic stands as one of two dominant languages of European historical architecture. This volume explores methods of reading and interpreting the Gothic from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Following the editor’s introduction it contains ten essays written by leading scholars from Canada the United States and Great Britain. In challenging the traditional parameters of Gothic the papers explore ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ manifestations of the Gothic and they consider material ranging geographically from Ireland to Poland and from Paris to Sicily. Each paper explores ways in which Gothic was or could be read by the contemporary viewers for which it was designed and by post-modern commentators. In placing the act of reading at the centre of their investigations the papers offer significant new insights into the forms and meanings of the Gothic.