Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse

Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse
ISBN-10
0521479207
ISBN-13
9780521479202
Series
Reading Images
Category
Art
Pages
489
Language
English
Published
1995-11-24
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Suzanne Lewis

Description

Reading Images focuses on the multi-layered relationships between the textual image and its reader-viewer in the Apocalypse manuscripts produced in England during the thirteenth century, a period of profound changes in the social and cultural fabric. The exponential expansion in the production and dissemination of illuminated manuscripts that occurred at this time provided a critical, cultural mechanism for the creation of new technologies of the self. As the Apocalypse narrative was visualized in pictures, it became a powerful paradigm within which problematic contemporary experiences such as anti-Judaism, the later Crusades, and expectations of the world's end could be defined. Reading Images explores the kinds of contemporary mythologies that constitute ideology, a realm in which visual representation becomes an agent rather than a reflector of social change.

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