Image, text, and religious reform in fifteenth-century England
By: Shannon Gayk
Series: Cambridge studies in medieval literature -- 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780521190800
Subjects: Visual perception in literature; English literature; Idols and images in literature; Iconoclasm; History and criticism; Religion and literature; Iconoclasm in literature; History
Description: "Focusing on the period between the Wycliffite critique of images and Reformation iconoclasm, Shannon Gayk investigates the sometimes complementary and sometimes fraught relationship between vernacular devotional writing and the religious image. She examines how a set of fifteenth-century writers, including Lollard authors, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, John Capgrave, and Reginald Pecock, translated complex clerical debates about the pedagogical and spiritual efficacy of images and texts into vernacular settings and literary forms. These authors found vernacular discourse to be a powerful medium for explaining and reforming contemporary understandings of visual experience. In its survey of the function of literary images and imagination, the epistemology of vision, the semiotics of idols, and the authority of written texts, this study reveals a fifteenth century that was as much an age of religious and literary exploration, experimentation, and reform as it was an age of regulation"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction. Reformations of the image; 1. Lollard iconographies; 2. Hoccleve's spectacles; 3. Lydgate's refigurations of the image; 4. Capgrave's material memorials; 5. Pecock's libri laicorum; Coda. Words for images.