The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England
- Author / Editor
- Stanbury, Sarah.
The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England
- Published
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
- Physical Description
- 290 pp.
- Series
- The Middle Ages.
- Description
- Stanbury describes late medieval English attitudes toward images, icons, and devotion, exploring how the tensions among these attitudes are represented in art and literature. Reformist distrust of images co-existed with newly intensified devotional practice to produce awareness and anxiety about the "premodern fetishes" of devotional art. Against this backdrop, Stanbury assesses John Capgrave's Katherine, Walter Hilton's "Merk Ymage," Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Life of Christ, the Book of Margery Kempe, and several aspects of Chaucer's "sacramental poetic": his ekphrastic descriptions, the Pardoner's relics, daisy worship in LGWP, the "translation" of Griselda in ClT, and the tension between private devotion and public spectacle in PrT.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Pardoner and His Tale
- Clerk and His Tale
- Legend of Good Women
- Prioress and Her Tale