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Reading in the wilderness : private devotion and public performance in late medieval England / Jessica Brantley.
LIBRA BV4501.3 .B7423 2007
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Brantley, Jessica.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Spiritual life--Christianity--History--Middle Ages, 600-1500.
- Spiritual life.
- Devotion.
- Spiritual life--Christianity.
- History.
- England--Religion.
- England.
- Religion.
- Genre:
- History.
- Physical Description:
- xviii, 463 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Summary:
- "The devotional reading experience in the Middle Ages was not merely a private act of contemplation and introspection, but a more public enterprise dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate MS Additional 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England."
- "Drawing on the work of W.I.T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript's texts and illustrations together, unlike previous studies of 370.19, to examine connections between word and picture, and reading and performance, both within the solitary monk's cell and outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed in tandem, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading."--Jacket.
- Contents:
- Introduction: The performance of reading
- "Silence visible" : Carthusian devotional reading and meditative practice
- Backgrounds : the Carthusian Order
- Carthusians and books
- Carthusians and art
- The shapes of eremitic reading in the desert of religion : the desert of religion as imagetext
- "ALS wildernes is wroght þis boke" : formats of monastic books
- Reading spiritual community in the wilderness
- Lyric imaginings and painted prayers
- The eremitic lyric and Richard Rolle
- Imagining the Carthusian reader
- Liturgical pageantry in private spaces
- Reading the liturgy : two models
- Performing the holy name
- Performing the canonical hours
- Performing the seven sacraments
- Envisioning dialogue in performance
- "In maner of a dyaloge it wente"
- Allegorical dialogues : the pylgremage of the soul
- Mystical dialogues : the treatise of the seven points
- Dramatizing the cell : theatrical performances in monastic reading
- Dramatic texts, lyric voices, and private readers
- Theatrical reading in additional 37049
- Monastic closet drama
- Conclusion: Reading performances.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 395-448) and indexes.
- Conference on Christianity & Literature Book of the Year Award, Winner, 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780226071329
- 0226071324
- OCLC:
- 123079186
- Online:
- Contributor biographical information
- Publisher description
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