Medieval Saints and Modern Screens Alicia Spencer-Hall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spencer-Hall, Alicia, author.

Series:

Knowledge communities (Amsterdam, Netherlands) ; 3.

Knowledge communities ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Saints in motion pictures.

Middle Ages in motion pictures.

Hagiography.

Motion pictures--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--History--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 pages) : illustrations, tables.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liege'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liege, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ecstatic Cinema, Cinematic Ecstasy

1.Play / Pause / Rewind: Temporalities In Flux

2.The Caress Of The Divine

3.The Xtian Factor, Or How To Manufacture A Medieval Saint

4.My Avatar, My Soul: When Mystics Log On

Conclusion: The Living Veronicas Of Liège

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Revision of author's thesis (dissertation)-- University College London, 2010-2014.

Compliant with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Content is displayed as HTML full text which can easily be resized or read with assistive technology, with mark-up that allows screen readers and keyboard-only users to navigate easily.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Filmography, pages 289-291.

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed October 02 2025)

ISBN:

1-003-69960-X

1-04-079909-4

90-485-5129-3

90-485-3217-5

9781003699606

OCLC:

1021808088

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access