The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions

Abstract

"The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions." This article reconsiders traditional explanations for the novel attitudes toward imagery that have long been recognized as having characterized the late Middle Ages. In particular, it challenges the notion, inherited from Huizinga, that the widespread growth and acceptance of devotional imagery is to be attributed to the increasingly popular character of the audience for religious art. Particularly in the Rhineland, a region of seminal importance at the turn of the fourteenth century, it seems that nuns constituted the primary audience for devotional imagery, and that the images as well as the visions they inspired embody a set of religious aspirations that should not be judged by standards inherited from the mystical tradition of the earlier Middle Ages.