Late Medieval Culture Research Articles

The concept of "vanitas" by Hieronymus Bosch in the context of late medieval culture of the XV-XVI centuries

The concept of "vanitas" by Hieronymus Bosch in the context of late medieval culture of the XV-XVI centuries

Flesh and Blood vs Rigor of Justice The Concepts of Justitia and Aequitas in “Processus Satanae contra genus humanum”

A fifteenth-century treatise, Processus Satanae contra genus humanum, is a peculiar artefact of late medieval culture as it blends theological, theatrical, and juridical elements significant for the period. Intended as a manual for law students, it provided an idealized example of an ordinary court hearing. According to the plot, the Devil files a complaint against the entire humankind and demands that it returns to his possession. He sends a demonic representative to defend his interests, while the Virgin Mary assumes the role of humankind's lawyer. The trial is presided by Jesus Christ the judge. After an exhausting debate, the forces of good win the case. Underneath this entertaining and grotesque façade lies a serious discussion about different types of justice and their importance for a real-life judge, lawyer, or plaintiff. The author of Processus Satanae distinguishes two types of justice — justitia and aequitas. Justitia refers to rigorous justice of human law, while aequitas refers to righteousness coupled with mercy. The latter comes directly from God; without aequitas, justitia becomes rigid law that has no real power in Christian sense. Since the Devil and his servant rely exclusively on justitia, as they do not know misery and empathy, they ultimately lose the case. In this way, the treatise warns law students against following the letter of law blindly and without regard for individual circumstances.

Status, gender and emotions: family conflicts at the Parlement de Toulouse

ABSTRACT As a royal court of justice with jurisdiction over the entire province of Languedoc, southern France, the Parlement de Toulouse left an impressive but largely overlooked legacy of well preserved judicial records. Based on the case study of a 1444 trial pitting a widow, Isabelle de Ferréol, against her stepson, Raymond-Bernard de Montpezat, this article deconstructs the narrative structure of the pleas. Centred on the process of character creation and on the mechanics of defamation, the article analyses how the procurators who represented the plaintiff and the defendant in court shaped the contrasting characters of their clients. Instrumental in framing the true-sounding stories told by the procurators to the court were the politics of the Hundred Years’ War, gender constructs, late medieval family culture, law and literary tropes.

The Mobile Phone in Late Medieval Culture

This is an historical meditation - an essay on material culture and how humans relate to it. It is written as a science fiction piece, taking the form of a plenary address to a Material Culture conference sometime in the future. Mobile phones are well on their way to becoming universal devices and this playful essay explores ideas concerning the consequences of the mobile phone for humans, our relations with technology and our evolution.

Thinking Medieval Romance by Katherine C. Little Nicola McDonald

MLR, .,   make culturally credible a concept of Europe that is neither exclusively spatial nor economically based. e volume has the merit not only of retracing debates and discoveries of a centuries-old history, but also of producing a description of Romance linguistics that is both revolutionary and illuminating. Marked by a prejudice-free fascination for the subject and a clear and engaging exposition, it proves essential reading as an introduction to linguistics and as a reflection on its connections to human culture. C U  N Y F F inking Medieval Romance. Ed. by K C. L and N MD- . Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Arising from the ‘ink Romance!’ conference held at Fordham University in , this volume presents eleven essays, along with a comprehensive Introduction, from international contributors in the fields of medieval literature and music. Encompassing literary, visual, and sonic explorations of French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English romances, the interdisciplinary chapters frequently overlap and invite us to read and think across the volume’s five sections, and, more broadly, across the genre. Collectively, the essays constitute a significant contribution to scholarship with appeal to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the medieval period, as well as to scholars of earlier and later periods whose works intersect with it. In the Introduction, the editors trace romance’s roots in classical and historiographical traditions and its emergence in the twelh century as an experimental form. e genre’s most distinctive trait—fictionality—provides a critical space for interrogations of social, economic, and political issues, they suggest. Section  presents the paired concepts of ‘unknowing’ and ‘unthinking’, which are undertaken, respectively, by Nicola McDonald and James Simpson. For McDonald, Octavian Imperator exemplifies how the mundane constitutes a type of unknowing or wonder , and how wonder itself can engage directly with contemporary concerns, from the spending habits of the royal treasury to the power of guilds in late medieval culture. In contrast, Simpson illustrates romance’s ability to think indirectly. Reassessing an episode of sexual violence in Sir Degaré, he suggests that shame operates subtly as a generative force, one which ultimately contributes to the restoration of the family unit and social order. Romance’s potent intertextuality and dialogic relationships with politics, religion , and visual and sonic media are the concerns of the volume’s middle sections. Here, Laura Ashe teases out the contexts and implications of various accounts of King John’s death, especially in the Brut tradition, simultaneously highlighting the slippage between and the circular influence of historiographical and fictional texts. Lee Manion reveals how the Baltic elements of Sir Gowther reflect the range of crusading activities prevalent in the medieval period and how the narrative operates as a possible speculum for crusaders in other regions. Both Matilda Tomaryn  Reviews Bruckner, examining Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Le Conte du Graal, and Geoff Rector, analysing Marie de France’s Lais, focus on how romancers innovate and create authorial space by integrating and reworking religious materials (for Chrétien , from exegetical traditions, and for Marie, from the Psalms). Consequently, the authors highlight how the sacred and the secular intermingle in medieval thought. Returning to Octavian, Emma O’Loughlin Bérat draws out connections between romance and Revelation in representations of motherhood, the apocalyptic Woman, and manuscript illuminations, noting that these connections can offer moments of agency for female figures. e next two essays examine the literary and the sonic, with an emphasis on French romance. Emma Dillon suggests that in a variety of romances sonic interpolations, such as festal soundscapes, demarcate space and contribute to community-building both inside and outside the text. Monika Otter , through the example of Tristan romances and songs, unravels the reciprocal influence literary texts and musical creations (extant or lost) can have upon each other. e final section foregrounds the mutability of generic labels, reinforcing the volume’s message that romance not only thinks but also needs rethinking. rough a study of Floire et Blancheflor and its Hellenistic antecedent Callirhoe, Sharon Kinoshita argues for regional considerations of romance, here one grounded in the histories and experiences of the Mediterranean, reflecting its specific...

Pilgrimage, Print, and Performance

This article discusses three poems written in the early 1490s by the Florentine Giuliano Dati (1445–1524), a penitentiary priest at the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome: the Stazione e indulgenze di Roma (1492–93), Tractato di Santo Ioanni Laterano (1492–94), and Aedificatio Romae (1494). Composed in the popular cantare verse form, which was strongly associated with public performance, these works are an unusual example of printed guides to Rome aimed specifically at an Italian audience. Situating Dati’s cantari within the broader culture of the Roman pilgrimage, the article assesses their relationship with established textual and performance traditions and considers the pastoral motivation behind their production. In doing so, it advocates for closer attention to the permeability between ephemeral print and performance in late medieval pilgrimage and devotional culture.

ИСТОРИЯ ЦЕРКОВНОГО ПОЧИТАНИЯ ИКОН СВЯТИТЕЛЯ НИКОЛАЯ «РАТНОГО» И ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ СРЕДНЕВЕКОВОЙ ИКОНЫ «НИКОЛА МОЖАЙСКИЙ»

The purpose of the article is to present the history veneration of icons-copies of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, who was located in the fortress of Mozhaisk. The iconography of «Nikola Mozhaisky» or «Nikola the Feat» was distin-guished by the image of a sword in the right hand of the Saint. The historical and cultural study of the icon «Nikola Mozhaisky, the Miracle of Nicaea» from the collection of the Orel museum of local history is being conducted for the first time. The author offers a comprehensive method of historical and art history research with a combination of the method of art history analysis of the subject.The author dates the subject to the last third of the 16-th century, defines the historical and cultural context of this subjectorigin and existence, and also considers the historical and artistic sources of and similar objectsoriginin late medieval Russian culture.

The scribes and drawing-artists brothers Basovs’ art as a phenomenon of the Russian Late Medieval culture.

The scribes and drawing-artists brothers Basovs’ art as a phenomenon of the Russian Late Medieval culture.

“So shall yoe bee:” Encountering the Shrouded Effigies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall at Fenny Bentley

The Beresford Monument from the Church of St Edmund at Fenny Bentley in Derbyshire is a funerary monument that has received relatively little attention from scholars due to its unusual imagery and the lack of documentary evidence regarding its creation. The alabaster monument depicts Thomas Beresford (d. 1473) and Agnes Hassall (d. 1467) as fully shrouded three-dimensional effigies. Incised around the base of the monument are enshrouded representations of their twenty-one children. This paper analyzes the impact that veiling the bodies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall has on the effectiveness of the monument as a commemorative tool and situates the shrouded effigies within their broader visual and social context at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rather than dismiss the unusual imagery of the Beresford Monument as an expedient solution selected by sculptors who did not know what Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall actually looked like, this paper argues that shrouding the effigies was a deliberate commemorative strategy meant to evoke specific responses in the monument’s viewers. Although there is little concrete information about the tomb’s commission, contextualizing it by examining the monument in concert with other aspects of late medieval culture—including purgatorial piety, macabre texts and imagery, and ex votos—can provide a richer understanding of the object’s potentiality for its beholders. The anonymizing aspect of the shroud ultimately enabled viewers to identify freely and easily with the individuals depicted on the monument, which would have encouraged them to pray for the souls of Thomas and Agnes, thus perpetuating their memories and reducing their time in purgatory.

SACRED VERSE OF THE END OF THE XV – MID XVII cc. IN UKRAINIAN PARALITURGICALMUSICAL CULTURE (Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s reminiscences concerning the study of the genre)

The purpose of the article comprises: a) by means of conducting of musicological-source studies to enter the genre of sacred verse in musical-poetic heritage of Ukrainian late-medieval culture in spite of the fact that it is habitually associated with the Muscovite (Russian) culture of the considered time: b) to analyse the genre as an important religious-artistic source of the Ukrainian baroque time song creativity of the end of the XVI–XVIII centuries. The methodology of research have been used: methods of source study, historical, of music theory, etc. The scientific novelty. In the article, the sacred stich (verse) is stu as a genre of the national sacred song creativity tradition aroused in the late medieval age and contributed to the origin of the Ukrainian baroque sacred song creativity. M. Hrushevkyi’s unjustly forgotten concept of learning the sacred verse in the context of the Ukrainian song cultural and literary creativity was laid down in that approach. By means of a number of examples Yu. Medvedyk proves the topicality of M. Hrushevskyi’s ideas and points out further prospects of the development of the study of the genre of repentance verse. A special attention the author pays to the issue of the study of the motif of “repentance in wilderness” which was very well elaborated by East Slavic song authors of late medieval time. Later these motifs manifested themselves very distinctly in repentance sacred songs of the Baroque epoch. The essence of this culture is sufficiently, well represented in the “Bohohlasnyk” from Pochaiv, which has been recently reprinted in a Slavic studies Austria-Germany publishing house (“Böhlau Verlag”) by Yu. Medvedyk [7]. Conclusions. The state of the present-time textological studies of repentance verses allows contemporary researches to include them not to the old Muscovite (Russian) spiritual heritage. The previously conducted musical-textological investigational distinctly prove it

Travel writing, reception theory and the history of reading: reconsidering the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to explore the value of a reader-oriented approach to late medieval European travel writing. It offers a brief overview of the development of reception theory and the “history of reading” before discussing issues related to the definition of the genre in this period. Examining how medieval readers approached the celebrated accounts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, as well as a broader range of literature pertaining to travel, it argues that reconstructing the contemporary reception of such works can help us to better understand their position in late medieval culture. Particular attention is paid to the permeability of boundaries between fact and fiction, with a case study exploring two literary imitations of travel accounts produced in early fifteenth-century Florence. The article concludes with some considerations regarding the significance of the reader for our broader understanding of travel writing’s historical development.

Virginia Langum, Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture

Virginia Langum, <i>Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture</i>

The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society

Many medical texts of the European Middle Ages included advice to young women on breast reduction. These recipes and techniques have not often been discussed by medieval historians, whose interest in meanings of women’s breasts has concentrated mostly on religious or nutritive associations. Highlighting late medieval English texts and culture, this article summarises medical advice on repressing breast growth, notes some ancient and earlier medieval precedents and argues the recipes responded not only to aesthetic preferences but also to beliefs that bust size and texture signified sexual experience. Arguing that breasts were legible flesh, in which an observer could read a young woman’s honour, it contends that breast suppression not only met idealised beauty standards but also protected sexual reputations.

Phenomenal pain: Embodying the Passion in the Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek

Structured around a daily routine of Passion imitation, the Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek presents self-mortification as a means of recognizing the fundamental significance of embodiment to understanding the world and one’s place in it. It encourages the reader to reflect on the relationship between embodiment, imitation and human experience. Employing a phenomenology of embodied existence, the function of Elizabeth’s exceptional pain rituals are here examined as processes of situating oneself in the world. It is argued that Elizabeth’s imitatio and its textual representation are a negotiation of the simultaneous formation and effacement of individual identity in late-medieval devotional culture. The essay addresses Elizabeth’s portrayal of numerous individuals, predominantly Christ, but also his torturers, the Virgin Mary and the disciple John, specifically examining her dual role as both tormentor and tormented in order to suggest that imitation is central to asceticism.

The voices of royal subjects? Political speech in the judicial and governmental records of fourteenth-century England

This article examines the reported speech of individuals who were accused of voicing criticism of the monarch or of royal government in fourteenth-century England. These words were attributed to individuals outside of the social elite, who were then drawn into political discourses shaped by the ideologies and institutional structures of the royal courts. This process might influence relations between neighbours and local communities, as well as between individuals and the officials who represented the Crown. When we think about how this affects our understanding of late medieval political culture, we need to think about the whole context of the accusation: the role of ‘informers’, witnesses and local juries. Political news sometimes emanated from royal office holders, messengers, clerks and sheriffs, allowing them to demonstrate just how well-connected they were with those in power. They could also manipulate the process to accuse opponents of spreading false tales and pursue local vendettas through the royal courts. All those who participated in the process had to interact with the language and procedure of the royal judicial system and they constructed their narratives carefully as part of the performance required by the courts. The written records, then, allow us to examine how the words of these individuals were rendered in textual form, and further, to think carefully about how they were represented as subjects of the Crown.

Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna by Elina Gertsman

Reviewed by: Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna by Elina Gertsman Judith Collard Gertsman, Elina, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; hardback; pp. 288; 48 colour, 106 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$79.95; ISBN 9780271064017. This is a beautiful book of unusual and delightful sculptures. It is anchored in the scholarship of the last thirty years and demonstrates how an interest in devotional forms of art and the gendering of the Middle Ages has opened up the range of subject matter now acceptable as the focus of scholarly research. Elina Gertsman's widely read scholarship is evident on every page. Shrine Madonnas are surprisingly well spread: they can be found in Spain and in Finland. They can be physically small and used for private devotion or large-scale statues found within chapels and churches. Most date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but first appeared in the late thirteenth century. Conventionally, a Shrine Madonna is a statue, usually carved in wood, of a seated and crowned Madonna, holding an infant Christ, which can be opened and acts as a container for holy images. The container wings, made of the split sides of the Madonna, might contain painted images of the Trinity, featuring a bearded God, the crucified Christ, and the dove of the Holy Spirit above their heads. There are variations, however. The Shrine Madonna of the Holy Clares' convent in Allariz, for instance, opens to display, in ivory, carved in deep relief, a series of seven crucial narrative moments in the life of Christ and the Virgin: the Annunciation, Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Coronation of the Virgin. The book is divided into four chapters, each exploring different aspects of these statues. It begins with condemnations of such works by Catholic theologians such as the Flemish Johannis Molanus and Jean Gerson, the Chancellor of the University of Paris. The latter condemned a statue seen in a Parisian Carmelite monastery, objecting to the image of the Trinity in Mary's womb, 'as if the entire Trinity took flesh in the Virgin Mary'. He objected to this imagery, as it had 'neither beauty nor pious sentiment and can be a cause of error and lack of devotion'. Yet, as Gertsman explores, such artworks acted as sites of devotional disclosures that were rooted in philosophical and physiological understandings of the human body. She uses these statues as Barthian punctum, a point of entry into late medieval culture. She highlights the porous borders between lay and ecclesiastical environments where objects were used by a range of people from different segments of society. In her discussion of these marvellous containers, Gertsman locates them within a broader late medieval visual culture, bringing in reliquaries and a range of other physical objects, such as the fifteenth-century Weinhausen sepulchre featuring a carved effigy of the dead Christ. The wooden sepulchre is decorated with a complex network of Christological narratives. She also draws in elaborate altarpieces, small, bejewelled cribs, and figures of the [End Page 213] infant Christ. These often interactive works, used sometimes in devotional performances, were once not the subject of academic study but are now found at the heart of this exciting research. Given the emphasis on pregnancy in these works, it is not surprising that Gertsman also addresses medical imagery. Scenes of the Visitation are shown, along with woodcuts and other images concerning monstrous birth. Miracle plays, the writings of Rupert of Deut, Bonaventure, and others discussed the miracle of Mary's escape from labour pains. Mary's body also becomes a sacred space: Robert Grosseteste compared it to a castle, while her womb was Jesus's ivory throne. This is a thoughtful work that draws on wide literature related to the Virgin Mary and pregnancy and anchors these shrine statues in the rich visual culture of late medieval religious devotion. It moves a devotional art form that has sometimes been regarded as controversial into the mainstream of medieval thought and practice. Judith Collard University Of Otago Copyright © 2017 Judith Collard

About the Cover

About the Cover David L. Howell Click for larger view View full resolution The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏物語) is a classic of world literature. Japanese readers have been fascinated by the novel since Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, completed it during the first decade of the eleventh century. The peak of premodern interest in Genji came during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the tale dominated the cultural lives not only of court elites but also of warriors who aspired to cultural distinction. Genji was everywhere during that time—in readings, lectures, discussions, plays, calligraphic inscriptions, and paintings. The cover image for this issue is a product of the late medieval culture of Genji. Sue Saburō 陶三郎, a leading retainer of the influential Ōuchi 大内 warrior house, commissioned the work now known as the Harvard Genji Album. Completed in 1510, the album originally comprised fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu 土佐光信 (1434–1525), one for each of the novel's chapters. (One of Mitsunobu's paintings was lost and has been replaced in the extant album by another artist's work.) Each painting is paired with a textual excerpt by a prominent calligrapher. The image here illustrates the moment in the fifth chapter, "Young Murasaki" (Wakamurasaki 若紫), when Genji first espies Murasaki—the young girl in the center of the image—whom he adopts as his ward and later marries. HJAS thanks the Harvard University Art Museums for their kind permission to reproduce the image. DLH details: Tosa Mitsunobu, Young Murasaki (Wakamurasaki), illustration to chap. 5, in Genji monogatari, Muromachi period, 1509–1510. Fifth of a series of 54 painted album leaves mounted in an album with calligraphic excerpts; ink, color, and gold on paper; H. 24.2 cm x W. 18.0 cm. Harvard Art Museums /Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of the Hofer Collection of the Arts of Asia, 1985.352.5.A. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. [End Page ix] Copyright © 2017 Harvard-Yenching Institute

'GAME' IN "THE TALE OF GAMELYN"

It is often said that the protagonist of the fourteenth-century Tale of Gamelyn has a name that means 'son of the old man', deriving from the Icelandic gamall or 'old'.1 This reading speaks to Gamelyn's status as the child of his father's old age, and the fact that it is his position as a son among other sons that sets the narrative in motion. But Gamelyn's name also bears a significant relationship to the word 'game' in its multiple senses of amusement, delight, and pleasure; wild animals hunted for sport; the act of hunting them; and structured play, of the sort explored by Johan Huizinga in his classic 1938 study of 'the play element of culture', Homo ludens. These resonances have been noted by a number of different critics, but so far as I am aware no one has yet developed them into a structured account of the text.2This article investigates the extent to which the dynamics of the Tale can be thrown into relief by inserting it into a late medieval culture of 'game'. This engagement has a double character. In the first place, game and play are characterized by rule-boundedness. All play', Huizinga argues in Homo ludens, 'has its rules.' Hence his comment, that play 'creates order' - more than that, that it 'is order'.5 Consideration of ordered 'game' in Gamelyn leads towards late medieval conduct books and household manuals - books of'game' and of'nurture' - and their codifications of rules for proper behaviour. It explores the ways in which these rule-bound game-spaces help constitute the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that structure medieval society, and it works its way towards a language that describes the breaching of these rules. Secondly, though, game and play are for Huizinga characterized by a certain quality of pretence. As forms of makebelieve, they suspend straightforward distinctions between truth and falsehood. This aspect of game-behaviour is rejected by Gamelyn. Gamelyn reconfigures the meanings of game prevalent in chivalric romances, where it typically speaks to the role-playing demanded by sophisticated forms of social organization. It also unfolds an entirely different understanding of game from that prevalent in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with which Gamelyn is associated in the manuscript tradition. Critical accounts of the dialectic of 'ernest' and 'game' in Chaucer have argued that The Canterbury Tales offer a celebration of the complex satisfactions offered by the organized untruths that go by the name of literature. The Tale of Gamelyn bears a far more antagonistic relationship to questions of duplicity. It may be that all games - and all fiction - must involve some measure of deception, but that is not how Gamelyn sees things. The most significant structural antithesis of 'game' in the Tale is not 'ernest' but 'gyle'.Gamelyn thus simultaneously affirms and dissents from the conventionalism implicit in game-playing. At the level of plot, it stages a number of violent breaches of customary rules of behaviour, but the unruly energies it unleashes are ultimately directed to the service of a law of paternal and sovereign power. Simultaneously, the text's semantic gamesomeness is mobilized to rule out of bounds a conception of social life as a texture of sophisticated play. The pun hidden within the protagonist's name is central: Gamelyn, I argue, pits 'game' against 'game'.IThe story of Gamelyn can be quickly told. Gamelyn is the youngest of the three sons of Sir John of Boundys. He is bequeathed the largest share of his father's estate. His eldest brother (also John) deprives him of this inheritance, and the fraternal conflict that ensues leads to Gamelyn being outlawed and taking refuge in the forest. He becomes the king of a band of outlaws and with their assistance seizes control of the court that has condemned to death the middle brother, Sir Ote (who had supported Gamelyn). Sir John as sheriff, the Justice, and the jurymen are all killed instead. Ote makes Gamelyn his heir, and Gameyn regains his inheritance. …

On the Unruly Power of Pain in Middle English Drama.

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period's philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds' Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge trouble the significance of pain and its relationships with punishment and performance; these works admit the unreliability of pain and fear, even as they harness the formidable power pain holds throughout Middle English literature. This essay analyzes passages from all three texts to demonstrate their deep skepticism about the signifying power of pain alongside their abiding investments in pain's utility. I argue that these texts ultimately challenge Middle English drama's dominant discourses of patriarchy and empire by way of their representations of pain.

Imago Mortis

Imago Mortis Bridget Whearty Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Ashby Kinch. Leiden: Brill, 2013. <http://www.brill.com/imago-mortis> One of the joys of being a medievalist today is the exploding growth of digital access. It seems that every month a new library or museum announces an ambitious digitization program. In the face of this glut of availability, there is a pressing need for smart studies engaging deeply with medieval images. Ashby Kinch’s Imago Mortis: Mediating Image of Death in Late Medieval Book Culture is one such study. Imago Mortis is an ambitious book, exploring cross-pollinations between didactic and literary works, manuscript illumination, wall paintings, cadaver tombs, late medieval religious traditions on the commemoration of the dead, and local and international political maneuvering in England and English-occupied Paris during the 1420s and 30s. Through these nodes, Kinch traces how visual and verbal artists draw on, adapt, and transform each other’s traditions in ways that are sometimes complementary, sometimes competitive, and nearly always in the service of making death more palatable to their powerful patrons. It would have been significantly easier to study one or two of these topics more deeply and in isolation, but it is in teasing out this vast network that Imago Mortis does its most valuable work. As Kinch puts it, “attending closely to the creative re-interpretation of both conventional and novel images of death in the medieval period opens up important dialogues: between literary and visual forms; between artists and the patrons for whom they produced their work; between the political and religious institutions that competed for the psychological and social energies of the late medieval individual; and between ourselves and the past” (276). In Chapter One, “Affirmative Visions of Dying in Illustrations of Henry Suso’s ‘De Scientia,’” Kinch shows how three manuscripts pair Suso’s vision of the lonely bad death with illustrations showing a good end surrounded by community. For the visual artists illuminating these manuscripts, Moriens, the dying one, is supported in death by the same institutions that supported him in life: a good friend (in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen Cod. gall. 28), a loving family (in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV. III), and an attending cleric (in London, British Library, Additional MS 37049). Rather than dismissing these craftsmen as bad readers of the texts they illustrate, Kinch reads disagreements between Suso’s text and accompanying illustrations as visual [End Page 301] artists’ thoughtful critiques and deliberate transformation of the textual tradition they accompany. Chapter Two, “Verbo-Visual Mirrors of Mortality in Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Lerne for to Die’” turns to the only extant Middle English verse translation of Suso’s “De Scientia.” Although it begins by analyzing a deathbed illustration in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, this chapter is not really concerned with connecting Hoccleve’s poem with a specific death culture, visual arts tradition. Instead, it traces how Hoccleve’s verse aestheticizes Suso’s Latin prose, arguing that this highly wrought poetic form serves as a tool for self-promotion, highlighting the English writer and his virtuosity. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Hoccleve differentiates himself from Chaucer through his preoccupation with death and loneliness, Kinch argues that Hoccleve depicts Chaucer as the poet who transcends death, but that he portrays himself as a poet who faces death, thus creating a space for himself outside of Chaucer’s shadow as well as outside the reach of meddling friends and worldly ambition. The intimate links between worldly ambition and patronage are a central topic of Chapter Three, “Commemorating Power in the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead,” which analyzes luxury images of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Here Kinch reveals how aristocrats co-opt an art form that began as clerical critique of aristocratic power. Through patronage of exquisite books and monuments, aristocrats turned this satire of their class’s failings to their advantage. The leveling power of death turns out to be something of a lie when patronage is taken into account. All men must die, but the wealthy can purchase rich memorials that ensure the survival of their names and memories, urging those...