Medieval Figure Research Articles

Hair Pieces: Alice Maher’s Recent Art

FRONT COVER The front cover illustration is Alice Maher’s fifteen-foot charcoal drawing Ombre (1997). The editors thank Alice Maher for permission to reproduce this illustration as well as several of the images that appear throughout this article and in the following interview by Alston Conley. HAIR PIECES: ALICE MAHER’S RECENT ART ADELE DALSIMER AND VERA KREILKAMP Entering a gallery of Alice Maher’s recent sculpture and drawings, we respond to discrete objects that exist concretely in space: a miniature house, stiff children’s dresses, a jacket hanging on the wall. But as we move closer to Maher’s works, we realize that things are not what they seem—that objects with seemingly firm boundaries undo our initial impressions. The miniature dwelling (Thorn House, 1994), no larger than a bird house, is covered with sharp thorns (figure 1); Bee Dress (1994), created as if on a diminutive dressmaker’s form, is fabricated from the carcasses of bees (figure 2); Berry Dress (1994) is constructed of rose hips attached to an empty form with sharp pins that protrude into the dress (figure 1, page 199). The clothing on the hanger, which reminds us of a camouflage jacket (Nettle Coat, 1995), is made of stinging nettles. Maher’s recent works challenge both the form and content of the images they purport to represent. Standing at a distance from her fifteen-foot charcoal drawing Ombre (front cover), we are momentarily disconcerted by a figure/ground illusion: are we encountering a work of art hung on a wall or an empty space cut into white plaster? The drawing replicates the shape of a gothic portal or window, or even of a huge keyhole suspended above the ground. But, as we move closer, the appearance of empty space dissolves into a vision of human hair cascading from the head of a woman turned away from us; the illusion of hair is so realistic that the drawing attracts the viewer’s touch. Finally we realize that this illusion has been created by perHAIR PIECES: ALICE MAHER’S RECENT ART 191 sistent mark-making on a plaster backdrop. Despite the tactile realism of this strange trompe l’oeil, we stand before a flat surface—a charcoal drawing of hair rather than the real thing it figures. Thus Maher’s huge drawing sustains a tension between the concreteness of its representation of individual strands of hair and the dark void we initially perceived. The title of the piece reinforces its formal ambiguity, for the French word “ombre”—denoting shade, shadow, or phantom—suggests Maher’s exploitation of the viewer’s changing perspective. Ombre depicts a woman’s luxuriant hair, but the female form shadowed by that hair remains elusive, her corporeality merely suggested, never figured. Seemingly constructed from the most feminine of materials—long flowing tresses— Maher’s drawing, in fact, elides the female self beneath its covering. By using human hair both as subject and medium, Maher deploys its radical indeterminacy as a cultural sign and thus destabilizes essentialist constructions of female identity. In other recent works, as well as in Ombre, the artist draws upon religious iconography, mythology, and folk and fairy lore to explore the ambiguous significations of women’s hair. Plunging her viewers into a literary and visual intertextuality, she exploits the contradictory associations we have with hair—some alluring but others filled with terror. Maher has associated her work, for example, with the stories of Rapunzel and Melisande, fairy tales in which men perform feats of valor to possess women whose tresses metonymyze their cultural value. Yet such hairy attractions can be fatal: Medusa’s snaky locks transform men into stone; long-haired Lorelei entices sailors to their death; medieval figures of a malignant lust, often dressed in beast skins, seduce with flowing hair. In this symbolic grammar, women’s hair signals physical or moral death and invokes a savage bestiality, a destructive sexual predatoriness. HAIR PIECES: ALICE MAHER’S RECENT ART 192 figure 1 Thorn House (1994). Wood, rose thorns, and glass. (Courtesy of Alice Maher) But the cultural meanings of hair are still more indeterminate—potentially enticing, rewarding, and destroying men, but also shielding women from their gaze. In...

Madness and the Middle Passage: Warner-Vierya's Juletane as a Paradigm for Writing Caribbean Women's Identities

This article links Glissant's theory of an inherent Caribbean madness due to the originary rupture and alienation from Africa with Foucault's theory of the ritual significance and essential liminality of the madman as exemplified in the medieval figure of the "Ship of Fools." In calling the madman the "passenger par excellence," Foucault implies a connection between sanity and linear narratives, such as that of a voyage. Myriam Warner-Vierya's novel, Juletane, suggests that European paradigms of narrative and voyage are inadequate to provide a sense of self for Caribbean women. The novel takes the form of a diary that chronicles the steadily disintegrating marriage and sanity of Juletane, a Caribbean woman orphaned at ten, raised in Paris, who meets and marries an African student in an effort to find a new identity in her husband and a return to Africa. The novel suggests that the linear narrative of a return to the source in Africa denies the rupture with Africa and the immediate circumstances of Caribbean subject-hood. In her efforts, Juletane ignores the alternative narrative possibilities that the novel presents in the circular and shared narratives of women that do not depend on a sense of closure or arrival, but like the voyage of the madman, remain open to the infinite crossroads of the sea and narration.

DIE HEILIGE RITA DES WAGGONBAUWERKS. ALTGERMANISTISCHE ÜBERLEGUNGEN ZU CHRISTA WOLFS DER GETEILTE HIMMEL

In this article the author analyses the progression of the protagonist, Rita Seidel, in Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel. At the outset of the work Rita Seidel is inexperienced in both love and politics; however, at the end of the novel she has become a convinced socialist, able to overcome the loss of her first love Manfred. This development, typical of the “Ankunftsroman”, is however not like that of the “Bildungsroman”; for Wolf's protagonist reason does not appear to be of primary importance, since the contradictory nature of socialist society, as it is presented in the novel, does not lead her change her socialist outlook, but paradoxically it seems to confirm her beliefs in those ideals. The author concludes by arguing that the structure underlying the progression of the heroine in this novel is like that which is to be found in medieval legends of saints; the function of the socialist Rita Seidel in Wolf's novel, not unlike that of the medieval holy figure of the sinner-pope in Hartmann's Gregorius, is to serve as an imitatio to believers.

Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites by Lindsay Smith (review)

Reviews217 Lindsay Smith. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites: Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. xiv + 204. In this seven-chapter study, Lindsay Smith proposes to interrogate the "intricacies of the sense of sight during the Victorian period" (3) by undertaking close readings of selected texts by John Ruskin and William Morris. Along with these two central case studies, J.M.W. Turner, William Holman Hunt, and D.G. Rossetti figure prominently as exemplars of a "more hesitant and provisional account of vision" (3) than that offered by many earlier Romantic poets and visual artists, whose existence in a pre-photographic era largely determined their reliance upon monocular, geometrical perspective as a means of representing three-dimensional space. The text aims to account for apparent "indeterminacies" in the development of (and responses to) the new medium of photography between 1839 (the year in which the process of daguerreotypy was announced in Paris) and 1870. Ultimately, Smith wants to redress what she sees as the tendency of literary and art-historical theory to neglect the subtle permutations that defined Victorian discourses about vision; Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry functions as a prolonged argument from a position of "vital specificity," attempting to enrich our understanding of the "historical and material modes" that gave rise to a peculiar tension between empirical and transcendental ways of seeing. It is from this insistence upon tracing "cultural and historical specificity in nineteenth-century optical debates" (46) that the book derives both its strengths and weaknesses. Emphasizing that the "fundamentally visual imperative" (12) governing Ruskin's, Morris's, and Hunt's writings and paintings can be grasped only dirough a comprehension of photographic tools and techniques distinctive to the early Victorian era, Smith brings to bear upon such familiar texts as The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, The Scapegoat, The Light of the World, and The Defence of Guenevere a capacity for interpretive scrutiny of such intensity and duration that the originality of her readings (as well as her obvious intimacy with the material) frequently go unappreciated. The many "specific intervention^] of optical discourse" (57) that Smith locates in the oeuvres of her authors and artists tend to lose significance in her argument's subsidence into the sort of microscopic obscurantism that, as she herself points out, the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were often wrongly accused of giving way to in their enthusiasm for physical detail. 218Victorian Review There is something disingenuous, also, in Smith's assertion, mid-way through her third chapter on Hunt's enigmatic 1855 painting of The Scapegoat, that "we need not be primarily concerned with empirical evidence as to which particular Pre-Raphaelite paintings had specific photographic characteristics" (102). This comment echoes Smith's suggestion in the preceding chapter that Morris's early essay, "Shadows of Amiens," leaves traces of "the frequently forgotten additional term" of photography, exhibiting "the extent to which [Morris] himself had 'internalized' photographic discourse" (86). Although I am intrigued by Smith's thesis that Pre-Raphaelite writings and visual art were imbued with an "awareness of the logic growing out of the underlying conceptual premises that photography had begun to bring to bear on the artistic practice of the time" (97), the impetus remains with her to demonstrate — as she promises to do at the outset — that this influence is more than simply inferred. Even in her penultimate chapter, however, Smith contends that Morris operated under an "implicit" debt to Ruskin's conceptualization of the noble grotesque in the former's writing of The Defense of Guenevere — a poem which also, and perhaps more interestingly, "appropriates a medieval figure to the newly liberating discourse of visual theory ... as an optically liberated woman" (191-192). In short, Smith's identification of "internalized" discourses and "forgotten" terms is counterproductive: in a text stipulating the importance of the "material conditions of vision and its contextual correspondences" (13), it is offputting to find the burden of proof fall so often upon vague contentions about artistic influence and discursive osmosis. Nevertheless, Victorian Photography is valuable for its detailing of Ruskin's relationship to Morris within the broader problematic of new interrelationships...

Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil by Bernard McGinn

604BOOK REVIEWS Volume 2 also has a comparison of texts discussed, detailed footnotes packed with information other than routine bibliographical data, and a useful bibliography . Yes,AHistory ofthe Bible as Literature tot readers ofmany interests is cause for rejoicing. S. G. Hornsby, Jr. LaGrange College Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. By Bernard McGinn. (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco. 1994. Pp. xiii, 369.»35.00.) Bernard McGinn is now established as one of the greatest living historians of Christian thought. His series The Presence of God (Crossroad, 1991) has no peer in the history of spirituality and can be compared in depth and scope only toJaroslav Pelikan's monumental five volumes on The Christian Tradition (Chicago, 1971-1989). In addition to his grasp of spirituality, McGinn has also published extensively on the history of eschatology and of apocalypticism. From this background, the author was well placed to investigate the history of the Antichrist from the first through the twentieth century. As the second millennium approaches, speculation about eschatology has increased, though mostly among fringe groups. But the film 2007 already prepared the way for a broad and general interest in the idea of millennium, and McGinn's book speaks with great clarity and readability to the general audience as well as to the scholar. McGinn is one ofthe historians, like Pelikan, Francis Oakley, and Alan Bernstein, demonstrating that the history of ideas is not only alive and well but is producing better work now than ever before. The existence of Antichrist beyond the human imagination is not the main point at play here. Rather, the author emphasizes that the concept ofAntichrist, like the concept of the Devil, informs us about human perceptions of evil. Theoretically, the Antichrist is best defined as the evil essence of human opposition to the goodness of Christ. Historically, there have been many diverse ideas of what the Antichrist "really" is: a single son of Satan, who will appear at the end of the world; a collection of people such as apostates and heretics; an institution; a symbol of the evil in others or in ourselves, the last an idea not invented by modern subjectivists but going back at least as far asAugustine. The book is successfully organized along chronological lines with attention to a variety of topics in each period. Though the emphasis is on theology, McGinn successfully treats graphic arts, literature, and popular religion as well. Beginning with a study ofJewish thought before the time ofChrist, in which among other things he connects the origins of Antichrist with the origins of Satan, particularly in apocalyptic literature, McGinn goes on to early Christianity . The first mention of Antichrist is in the Johannine letters. McGinn BOOK REVIEWS605 shows how the Jewish tradition of concentrating evil in a historical figure such as Antiochus IV developed into the Christian pattern ofidentifying tyrants such as Nero as the Antichrist, though there was also a tendency to identify Antichrist as a group of heretics such as gnostics, or as a political institution such as the Roman Empire. Augustine identified the Antichrist with heretics and schismatics but cautioned that we must also guard against Antichrist in the evil inclinations within ourselves. For Augustine and his successors, the Antichrist was above all "the power of the Lie." Without dwelling on trivial details, McGinn provides a good account of important depictions of Antichrist by such medieval figures as Gregory the Great, Adso, Joachim, and Gerhoh; he also points out the increasing use of Antichrist as a rhetorical device against one's opponents during the reform controversies of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The rhetorical utility of the Antichrist increased still more from the thirteenth century, when the Emperor Frederick II could be named Antichrist by papalists. Papal propagandists reaped the whirlwind in the later Middle Ages, when John Wycliff and then John Hus called the pope, or the papacy in general, the Antichrist. The political rhetoric of Antichrist reached its height among the Protestant reformers ofthe sixteenth century, when Catholic theologians such as Bellarmine and Suarez had to spend (or waste) considerable ink in refuting the identification of the pope with Antichrist. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant propagandists...

On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Abarbanel

On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Isaac Abarbanel, celebrated scholar, financier, and leader of Spanish Jewrv at the time of the 1492 expulsion, is usually viewed as a late medieval figure. Yet he spent the first half of his life in Portugal at a time when new humanist winds were blowing and composed nearly all of his prodigious theological and exegetical tracts in Spain and Italy at a time when cultural ideals had taken root. The article highlights the Renaissance side of Abarbanel's intellectual profile in three new ways. It explores the impact of historical thinking, a central feature of humanism, on Abarbanel. It illustrates the influence of this and other sensibilities on his biblical scholarship rather than on his theological views. And it draws many of its examples from Abarbanel's Spanish biblical commentaries, written almost a full decade prior to his arrival in Italy. In th...

Chivalry, Symbolism, and Psychology in Cervantes' Knight of the Green Cloak

mances.' But in the famous episode of the Knight of the Green Cloak (Don Quijote ii, xvi-xviii), 40 Cervantes' selective reinterpretation of the chivalric donnee dissolves the ostensible danger of the medieval figures. First of all, the timidity of the Knight of the Green Cloak undermines the traditionally physical threat of the medieval adversaries. In addition, Cervantes' Green Knight lacks the magical aura of the Green Knight in such Arthurian romances as the French prose version of the Livre de Caradoc or the English

Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie (review)

236 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:2 APR 1984 ual and simple beings as well as to the components of composite individuals (Sects. I, VI, et statim). The volume opens with a brief introduction which explains editorial policy and closes with a section on biographical information on medieval authors, a bibliography , and indices. The biographical section again reflects the inclinations and preferences of the editors rather than the relative historical importance of medieval figures. For example, William of Haytesbury, whose importance in the history of Western philosophy is limited, is given as much space as Francisco Suarez. And while some important authors such as Durandus of St. Pourgain (still quoted in the eighteenth century) are altogether omitted, relatively minor and, indeed, early ones such as Garlandus Compotista and Geoffrey of Hasphall are included. The bibliography is very selective: authors who contributed to the volume have all of their pertinent (including those forthcoming) works listed, while important works from other well known scholars of the period are omitted. And the bibliographical information on the various medieval authors is uneven. Unlike the useful notes on every author mentioned in Gilson's History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955), little or no information is given on many of the individuals mentioned in The Cambridge History, even in cases where there is substantial scholarship available in English and other major European languages (exx.: Guido Terrena, Walter of Bruges, Thomas Bricot, etc.) This practice diminishes considerably the usefulness of the volume as a research tool. The indices likewise reveal the tone of the volume: there are almost as many references to 'grammar' as there are to 'God.' We can only wonder what Peter Damian would have said about this if he were alive today. The criticisms made above are not meant to detract from the value of this book, but rather to place the work in its proper context. Indeed, although The Cambridge History is not a history of late medieval philosophy properly speaking and has some obvious limitations, it is certainly a book which needs to be taken seriously by historians of the period. JORGE J. E. GRAC1A State University of New York at Buffalo Laurentii Valle. Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie. Edited by Gianni Zippel. 2 vols. Padua: Antenore 1982. cxiii + 636 pp. NP. Lorenzo Valla's Dialectic is now seen as the most revolutionary and one of the most important logical works of the fifteenth century. From the standpoint of a thorough historical knowledge of the Latin language, he attacks elementary scholastic logic, and its basis in Boethius and the Latin translations of Aristotle. Many of the staples of the textbooks are savaged: the five predicables, the ten categories, the analysis of the proposition, the square of contraries, the six modals, the three figures of the syllogism . Valla aims to simplify the semantic sections of traditional logic as much as possible, wishing to concentrate instead on finding and shaping arguments which can be of practical use. Although his more radical positions were neither taken up nor BOOK REVIEWS ~37 refuted, later humanist dialecticians pursued similar aims and exploited some of his arguments. In recent years, even given the general upsurge in studies of Valla, who has come to seem intellectually the most interesting of the early fifteenth century Italian humanists , the dialectic has attracted special attention, and there are now important studies of the work by Vasoli, Trinkaus, Camporeale, Gerl and (in this journal) Jardine. As with many of his works, Valla continued to revise and republish the Dialectic after its first circulation, so that the work has till now remained difficult of access. Students and scholars have had to rely on the 116 large, closely printed folios in the Turin reprint of the Basel Opera Omnia of 154o which give a good but not error free account of the second version, or on whatever selection of manuscripts (usually the microfilms of those in the Vatican Library) was available. The guide to these explorations in the manuscript tradition has been an article which Gianni Zippel contributed to the Archivio Storico per le Provincie Parmensi, in 1957 . This outlines three principal recensions, identifies their manuscript witnesses, and promises the critical...

The Age Structure of Medieval Islamic Education

problematic. (') This lacuna in our knowledge is particularly regrettable because it deprives the researcher engaged in the study of a single medieval intellectual figure of a background against which to measure his subject while at the same time it leaves the social historian with a major gap in his understanding of medieval urban society. The one aspect of medieval education that will be dealt with in this article, namely, the age structure of the educational

Some Early Medieval Figure Sculpture from North-East Turkey

Some Early Medieval Figure Sculpture from North-East Turkey

A fifteenth-century sword and a medieval bronze figure from Westminster Abbey

The two articles here described were exhibited by the kind permission of our Fellow the dean of Westminster. They cannot be said to be recent discoveries, but have never been shown before to the Society; and they possess enough points of interest to warrant publication (pl. xiv).