Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?

Contents: Foreword, W.J.T. Mitchell; Introduction: beholding violence, Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch; Proof in pierced flesh: Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas and the beholder of wounds in early modern Italy, Allie Terry-Fritsch; Giovanni Pisano's marble wounds: beholding artistic self-defense in the Pisa cathedral pulpit, Matthew G. Shoaf; Beholding and touching: early modern strategies of negotiating illness, Mirella G. Pardee; The gap of death: passive violence in the encounter between the Three Dead and the Three Living, Elina Gertsman; Being beheld: Julian of Norwich's mystical surreal and the violence of vision, Christopher Taylor; Image in pain: icons, old bones and new blood, Galina Tirnanic; 'To have the pleasure of this siege': envisioning siege warfare during the European wars of religion, Brian Sandberg; Theatrum mundi: performativity, violence and metatheatre in Webster's The White Devil, Lisa Dickson; Portia's Pauline perversion: The Merchant of Venice and Romans I, Will Stockton; Violent passions: plays, pawnbrokers, and the Jews of Rome, 1539, Barbara Wisch; Beholding typology: the violence of recognition in Caravaggio's representations of the Sacrifice of Isaac, Erin Felicia Labbie; Bibliography; Index.

Allie Terry-Fritsch is Associate Professor of Art History at Bowling Green State University. Erin Felicia Labbie is Associate Professor of English Literature at Bowling Green State University and is the author of Lacan's Medievalism.