The Authority of the Word

This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions - typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others - based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated in tandem with other discursive paradigms - scribal, humanistic, antiquarian, historical, and literary, to name but a few - for the connection, complementary or otherwise, between verbal and visual media. The Authority of the Word discusses the ways in which the mutual form and function, manner and meaning of texts and images were conceived and deployed in early modern Europe. Contributors include James Clifton, John R. Decker, Maarten Delbeke, Wim Francois, Jan L. de Jong, Catherine Levesque, Andrew Morrall, Birgit Ulrike Munch, Carolyn Muessig, Bart Ramakers, Kathryn Rudy, Els Stronks, Achim Timmermann, Anita Traninger, Peter van der Coelen, Geert Warnar, and Michel Weemans.

Review:

The value of this volume goes beyond a traditional method's careful limning of an academic specialization. Method and tradition aside, the papers all scrutinize a very significant period in the history of visual production and consumption in Europe [..] many of these [essays] make a point of socially locating their subject matter and giving the reader a concrete sense of the material relationship of text and image to the surrounding world. - David Morgan, Duke University, in: Renaissance Quarterly 65/3 (Fall 2012), p. 897 One of the edges of current scholarship interrogates the constructed boundary between words and images. This collection of twenty essays [...] is a lovely sampling of the state of the question. - Lee Palmer Wandel, University of Wisconsin-Madison, in: HNA Review of Books