Download or read book The Thief the Cross and the Wheel written by Mitchell B. Merback and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When spectators in the Middle Ages examined images of Christ's crucifixion on Mount Calvary, did they ever consider them as representations of capital punishment? This work argues that they did, and traces connections between religious devotion, physical pain, criminal justice and judicial spectatorship, to explain why.
Download or read book The Thief the Cross and the Wheel written by Mitchell B. Merback and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2001-03-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is a fascinating account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience. Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship. Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.
Download or read book The Thief the Cross and the Wheel written by Mitchell B. Merback and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-07 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western visual culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked in this symbolic language is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. In The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is an account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience.
Download or read book Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature written by Larissa Tracy and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.
Download or read book The Visual Culture of Violence After the French Revolution written by Lela Graybill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution traces four sites of spectatorship that exemplified the visual culture of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offering a new account of the significance of violent spectacle to the birth of modernity. Considerations of the execution scaffold, salon painting, print culture and the fait divers, and waxworks displays establish the centrality of spectatorial violence to experiences of selfhood in the wake of the French Revolution. Shedding critical light on previously neglected aspects of art and visual culture of the post-Revolutionary period, The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution demonstrates how violent spectacle at this moment was profoundly shaped by shifting social attitudes, contemporary political practices, and rapidly accelerated technological developments. By attending to the formal and historical specificity of violent spectacle after the Revolution, Graybill affirms the historical contingency through which the visual culture of violence in the modern era has emerged. The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution will be broadly relevant to scholars of art, media and visual studies, and particularly to historians of the French Revolution and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. The book's concern with the representation of violence makes it of interest to scholars working in a variety of fields beyond its historical period, especially in art, literature, history, media and culture studies.
Download or read book After the Carolingians written by Beatrice Kitzinger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume that introduces new sources and offers fresh perspectives on a key era of transition, this book is of value to art historians and historians alike. From the dissolution of the Carolingian empire to the onset of the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, the transformative 10th–11th centuries witnessed the production of a significant number of illuminated manuscripts from present-day France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, alongside the better-known works from Anglo-Saxon England and the Holy Roman Empire. While the hybrid styles evident in book painting reflect the movement and re-organization of people and codices, many of the manuscripts also display a highly creative engagement with the art of the past. Likewise, their handling of subject matter—whether common or new for book illumination—attests to vibrant artistic energy and innovation. On the basis of rarely studied scientific, religious, and literary manuscripts, the contributions in this volume address a range of issues, including the engagement of 10th–11th century bookmakers with their Carolingian and Antique legacies, the interwoven geographies of book production, and matters of modern politics and historiography that have shaped the study of this complex period. .
Download or read book Death Torture and the Broken Body in European Art 1300 650 written by JohnR. Decker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ?s Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body?s desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.
Download or read book The Thirteenth Turn written by Jack Shuler and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a rope, a symbol, and rough justice in America. The hangman's knot is a simple thing to tie, just a rope carefully coiled around itself up to thirteen times. But in those thirteen turns lie a powerful symbol, one that is all too deeply connected to America's past -- and present. The last man to be hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, who was executed in Delaware in 1996 for committing a double murder. Even today, hanging is still legal, in certain situations, in New Hampshire and Washington. And the noose remains a potent cultural symbol. An incident in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006, in which nooses were used to menace black students, made national news. Yet little has changed: according to author Jack Shuler, there have been nearly 100 "noose incidents" just in the last two years. The Thirteenth Turn unravels these stories, from Judas Iscariot, perhaps the most infamous hanged man, to the killing of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers at the heart of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and beyond. In his travels across America, Shuler traces the evolution of this dark practice. As he investigates the death of John Brown, or the 1930 lynching that inspired the song "Strange Fruit," he finds that the very places that perpetrated these acts now seek to forget them. Shuler's account is a kind of shadow history of America: a reminder that vigilantes and hangmen play a crucial role in our national story. The Thirteenth Turn is a courageous and searching book that reminds us where we come from, and what is lost if we forget.
Download or read book Public Violence in Islamic Societies written by Christian Lange and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subject particularly in the context of its implementation as a political strategy to claim power over the public sphere. Violence, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, has been the object of research in the past, as in the case of jihad, martyrdom, rebellion or criminal law. This book goes beyond these concerns in addressing, in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary fashion, how violence has functioned as a basic principle of Islamic social and political organization in a variety of historical and geographical contexts.Contributions trace the use of violence by governments in the history of Islam, shed light on legal views of violence, and discuss artistic and religious responses. Authors lay out a spectrum of attitudes rather than trying to define an Islamic doctrine of violence. Bringing together some of the most substantive and innovative scholarship on this important topic to date, this volume contributes to the growing interest, both scholarly and general, in the question of Muslim attitudes toward violence
Download or read book The Passion Story From Visual Representation to Social Drama written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cellini s Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi written by Christine Corretti and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, one of Renaissance Italy’s most complex sculptures, is the subject of this study, which proposes that the statue’s androgynous appearance is paradoxical. Symbolizing the male ruler overcoming a female adversary, the Perseus legitimizes patriarchal power; but the physical similarity between Cellini’s characters suggests the hero rose through female agency. Dr. Corretti argues that although not a surrogate for powerful Medici women, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers that Cosimo I de’ Medici’s power stemmed in part from maternal influence. Drawing upon a vast body of art and literature, Dr. Corretti concludes that Cellini and his contemporaries knew the Gorgon as a version of the Earth Mother, whose image is found in art for Medici women.
Download or read book Saving Paradise written by Rita Nakashima Brock and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Saving Paradise" offers a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.
Download or read book Suspended Animation written by Robert Mills and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Marsellus in the film PulpFiction asserts, "I'm gonna git medieval on your ass," we know that he is about to bring down a fierce and exacting punishment. Yet is the violence of the Middle Ages that far removed from our modern society? Suspended Animation argues that not only is the stereotype of uncontrolled violence in the Middle Ages historically misleading, the gulf between modern society and the medieval era is not as immense as we might think. In fact, both medievals and moderns live within a social tension of "suspended animation" engendered by images and acts of violence. Just as in medieval times, Robert Mills argues, it is the threat of violence—not the reality—that continues to structure our lives. To illustrate this "aesthetics of suspense," Mills draws on extensive and disturbing examples from medieval iconography, contemporary philosophy, and even pornography, ranging from the vivid depictions of Hell in Tuscan frescoes to Billie Holiday's famously wrenching song "Strange Fruit". Mills reveals how these uncomfortable images and texts expose a modern self-deception, and he further explores how medieval images evoked a pleasure revealingly close to that found in modern depictions of sexuality. Suspended Animation also makes a fresh contribution to theoretical debates on pre-modern gender and sexuality. Mills's comprehensive analysis demonstrates that—as wartime prisoner abuse incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay have recently indicated—our notions of ourselves as not-medieval (that is, civilized) not only fail to prepare us for modern torture and warfare but also lead us into complicity with self-proclaimed moral and civic leaders. Whether considering a medieval painting of a Christian martyr or the immense popularity of grotesque historical tourist attractions such as the London Dungeons, Suspended Animation argues that images of death and violence are as pervasive today as they were in the Middle Ages, serving as potent reminders of the link between the modern and the medieval era.
Download or read book Alien Sex written by Gerard Loughlin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarman’s The Garden. Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani. Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God. Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.
Download or read book God and Grace of Body written by David Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the ways in which the symbolic associations of the body and what we do with it have helped shape religious experience and continue to do so. David Brown writes excitingly about the potential of dance and music - including pop, jazz, and opera - to enhance spirituality and widen theological horizons.
Download or read book Sex Gender and the Sacred written by Joanna de Groot and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex, Gender and the Sacred presents a multi-faith, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that explore the interlocking narratives of religion and gender encompassing 4,000 years of history. Contains readings relating to sex and religion that encompass 4,000 years of gender history Features new research in religion and gender across diverse cultures, periods, and religious traditions Presents multi-faith and multi-disciplinary perspectives with significant comparative potential Offers original theories and concepts relating to gender, religion, and sexuality Includes innovative interpretations of the connections between visual, verbal, and material aspects of particular religious traditions
Download or read book The Lure of the Arena written by Garrett G. Fagan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Were the Romans who watched brutal gladiatorial games all that different from us? This book argues they were not.
