INTERVENTIONS NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. THE ART of VISION T Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture Edited by ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON, ETHAN KNAPP, and MARGITTA ROUSE THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The art of vision : ekphrasis in medieval literature and culture / edited by Andrew James John- ston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse. pages cm — (Interventions: new studies in medieval culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1294-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ekphrasis. 2. Literature, Medieval--History and criticism. 3. Description (Rhetoric)—His- tory—To 1500. I. Johnston, Andrew James, editor. II. Knapp, Ethan, 1966– editor. III. Rouse, Margitta, 1970– editor. IV. Series: Interventions (Columbus, Ohio) PN682.E46A78 2015 809'.02—dc23 2015019905 Cover design by Mia Risberg Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Contents Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION THE DYNAMICS OF EKPHRASIS Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse 1 PART I EKPHRASIS AND THE OBJECT 1 EKPHRASIS AND THE OBJECT Valerie Allen 17 2 MULTILINGUAL LISTS AND CHAUCER’S “THE FORMER AGE” Sarah Stanbury 36 3 SPEAKING IMAGES? ICONOGRAPHIC CRITICISM AND CHAUCERIAN EKPHRASIS John M. Bowers 55 PART II THE DESIRE OF EKPHRASIS 4 VISION AND DESIRE IN MARY MAGDALENE AND THE WINTER’S TALE Claudia Olk 79 5 FEELING THINKING: PEARL’S EKPHRASTIC IMAGINATION Anke Bernau 100 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. vi | CONTENTS 6 FROM ENSLAVEMENT TO DISCERNMENT: LEARNING TO SEE IN GOTTFRIED’S TRISTAN Kathryn Starkey 124 PART III THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EKPHRASIS 7 EKPHRASIS AND RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY IN SPENSER’S LEGEND OF HOLINESS Darryl J. Gless 149 8 FACING THE MIRROR: EKPHRASIS, VISION, AND KNOWLEDGE IN GAVIN DOUGLAS’S PALICE OF HONOUR Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse 166 9 EKPHRASIS AND STASIS IN CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S LIVRE DE LA MUTACION DE FORTUNE Suzanne Conklin Akbari 184 PART IV THE BORDERS OF EKPHRASIS 10 FACES IN THE CROWD: FACIALITY AND EKPHRASIS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND Ethan Knapp 209 11 THE SOUL OF EKPHRASIS: CHAUCER’S “MERCHANT’S TALE” AND THE MARRIAGE OF THE SENSES Hans Jürgen Scheuer 224 12 EKPHRASIS, TROPE OF THE REAL; OR, WHAT THE PEARL-DREAMER SAW Larry Scanlon 243 Bibliography 269 About the Contributors 295 Index 299 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Acknowledgments irst and foremost, the editors wish to thank the contrib- utors, who have been a pleasure to work with and who Fhave shown great patience as this collection has evolved. Further, we would like to thank the German Research Association, which funded the Art of Vision workshop at Freie Universität Berlin in March 2010. The workshop sparked off the idea for this book, bring- ing together an international cohort of medievalists currently working in the field of visuality. We would also like to thank our colleagues and friends who supported the project during various stages: Aranye Fradenburg, Elisabeth Kempf, David Matthews, Jenna Mead, Wolfram Keller, Jennifer Wawrzinek, Russell West-Pavlov, and Kai Wiegandt. Special thanks go to Martin Bleisteiner and Sven Durie, our graduate assistants, for offering invaluable help in putting the manuscript into a publishable form, and Malcolm Litchfield and Eugene O’Connor, our editors at The Ohio State University Press, for shepherding us through the publication process. Lastly, we would like to express our sorrow for the passing of one of the contributors, Darryl J. Gless. His presence was a highlight of the conference at which this collection began, both in the excellence of his scholarship and the pleasure of his company. THE EDITORS vii All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Introduction THE DYNAMICS OF EKPHRASIS Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse kphrasis has long asserted itself as a durable provocation within the field of the literary. It is, to say the least, a very old E issue. Indeed, one might even call it old-fashioned—not only because it goes back to Homer and the very beginnings of the Western canon as we know it, but also because the ekphrastic has been accused of possessing a suspect tendency to be enlisted in the service of aes- thetic conservatism. Yet, at the same time, the increasing interest in the intermedial we have been witnessing for the last thirty years, and especially the growing fascination with visual culture that has been in evidence since about 1990, has placed ekphrasis at the center of a variety of contemporary debates, suggesting that, far from being old- fashioned, ekphrasis is lodged at the site of a radical nexus between the apparently incommensurable modes of visual and verbal representa- tion. In medieval English studies in particular, ekphrasis and the rela- tions between the visual and the literary in general have over the last decade and a half received a prominence that testifies to their continu- ing potential for generating passionate debate.1 1. To mention only some of the most important publications of the last fif- teen years or so: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Claire Barbetti, 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 | INTRODUCTION: JOHNSTON, KNAPP, AND ROUSE The trope of ekphrasis has played a surprisingly significant role in recent considerations of late medieval cultural history. Take, for example, James Simpson’s magisterial account of late medieval English literature, Reform and Cultural Revolution. In his historical analysis of literary writing in English during the transition from the medieval to the early modern period, Simp- son pointedly excludes the Lollards from the realm of the literary and thus from the purview of his study. He argues that because their well-attested iconophobia prevented them from producing truly artistic texts, Lollard writers do not merit a place of their own in a literary history of England.2 Taking their claims to iconophobia literally, he dismisses them from the lit- erary field and implicitly banishes them to the ostensibly unattractive sphere of religious polemic. Consequently, there are comparatively few Lollards in what, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has arguably become the definitive literary history of England’s later Middle Ages. As was to be expected, this did not exactly meet with general approval. Bruce Holsinger, especially, criticized this aspect of Simpson’s account, main- taining that, for all their professed iconophobia, Lollard writings do actu- ally possess a powerful visual streak and tend to be fully conversant with a time-honored ekphrastic rhetoric meant to render verbal descriptions vividly lifelike according to the classical concept of enargeia. Amongst other things, Holsinger argues that Lollard texts employ their highly developed capacity for a vivid rhetorical rendering of aesthetic and visual experience in the context of an effective critique of the late medieval Church’s ever-increasing tendency toward splendid display. Due to their willingness and ability to incorporate visual experience into textual experience, Lollard texts betray, therefore, an impressive degree of aesthetic self-consciousness; that is, the type of aesthetic self-consciousness conventionally taken as one of the defining markers of the Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory (New York: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2011); Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Peter Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, eds., Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexual- ity, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zee- man, Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004); Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 2. James