1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910818650603321

Autore

Pinkus Assaf

Titolo

Visual aggression : images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany / / Assaf Pinkus

Pubbl/distr/stampa

University Park, Pennsylvania : , : The Pennsylvania State University Press, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

0-271-08767-6

0-271-08769-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource 215 p.)

Classificazione

LK 83340

Disciplina

700.4552

Soggetti

Violence in art

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Intro -- COVER Front -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Notes to Introduction -- Chapter 1: Visual Rhetoric -- Notes to Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2: Between Theological and Juridical Positions -- Notes to Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3: Bodily Imagination, Imagined Bodies -- Notes to Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4: Eroticized and Sexualized Bodies -- Notes to Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5: The Body Reincarnated -- Notes to Chapter 5 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways in which it has been represented and understood? Assaf Pinkus considers these questions within the context of what he calls galleries of violence, the torment imagery that flourished in German-speaking regions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploring these images and the visceral bodily responses that they produced in their viewers, Pinkus argues that the new visual discourse on violence was a watershed in premodern conceptualizations of selfhood.Images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany reveal a strikingly brutal parade of passion: severed heads, split skulls, mutilated organs, extracted fingernails and teeth, and myriad other torments. Stripped from their devotional context and presented simply as brutal acts, these portrayals assailed viewers’ bodies and minds so



violently that they amounted to what Pinkus describes as “visual aggressions.” Addressing contemporary discourses on violence and cruelty, the aesthetics of violence, and the eroticism of the tortured body, Pinkus ties these galleries of violence to larger cultural concerns about the ethics of violence and bodily integrity in the conceptualization of early modern personhood.Innovative and convincing, this study heralds a fundamental shift in the scholarly conversation about premodern violence, moving from a focus on the imitatio Christi and the liturgy of punishment to the notion of violence as a moral problem in an ethical system. Scholars of medieval and early modern art, history, and literature will welcome and engage with Pinkus’s research for years to come.