Teaching images in late medieval England

Thesis

This thesis examines how late-medieval English devotional writers sought to teach readers how to understand, use, and regulate religious images during a period of intense debate about the proper forms, roles, and reverence that might be shown to religious art. Focussing on the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, I investigate what this study terms ‘teaching images’: that is, both the pedagogical use of images as tools for devotion and the textual efforts to define proper attitudes toward visual representation. Through close readings of Middle English devotional prose by Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the author of Dives and Pauper, Nicholas Love, and Reginald Pecock, this thesis reconstructs a distinctive tradition of image-teaching that emerged in response to both the perceived threat of heretical iconoclasts and a well-established orthodox suspicion of ‘lewd’ viewers. In this context, I argue that attitudes towards teaching images were profoundly shaped by wider debates about clerical authority, scriptural access, and the suitability of the vernacular as a language of complex theological inquiry.

Throughout, I employ an interdisciplinary methodology that encompasses both texts and image. In addition, this thesis treats ‘image’ broadly, examining both material evidence, and imagined phantasms produced by the faculty of imagination, which late-medieval thinkers understood as a bodily, materially-grounded power mediating between sense perception and intellect. By situating texts within a shared visual culture, I demonstrate how authors anticipated, relied on, and sought to shape the visual literacy of their audiences. In so doing, this thesis contributes to ongoing discussions about medieval art and late-medieval ‘ways of looking’ by establishing more clearly the intellectual and pedagogical contexts in which key textual sources were produced. At the same time, it repositions these authors not merely as commentators on visual culture, but as active and reflective participants within it.

Authors: Morgan, F

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0nd4bpvr7
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: visual culture; text and image
• Subjects: Devotional literature, English (Middle); Art, Medieval; Didactic literature, English (Middle); Imagination