This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.
Author(s): Alicia Spencer-Hall
Series: Knowledge Communities
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 303
City: Amsterdam
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ecstatic Cinema, Cinematic Ecstasy
The Agape-ic Encounter
Ecstatic Cinema
Cinematic Ecstasy
The ‘Holy Women of Liège’
A Collective Audience
Cinematic Hagiography
Mysticism and Popular Culture
Beyond the Frame
Overview of Chapters
1 Play / Pause / Rewind: Temporalities in Flux
The Miracle of Photography
Photographic and Sacred Time
Saints as Photographs
Pressing Play: Cinematic Reanimation(s)
Execution Films
Resurrection, Resuscitation, and Unfulfilled Promises
The Purgatorial Body
Liturgical Time
Purgatorial Time
Putting Things into Perspective
2 The Caress of the Divine Gaze
Look, and Look Again
Bacon’s Synthesis Theory
Becoming What You See: The Cinesthetic Subject
God the Projector
Feeling What You See: Sensual Catechresis
The Collective Spectatorial Body
Coresthesia: Reading, Seeing, and Touching the Corpus
3 The Xtian Factor, or How to Manufacture a Medieval Saint
Marie of Oignies, the Celebrity Saint
An Anti-Cathar Poster Girl
Marie the Mystical Chanteuse
Jacques of Vitry, Star Preacher
Hairdressers to the Stars
Celebrity Role-Models
Margery Kempe’s Fanfictions
Keeping Up With Kempe
Fans in the Academy
4 My Avatar, My Soul: When Mystics Log On
Vision, Presence, and Virtual Reality
Situating SL: Disentangling Television, Film, and Virtual Worlds
The Online Communion of Saints
‘Logging On’ to the Communion of Saints
Of Avatars and Offline Bodies
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Technology
Crucifixion Online
Men, Women, and Heterodoxy
Gender-Swapping to Level Up
Agency and Dependence
Conclusion: The Living Veronicas of Liège
Unveiling the Veronicas
Lively Relics
Bargaining: Agency and Impotence
The Other Women, Glimpsed in the Mirror
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
List of Tables and Figures
Table 1 Corpus summary data
Figure 1 Map of the Low Countries, c. 1100-c. 1500
Figure 2 Map of the southern Low Countries in the thirteenth century, showing principal towns and regions
Figure 3 Dioceses in the southern Low Countries, 1146-1559
Figure 4 The first beguine communities in Brabant-Liège (c. 1200-c. 1230)
Figure 5 ‘Face of Christ Superimposed on an Oak Leaf’, photogenic drawing by Johann Carl Enslen (1839)
Figure 6 Radiation through the glacial (or crystalline) humour according to Roger Bacon
Figure 7 Manuscript illustration of Olibrius the prefect, with abrasions
Figure 8 Manuscript illustration of St. Margaret, unmarked, between two guards, with head and feet erased
Figure 9 Section of manuscript folio, showing text of Augustine’s Confessions (left) and medieval commentator’s notes (right)
Figure 10 Parchment mitre commissioned by Jacques de Vitry (front)
Figure 11 Parchment mitre commissioned by Jacques de Vitry (back)
Figure 12 Second Life advertisement featuring Avatar-style avatar (‘Navitar’) from 2010
Figure 13 Author’s avatar using a prayer pose in a Second Life Catholic church
Figure 14 Author’s Second Life avatar using ‘Jesus Cross with Animation’ (created by Trigit Amat)
