Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience

Description

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. 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)