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IMAGES TO INFLUENCE THE SUPERNATURAL: APOTROPAIC REPRESENTATIONS ON MEDIEVAL STOVE TILES* Ana Maria Gruia Ever since their “invention” in the early fourteenth century, medieval stove tiles have carried various types of representations: • heraldic ones to show the identity and status of their owner; • religious ones to match the devotions of the time; • geometric ones to imitate architecture and delight the eye; • lay stories to instruct and entertain. At least, this is the way in which we think they might have been perceived by their medieval beholders. But there are also other representations that do not fit so well into any of these groups and are more ambiguous as to their possible function. These are the hybrids and the monsters, the exotic animals, the sexual or scatological scenes, the masks, the strange signs and symbols. Some can be found also in the margins of manuscripts , on misericords and capitals, on consoles and reliefs, on lay badges and cookie molds. There is an ongoing debate as to the interpretation of these so-called “marginal” representations that permeate various medieval decorative arts. In the absence of written sources, specialists are left to wonder whether they were moral or didactic, subversive or even offensive, humorous or apotropaic, or maybe simply decorative, with no deeper meaning.1 * I am very grateful to Sophie Page for her useful suggestions on terminology and bibliography related to medieval magic. 1 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le moyen âge fantastique (Paris: Armand Collin, 1955); Lillian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Claude Gaignebet and J. Dominique Lajoux, Art profane et religion populaire au moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); Michael Camille, Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992); Steen Schjødt Christensen, “Mysterious Images – Grimacing, Grotesque, Obscene, Popular: Anti- or Commentary Images?”, Medium Aevum Quotidianum 39 (1998): 55-75; Jean Wirth, “Les marges à drôleries des manuscripts gothiques: problèmes de méthode” in History of Images. Towards a New Iconology, ed. Alex Bolvig and Phillip Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 277-300; Ruth Mellinkoff, Averting Demons. The Protective Power of Medieval Visual Motifs and Themes (Los Angeles: Ruth Mellinkoff Publications, 2004). A ANA MARIA GRUIA 154 My assumption is that the “marginal” images on stove tiles, or at least some of them, as well as the religious subjects, had (also) a protective function. They might have been perceived through the paradigms of popular religion (labeled as superstition by the Church, and shared by both elite and lower social groups) and household magic, as one of the effective ways to protect the home and the people inside it. From a methodological point of view, I have gathered the most “extravagant” examples of stove tile imagery. The selection of the most striking examples, easiest to link to the common tradition of magic, is a methodological short-cut in the sense that larger samples might nuance the interpretation and might lead to the inclusion of other images under the general label of folk apotropaions. One might take into consideration the possible apotropaic function of religious images on stove tiles, but in the absence of strong data supporting such a use, it seems safer to start with the idea easier to grasp. Although “easier” does not mean “easy”, since several precautions must be taken in such an enterprise. First, there is an absence of documentation precisely on the beliefs and uses associated with stove tiles in the late Middle Ages in Central and Eastern Europe. Then, most of the indirect data comes from analogies either distant in time (Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages or Early Modern times) or in space (Western Europe or the Byzantine Empire). Other supporting evidence belongs to learned magic, which could, nevertheless, have shared or lent certain symbols to the common tradition of magic. But studies on the universal character of a belief in apotropaic powers2 and the slow change of popular culture might, at least tentatively, justify the present attempt to articulate a theory not discussed so far in the scholarly literature. A brief terminological discussion is needed of the definitions of the key concepts : popular culture, popular religion, and especially, folk magic. Such terms have long been debated in scholarship, and my general impression is that they are best suited to negative definitions by encompassing everything that is not official culture, religion, or sophisticated magic. Aron Gurevich3 speaks of medieval popular culture as a world perception which emerged from the complex and...

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