The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (review)

During the late fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth, the proliferation of devotional images fueled debate over their uses and abuses. Sarah Stanbury’s richly illustrated and provocative monograph explores the ramifications of the “image explosion” that transformed church interiors, altered the relations between lay sponsors and clerical users of images, and linked “the parish and public in vital new alliances and conflicts” (17). She analyzes the ethical stakes and economic underpinnings of the image debate and reflects on how that debate worked to “redefine the terms of orthodoxy and dissent” (17). The reformist opposition to devotional images, Stanbury argues, construed them as what anthropologists would later term “fetishes”—objects of a desire that is excessive, sensual, perverse, illicit, and insatiable. Underlying this construction of the image as fetish is a host of anxieties about social control and, above all, the economics of spirituality. “Devotional images trouble reformers,” Stanbury contends, “not only because they threaten a material intrusion in the devotional sphere but also because they signify the very market-based operations of the spiritual system itself” (14).

Stanbury summons an eclectic assortment of textual witnesses to and participants in the image debate—saints’ lives and mystical writings, Knighton’s Chronicle, the so-called Despenser Retable in Norwich Cathedral, the hagiographies and pseudo-hagiographies of Chaucer, Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Some of these are, or are explicitly about, images—including relics, church architecture and statuary, heraldic emblems, ritual accessories, and devotional icons—while others are inflected by their authors’ experience of devotional imagery. In either case, Stanbury’s analysis productively puts images in conversation with their written counterparts in ways that illuminate the devotional culture of late medieval England. Her exploration relies upon an abundance of visual evidence, and one of the book’s many strengths is its wealth of reproductions.

Stanbury divides her study into three major sections. Part One, “Fetish, Idol, Icon,” begins by contrasting three authors’ uses of “feminized devotional images” to address issues surrounding the “display and potency of devotional objects” (37). In her first example, the chronicler Henry Knighton recounts a notorious act of iconoclasm—Lollards William Smith and Richard Waytestathe using a wooden statue of Saint Katherine to cook cabbage stew—as a virgin martyr legend, with the Lollards in the roles of pagan persecutors and the statue cast as the saint, to illustrate the “horrors of Lollardy” (63). Writing at roughly the same time as Knighton, Walter Hilton “adopts language nuanced by contemporary reformist discourse for use in a devotional romance” (36–37). In creating the “merk ymage” of his Scale of Perfection, Hilton “invests an image with even greater horror” than the Lollards do (58), echoing “the materialist critique of images to underwrite an ascetic spirituality” (63). For her third example, Stanbury returns to Saint Katherine as she was represented by John Capgrave, circa 1445. Where Knighton construes a statue as a saint, Capgrave transforms the saint into “an embodied devotional image in a struggle against idolatry, with her famous wheel as both fetish item and idol” (14–15). “By unsettling subject positions in the image debate,” she argues, “Capgrave’s text gives both sides of the question brilliant play” (66) and “offers a metacommentary on the troubling similarity between images and idols” (64).

Stanbury next turns to the Despenser Retable of Norwich Cathedral, hypothesized to be a gift of thanks from prominent local families (whose coats of arms are blazoned into the frame of the retable) to Bishop Despenser in recognition of his role in suppressing the rebellion of 1381. She reads the retable convincingly and eloquently as a “framed narrative about social disruption and the restoration of order” that is “as much about orthodoxy, community, and class in late fourteenth-century Norwich as it is about the Passion” (93).

Stanbury’s second section, “Chaucer’s Sacramental Poetic,” uses the image debate as a backdrop for discussing Chaucer...