The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture ed. by Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, Margitta Rouse (review)

This timely collection will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers with its wide range of perspectives on medieval ekphrasis—”the verbal representation of visual representation” (3)⁴—in texts from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, in Latin, English, French, and German. It contributes significantly to the invigorating new work on visual culture, visuality in verbal texts, and the materiality of texts. Middle English literature predominates, with four chapters on Chaucer and two on Pearl, but the collection is not confined by any national culture or definition of the visual in the verbal, and raises searching theoretical issues as well.

Four sections focus on materiality and things; desire, emotion, and reason; ways of knowing; and theories and extensions of ekphrasis. The introduction provides several illuminating contexts. First, it situates the interest of ekphrasis in late medieval English culture in the debate about Lollard iconophobia. Using a narrow definition of ekphrasis as describing visual works of art, James Simpson excluded Lollard texts from his Reform and Cultural Revolution because their “iconophobia prevented them from producing truly artistic texts” with the degree of self-consciousness about representation that distinguishes literary works from religious polemic (2).⁵ Bruce Holsinger, using a more expansive classical definition of ekphrasis as a description of any visual scene or object characterized by enargia (the impression of vivid lifelikeness) disputed this exclusion, and found instead “an impressive degree of aesthetic self-consciousness” (2) in Lollard texts.⁶ As the representation of extra-textual visual reality, ekphrasis becomes central to debates about aesthetic self-consciousness, in particular its apparent denial of political and other social pressures within which literary texts are written and read. Rather than embodying an apolitical, autonomous aestheticism, the editors write, ekphrasis instead “challenges us to seek the conflicted in the aesthetic” and “to unpack the manifold political, epistemological, or even theological issues present in any aesthetic statement” (6). Moreover, ekphrasis provides an ideal site to tease out the degree to which our critical terms arise out of modernism, especially in its tendency to define itself in contrast to the Middle Ages as a pre-aesthetic, premodern Other. The editors do not settle the definitional debate—ekphrasis narrow or broad, classical/medieval or modern—but instead allow each contribution to use whatever definition best helps it to explore the “multilayered complexities of ekphrasis” (7), with all its entanglements in visual and verbal modes of representation, thinking, feeling, knowing, and believing—in short, in a consequential array of medieval experience.

Since each chapter redefines ekphrasis, laudable definitional clarity also results in a good deal of repetition. But it also brings useful reminders and discoveries—for instance, that the narrowest definition of ekphrasis, the verbal description of a visual work of art, is a twentieth-century invention. In essays defining ekphrasis more broadly—for instance, Sarah Stanbury’s treatment of Chaucer’s “A Former Age” (Chapter 2), where lists of words referring to tools, craft, and human making comprise an ekphrasis that defines Englishness; or Ethan Knapp’s treatment of the representation of human faces (Chapter 10)— the repetition clarifies how broader conceptions still belong to the same critical domain.

Contributors take many approaches to ekphrasis and its entanglements. Valerie Allen (Chapter 1) offers an enthralling treatment of the materiality of Baudri of Bourgueil’s panegyric description of the bed-chamber of Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror. A poetic analogue of the Bayeux Tapestry, the “Adelae comitissae” focuses on Adela’s tapestry, whose images and embroidered words, recording the Conqueror’s deeds, hover between the visual and the verbal; the poem likewise stresses its own materiality through its fascination with shapes, plasticity, grammatical endings, and the craftsmanship of the verbal object. While later high medieval poetics, like postmodern poetics, rematerializes textuality, this earlier example stresses concrete craftedness, which Allen...