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

This rich collection of essays on medieval (and in some cases early modern) ekphrasis will be of interest for those working in the area of verbal-visual relations and representation, and also acts as a set of examples of how scholars (here overwhelmingly of literature) can refract their readings through the prism of this powerful trope. The editors' Introduction raises a number of cultural questions in which medieval ekphrasis had a place, including the relationship between physical pictures and mental images; a late medieval incarnational aesthetic as against iconoclastic and iconophobic drives; and allegory as a mode heavily reliant on the visual (pp. 8-9). The Introduction also reaffirms that the "narrow" definition of "ekphrasis"—"the literary description of a work of visual art" (p. 3)—is inadequate to its classical and medieval theory and practice as a powerful rhetoric of lively description, as Ruth Webb and others have influentially discussed. A strength of the volume is its inclusion of texts in Latin, French, German, and English, with the resulting confluence of scholarship cited, including non-Anglophone work sometimes neglected in English-speaking circles (for example Haiko Wandhoff's 2003 book Ekphrasis: Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle Räume in der Literatur des Mittelalters). The intersection between more recent accounts of the verbal and visual (Murray Krieger; W. J. T. Mitchell; James A. W. Heffernan) and medieval visual and rhetorical practice likewise enables the volume to make broader claims about ekphrasis in debates over periodization, although it is always easier to deflate the claims of modernity than it is to construct some alternative set of relations or continuities.

The volume is divided into four sections, and although the editors provide a plausible reasoning behind their arrangement, there would have been various other ways to match up or contrast the chapters. Part I, "Ekphrasis and the Object," starts with Valerie Allen's essay of that title, focused on Baudri of Bourgeuil's poem for Adela of Blois, but also reviewing the debates over a narrow or broad understanding of ekphrasis. Baudri's poem deserves this attention, but some of the discussion of medieval aesthetics (for instance, high medieval art as "unsymbolic" [p. 35]) is less persuasive, and could have been tested in relation to recent art historical literature. Sarah Stanbury's chapter, "Multilingual Lists and Chaucer's 'The Former Age,'" aligns ekphrastic passages in Chaucer's poems with lists of objects (for example in language learning texts or in indentures) of the kind that Chaucer would have known and that, in her reading, draw attention to "the relationship between words and things or words asthings" (p. 47). In another chapter focused on Chaucer, John M. Bowers surveys a number of ekphrastic moments and gives some provocative readings, for example, regarding the links between art and violence in The Knight's Tale, although I found other moments less convincing, for example, his pondering how the dreamer in The Book of the Duchessmight recognize who was in the pictures of the Troy narrative in his bed chamber (my notes here read: "But it's a dream—these things happen!").

Part II, "The Desire of Ekphrasis," includes chapters by Claudia Olk—a rewarding comparison between the Digby Mary Magdaleneplay and The Winter's Tale; Anke Bernau on "Thinking Feeling: Pearl's Ekphrastic Imagination"; and Kathryn Starkey on Gottfried's Tristan. In their different styles, I enjoyed Bernau's and Starkey's essays a good deal. Bernau explores grief, literary invention, and memory, suggesting that "[it] is in the poem's ekphrastic passages that the interrelations of cognition and affect in memory are explored most insistently" (pp. 106-7). Starkey's analysis of some ekphrastic scenes in Tristanshows how viewers can be misled or enthralled by what...