قدیسان قرون وسطی و صفحه‌های مدرن: بینش‌های الهی به عنوان تجربهٔ سینمایی

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 1 Table of Contents 6 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Ecstatic Cinema, Cinematic Ecstasy 12 The Agape-ic Encounter 15 Ecstatic Cinema 17 Cinematic Ecstasy 19 The ‘Holy Women of Liège’ 22 A Collective Audience 41 Cinematic Hagiography 44 Mysticism and Popular Culture 48 Beyond the Frame 53 Overview of Chapters 60 1 Play / Pause / Rewind: Temporalities in Flux 66 The Miracle of Photography 66 Photographic and Sacred Time 72 Saints as Photographs 74 Pressing Play: Cinematic Reanimation(s) 78 Execution Films 80 Resurrection, Resuscitation, and Unfulfilled Promises 84 The Purgatorial Body 87 Liturgical Time 92 Purgatorial Time 97 Putting Things into Perspective 103 2 The Caress of the Divine Gaze 108 Look, and Look Again 108 Bacon’s Synthesis Theory 114 Becoming What You See: The Cinesthetic Subject 119 God the Projector 123 Feeling What You See: Sensual Catechresis 129 The Collective Spectatorial Body 132 Coresthesia: Reading, Seeing, and Touching the Corpus 137 3 The Xtian Factor, or How to Manufacture a Medieval Saint 148 Marie of Oignies, the Celebrity Saint 148 An Anti-Cathar Poster Girl 153 Marie the Mystical Chanteuse 157 Jacques of Vitry, Star Preacher 159 Hairdressers to the Stars 162 Celebrity Role-Models 166 Margery Kempe’s Fanfictions 168 Keeping Up With Kempe 174 Fans in the Academy 188 4 My Avatar, My Soul: When Mystics Log On 194 Vision, Presence, and Virtual Reality 194 Situating SL: Disentangling Television, Film, and Virtual Worlds 198 The Online Communion of Saints 205 ‘Logging On’ to the Communion of Saints 211 Of Avatars and Offline Bodies 215 The Agony and the Ecstasy of Technology 222 Crucifixion Online 229 Men, Women, and Heterodoxy 232 Gender-Swapping to Level Up 235 Agency and Dependence 240 Conclusion: The Living Veronicas of Liège 244 Unveiling the Veronicas 244 Lively Relics 246 Bargaining: Agency and Impotence 248 The Other Women, Glimpsed in the Mirror 254 Abbreviations 256 Bibliography 260 Index 293 List of Tables and Figures 8 Table 1 Corpus summary data 23 Figure 1 Map of the Low Countries, c. 1100-c. 1500 27 Figure 2 Map of the southern Low Countries in the thirteenth century, showing principal towns and regions 28 Figure 3 Dioceses in the southern Low Countries, 1146-1559 29 Figure 4 The first beguine communities in Brabant-Liège (c. 1200-c. 1230) 30 Figure 5 ‘Face of Christ Superimposed on an Oak Leaf’, photogenic drawing by Johann Carl Enslen (1839) 67 Figure 6 Radiation through the glacial (or crystalline) humour according to Roger Bacon 117 Figure 7 Manuscript illustration of Olibrius the prefect, with abrasions 140 Figure 8 Manuscript illustration of St. Margaret, unmarked, between two guards, with head and feet erased 140 Figure 9 Section of manuscript folio, showing text of Augustine’s Confessions (left) and medieval commentator’s notes (right) 144 Figure 10 Parchment mitre commissioned by Jacques de Vitry (front) 189 Figure 11 Parchment mitre commissioned by Jacques de Vitry (back) 190 Figure 12 Second Life advertisement featuring Avatar-style avatar (‘Navitar’) from 2010 202 Figure 13 Author’s avatar using a prayer pose in a Second Life Catholic church 210 Figure 14 Author’s Second Life avatar using ‘Jesus Cross with Animation’ (created by Trigit Amat) 230 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. The thirteenth-century Latin hagiographic works known as the Holy Women of Liège corpus presents biographies filled with dramatic visions of God and intense physical unions with Christ. The texts that make up the collection demonstrate the problematic division of body and soul in the period and also reveal the potential of text to transmit visual experiences. This book explores those qualities of the texts using the latest developments in film theory, taking up such topics as the relationship of film to mortality, embodied spectatorship, celebrity studies, and digital environments 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.Read Alicia Spencer-Hall's keynote paper'Hagiography, Media, and the Politics of Visibility'from the Gender and Medieval Studies conference in Oxford on her blog Medieval She Wrote. "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."-- Provided by publisher "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 Liege'. 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 Liege, 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."-- Provided by publisher The Thirteenth-century Latin Hagiographic Works Known As The Holy Women Of Liège Corpus Presents Biographies Filled With Dramatic Visions Of God And Intense Physical Unions With Christ. The Texts That Make Up The Collection Demonstrate The Problematic Division Of Body And Soul In The Period And Also Reveal The Potential Of Text To Transmit Visual Experiences. This Book Explores Those Qualities Of The Texts Using The Latest Developments In Film Theory, Taking Up Such Topics As The Relationship Of Film To Mortality, Embodied Spectatorship, Celebrity Studies, And Digital Environments. Alicia Spencer-hall. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 259-289, Filmography (pages 289-291), And Index.

A collection of essays by the acclaimed film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, written between 1968 and 2005, tracks the crisis of contemporary European cinema, faced by the Hollywood giant on the one hand, and the collapsing national cinema industries on the other.