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Book Cover
E-book
Author Spencer-Hall, Alicia, author

Title Medieval Saints and Modern Screens Alicia Spencer-Hall
Published Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2018]
Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 0000
[2018]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (304 pages) : illustrations (some color), maps
Series Knowledge communities ; 3
Knowledge communities (Amsterdam, Netherlands) ; 3.
Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents Frontmatter -- Table Of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Ecstatic Cinema, Cinematic Ecstasy -- 1.Play / Pause / Rewind: Temporalities In Flux -- 2.The Caress Of The Divine -- 3.The Xtian Factor, Or How To Manufacture A Medieval Saint -- 4.My Avatar, My Soul: When Mystics Log On -- Conclusion: The Living Veronicas Of Liège -- Abbreviations -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary "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
Analysis Hagiography, divine visions, film, Liège, holy women
Notes Revision of author's thesis (dissertation)-- University College London, 2010-2014
Bibliography Filmography, pages 289-291
Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-291) and index
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject Motion pictures -- History -- 21st century
Motion pictures -- History -- 20th century
Hagiography.
Middle Ages in motion pictures.
Saints in motion pictures.
hagiographies (works)
Hagiography
Middle Ages in motion pictures
Motion pictures
Saints in motion pictures
Film
Visuelle Wahrnehmung
Mystik
Vision
Heiligenbild
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
Author Project Muse. distributor.
LC no. 2018376614
ISBN 9048532175
9789462982277
9462982279
9789048532179