How to imagine the soundscape of the Middle Ages? Clues may be found in the visual images of sound escaping reliefs and paintings. This is the theme of a new book
Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound
by Susan Boynton and Diane J Reilly
Series: Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Vol. 9)
Brepols Publishers (October 13, 2015)
ISBN-10: 2503554377
ISBN-13: 978-2503554372
ABSTRACT:
While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art, architecture, and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography, the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound, space and image in the long Middle Ages.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Sound and Image in the Middle Ages: Reflections on a Conjunction
By Susan Boynton, Diane Reilly- The Voice in Relief: Sculpture and Surplus Vocality at the Rise of Naturalism
By Matthew G. Shoaf - Performing Silence and Regulating Sound: The Monastic Soundscape of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes
By Sheila Bonde, Clark Maines - Hearing the Image at Santo Domingo de Silos
By Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo - The Sound of Conversion in Medieval Iberia
By Tom Nickson - “Praiseworthy in that great multitude was the silence”: Sound/Silence in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul
By Nina Ergin - Monastic Soundspaces in Late Byzantium: The Art and Act of Chanting
By Sharon E. J. Gerstel - Written Voices: The Spoken Word in Middle Byzantine Monumental Painting
By Nancy Ševčenko - Singing, Crying, Shouting, and Saying: Embroidered Aëres and Epitaphioi and the Sounds of the Byzantine Liturgy
By Henry Schilb - The Aural-Visual Experience in the Ashkenazi Ritual Domain of the Middle Ages
By Sarit Shalev-Eyni - The Play of Daniel in the Cathedral of Beauvais
By Andrew Tallon - Building a Church with Music: The Plainchant Capitals at Cluny, c. 1100
By Sébastien Biay - Sounds and Visions of Heaven: The Fusion of Music and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbroeck
By Judith H. Oliver - The Desert in Paradise: A Newly-Discovered Office for John the Baptist from Paradies bei Soest and Its Place in the Dominican Liturgy
By Margot E. Fassler, Jeffrey F. Hamburger - Staging the Blindfolded Bride: Between Medieval Drama and Piyyut Illumination in the Levy Maḥzor
By Sara Offenberg - Integrating Anselm: Pictures and the Liturgy in a Twelfth-Century Manuscript of the “Orationes sive Meditationes”
By Michael Curschmann - Silent Sounds: Musical Iconography in a Fifteenth-Century Jewish Prayer Book
By Suzanne Wijsman
FEATURED PHOTO:
An article in this collection by Judith H. Oliver explores the Sounds and Visons of Heaven as they are constantly woven into each other in the remarkable Codex Gisla. Notice how the Virgin is holding a book – a graduale – in her hands, while venturing into Bethlehem. Codex Gisla, Osnabrück Diözesanarchiv Inv No Ma 101 fol 17.