"So a miracle leaves its frame, and one epiphanic detail Illuminates an entire epoch" —Derek Walcott, from Tiepolo’s Hound Art did not exist in Byzantium. As Glenn Peers explains in Sacred Shock, there were, instead, a variety of devotional objects—pectoral crosses, church mosaics, icons, and illuminated manuscripts—regarded as infused with divine presence and used in religious practices. What concerns Peers in this provocative book is the means by which the relationship between the divine and the human was made manifest through crafted, material objects. According to Peers, the devotional objects of Byzantium should be understood as having a detail or place that plays a large part in “framing” their meaning for viewers. After an insightful discussion of pectoral crosses, Peers examines a series of case studies, which includes the depiction of the blood of Christ in the Chludov Psalter, a fourteenth-century icon of St. George, and the Mandylion, a famous relic thought to preserve the traces of Christ’s face. Sacred Shock combines fine scholarship with close analysis of Byzantine devotional objects and discussion of issues of broad importance to the study of visual experience. It is significant as both an exploration of art-historical methodology and a contribution to our understanding of the medieval world.

Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.

Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.This book is available as Open Access.

This book represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.This book is available as Open Access.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book provides close historical, theological and cultural analyses of an important, but neglected, Late Antique writer, Isaac of Antioch, who was active during the second half of the fifth century. This book is the first English-language monograph on this key figure and also includes the first translation (without the Syriac) of this compelling metrical homily into English, which has at its heart the public pronouncement by a parrot of theological truths. The authors situate this remarkable text in the wider fields of performance studies, animal studies and media studies, all areas that can illuminate essential meanings and implications of the homily.

This book provides close historical, theological and cultural analyses of an important, but neglected, Late Antique writer, Isaac of Antioch, who was active during the second half of the fifth century. This book is the first English-language monograph on this key figure and also includes the first translation (without the Syriac) of this compelling metrical homily into English, which has at its heart the public pronouncement by a parrot of theological truths. The authors situate this remarkable text in the wider fields of performance studies, animal studies and media studies, all areas that can illuminate essential meanings and implications of the homily.

"So a miracle leaves its frame, and one epiphanic detail Illuminates an entire epoch" —Derek Walcott, from Tiepolo’s Hound Art did not exist in Byzantium. As Glenn Peers explains in Sacred Shock, there were, instead, a variety of devotional objects—pectoral crosses, church mosaics, icons, and illuminated manuscripts—regarded as infused with divine presence and used in religious practices. What concerns Peers in this provocative book is the means by which the relationship between the divine and the human was made manifest through crafted, material objects. According to Peers, the devotional objects of Byzantium should be understood as having a detail or place that plays a large part in “framing” their meaning for viewers. After an insightful discussion of pectoral crosses, Peers examines a series of case studies, which includes the depiction of the blood of Christ in the Chludov Psalter, a fourteenth-century icon of St. George, and the Mandylion, a famous relic thought to preserve the traces of Christ’s face. Sacred Shock combines fine scholarship with close analysis of Byzantine devotional objects and discussion of issues of broad importance to the study of visual experience. It is significant as both an exploration of art-historical methodology and a contribution to our understanding of the medieval world.

Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.

Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.This book is available as Open Access.

This book represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.This book is available as Open Access.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.

This book provides close historical, theological and cultural analyses of an important, but neglected, Late Antique writer, Isaac of Antioch, who was active during the second half of the fifth century. This book is the first English-language monograph on this key figure and also includes the first translation (without the Syriac) of this compelling metrical homily into English, which has at its heart the public pronouncement by a parrot of theological truths. The authors situate this remarkable text in the wider fields of performance studies, animal studies and media studies, all areas that can illuminate essential meanings and implications of the homily.

This book provides close historical, theological and cultural analyses of an important, but neglected, Late Antique writer, Isaac of Antioch, who was active during the second half of the fifth century. This book is the first English-language monograph on this key figure and also includes the first translation (without the Syriac) of this compelling metrical homily into English, which has at its heart the public pronouncement by a parrot of theological truths. The authors situate this remarkable text in the wider fields of performance studies, animal studies and media studies, all areas that can illuminate essential meanings and implications of the homily.