Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music [Hardcover]

These essays recover the lively discussions on the topics of 'magnificence' and 'the sublime' in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following, and apply them to the Middle Ages to draw exciting new conlcusions.Introduction; C.S.Jaeger 'Opus es magnificum': The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace; M.Rossi Monti Singers and the Grandeur of Worship in the West, 400-800; C.Page 'Incessu humilem, successu excelsam': Augustine, Sermo humilis and Scriptural; D.Shanzer Magnificence in Miniature: The Case of Early Medieval Manuscripts; A.Cohen Cantor's King: The Magnification of Robert II; M.Fassler Reflections on the Wonderful Height and Size of Gothic Great Churches; P.Binski Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime; C.S.Jaeger 'Error Left Me and Fear Came in its Place': Giants and the Sublime in Dante and Medieval Literature; E.Stoppino The Magnificent Builder in Late Medieval Italy; A.Marina Sound and the City: Listening to Magnificence in Medieval Paris; E.Dillon How Magnificent was Medieval Art?; B.Williamson

'It is a brilliant collection of essays unpacking medieval art in a new, and to most of us I suspect, unfamiliar way. If you love aesthetics, medieval art of any kind, or just wish to broaden your perception of the culture of medieval Europe, this is a wonderful scholarly excursion.' The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians

'The church of Notre-Dame is no doubt still a sublime and majestic edifice . . . a sort of human creation, mighty and fertile as the divine creation . . .which to use the language of the chroniclers 'by its vastness struck terror into the spectator.' When Victor Hugo opened the influential Book XIV of his Hunchback with this characterization, he was recapitulating and advancing a concept of the medieval achievement that, in recent years, has ceded almost completely to what Stephen Jaeger terms the Diminutive Middle Ages. Magnificence and the Sublime: The AesthlC,