*Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550* is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor™'s relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor™'s perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of ™'high™' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (*Rabelais and His World*, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.
- Cover
- Series Information
- Copyright Information
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Ridicule or Reverence? A History of Scholarship on St. Joseph
- Sanctity, Humor, and the Gap between Material Reality and Religious Experience
- Works Cited
- 1. Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of his Cult
- 1.1 Introduction: Rethinking ‘Higher’ Levels of Literature and Art
- 1.2 Joseph’s Hosen and Early Material Evidence of his Cult
- 1.2.1 The Ivories
- 1.2.2 The Power of Relics in Fourteenth-Century Europe
- 1.2.3 The Hosen and Humor in Royal Commissions: The Antwerp-Baltimore Polyptych of Philip the Bold
- 1.3 Nutritor Domini and Bumbling Old Fool: The Hamburg Petri-Altar
- 1.3.1 The Kindelwiegenspiele
- 1.4 Conclusion
- Works Cited
- 2. Satire Sacred and Profane
- 2.1 Introduction: Laughter as Veneration
- 2.2 From the Margins to the Center: Humor and the ‘World Upside Down’ in Sacred Art and Ritual
- 2.3 Diaper-Washer Josephs and the ‘Battle for the Pants’
- 2.4 Joseph, the Ass, the Peasant, and the Fool
- 2.5 Complexities of Early Modern Humor: The Virtue of the
‘Natural Man’
- 2.6 Dirty Old Man: The Bawdy and the Chaste Saint
- 2.7 Conclusion: Satirizing the Sacred
- Works Cited
- 3. Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
- 3.1 Sacred Humor beyond Edification
- 3.2 Urbanitas, Facetia, and Courtliness in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
- 3.3 Dissimulatio, Christian Irony, and the Imago Humilis
- 3.4 The Art of Rhetorical Humor and the Artist as vir facetus: Early Humanism and Social Exchange
- 3.5 Conclusion
- Works Cited
- 4. The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
- 4.1 The Early Modern paterfamilias and the Profit Economy
- 4.2 Treasurer or Miser?
- 4.3 Satire, Subversion, and the Multivalent Image
- 4.4 Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Conclusion
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account