Dissimilar Similitudes

This rich collection of essays offers inspiration and insight in equal measure. Caroline Walker Bynum has collected six essays, some based on previously published material, which stand independently, but also resonate with one another. The volume centres around material objects. It is claimed that in the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries ‘religious experience was literalized into encounter with objects’ (p. 29). The volume unpacks how these encounters worked, their role in religious life and their rich texture. It is not enough to say that things work as images because they are like something else: this is not simply a matter of representation. To examine the ways in which objects have agency is, of course, not a new idea, and one which has been explored in illuminating depth by Bynum herself. But she goes beyond both representation and agency, to explore what she terms ‘dissimilar similitudes’. In many ways, these ideas are stimulated by comments from the Pseudo-Dionysius to Augustine to St Thomas Aquinas, but Bynum is clear that this is not a book about theological discussions, but about the ways in which medieval people responded to and used objects

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Fifteenth · Literature · Period (music · Politics · Representation (politics · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity