Rhetorical Species

Recent scholarship on medieval optics—much of it productively revisiting not-so-recent scholarship—has yielded many productive insights into specifically medieval “ways of seeing” that have greatly expanded the range of inquiry, not only in the fields of art history and the history of science and optical theory, but also in the fields of cultural and literary studies. Still, the concept of visuality remains, as William Innes Homer has noted, “slippery” and thus has been subject to various interpretations in its application to a wide disciplinary array of scholarly analyses. Visuality appears, as Jan-Dirk Müller has noted, “as a generalized term for diverse relationships of signs. ... [It] means encoded actions, stances, gestures, insignia, objects of material culture, configurations in space and time, ‘traces’ of the divine Creator in nature, and the like.” Similarly, the designation visual culture has been broadly conceived as “images, objects, and performance and the processes of visually perceiving them” or, more succinctly, as “the study of the social construction of visual experience.” According to these definitions, the terms visuality and visual culture, in scholarly parlance at least, encompass a heterogeneous assortment of objects or phenomena that either are visible or can be visualized. Thus, studies in visuality, while focused on diverse manifestations of the visual, have concerned themselves overwhelmingly with the image, that is, with that which is perceptible either physiologically (to the eye) or in the imagination (to the mind's eye). This focus on the perceptible image has resulted typically in an interdisciplinary approach that invokes visual culture or visuality as a “sister art,” an auxiliary field of inquiry as an aid to clarify or, more aptly, to illustrate the subject at hand

Aesthetics · Art · Discipline · Gesture · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Visual arts · Visual culture · Byzantine Studies and History · Computer Science · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature

  Roger Bacon, David C Lindberg•Roger Bacon's philosophy of nature•1983

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• Minne-Sang

  Peter Frenzel•The German Quarterly•1982

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