Title Background

<i>The Place of God in <i>Piers Plowman</i> and Medieval Art</i>

The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art

An interdisciplinary study of where God is imagined to be in the high Middle Ages, particularly in PPl and in the visual arts, especially manuscript illuminations. PPl is the only lengthy English poem before Paradise Lost which has God as a major figure in its narrative. Like the Gospel of John, it uses locational language in speaking of God, placing God explicitly in moral and physical space. God is imagined as above the world, in the world, in the garment of human flesh, within the heart, yet containing all things. God is in the church, yet not confined to it; Christ is in the poor; Truth (God) is in the truth of even those outside of Christendom. These multiple placements of God draw richness and clarity from their historical environment. This book is both a study of the sense of God and of the relationship between God and creatures in PPl and an analysis of art works of the high Middle Ages in their placement of God, with the aim of historicizing both literature and art, uncovering ways that medieval people imagined God and the understandings that they would have been able to bring to reading and viewing religious art. [SMCD]

Rev. by:

  • John C. Hirsh. MAE 71.2 (2002): 330-31;
  • Jill Mann. YLS 16 (2002): 179-81;
  • S. Panayotova, New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 309-11;
  • Elizabeth Robertson, Speculum 78 (2003): 492-94;
  • Maidie Hilmo, The Medieval Review, 02.12.11;
  • Kari Kalve, Religious Studies Review, 29 (2003), 70;
  • M. Kasten, Bulletin Codicologique, 2 (2002), 167;
  • Stephen Penn, Literature and Theology, 17 (2003), 108-9;
  • A. V. C. Schmidt, Anglia, 122 (2004), 507-11