Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job - Hardcover

Rudolph, Conrad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691026734 ISBN 13: 9780691026732

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The twelfth-century manuscript of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, lavishly written and illuminated at the Cistercian monastery of Cîteaux in 1111, contains images of seemingly gratuitous violence and daily life that are famous but have a significance that has eluded most modern viewers. These images range anywhere from monstrous beasts that devour and hack at each other with swords to monks harvesting grain and felling trees. They have been called by some scholars the products of "unbridled, often irrational fantasy," entirely independent of the text and of any specific meaning. In this book, Conrad Rudolph argues that beyond the face value of these illuminations, there lies an undercurrent of thematic consistency. Like obscure events from Scripture, he maintains, the images may lead to another level of meaning yet to be discovered.


Rudolph focuses on the ways spirituality and politics operate in the artistic process that produced this particular manuscript. By exploring these interactions, we can understand how the form of spirituality embodied in this manuscript legitimized a very intimate attitude on the part of the artist toward the subject. The images are in fact the product of Gregory's demand that one "become" what one reads: some reflect the ideal monk crafting a holy place out of the wilderness, others the Cistercian notion of spiritual advancement as a violent struggle. In this way, the Cîteaux Moralia in Job conveys an exuberance and creativity rarely found in manuscript illumination before or since.

About this title

About the Author

Conrad Rudolph is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He has held Guggenheim, J. Paul Getty, and Mellon fellowships, and is the author of Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton) and The Things of Greater Importance: Bernard of Clairvaux's "Apologia" and the Medieval Attitude toward Art.

From the Back Cover

"The Citeaux Moralia in Job is an important manuscript that has always received short shrift because viewers have ignored the text in studying the images. As a result, prior discussions have featured individual images, but not looked at patterns revealed in the whole book. Here Conrad Rudolph offers a wonderful reading of the images. He is singularly qualified to undertake the project because of his immersion in the writings of the Cistercians and his awareness of the specific historical and intellectual moment within which the manuscript was created. This book will interest readers from a variety of fields, including art history, history, and religious studies."--Anne D. Hedeman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691026734
• ISBN 13: 9780691026732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 196