Line Engh, Research fellow, The Norwegian Institute in Rome / Department of Philosophy, Classics,
History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo
http://www.minervaberkeley.org/conferences/seeing-knowing-vision-knowledge-cognition-and-aesthetics/2014-speakers1/line-cecilie-engh/

Seeing and knowing with the bride of Christ: How a metaphor shaped thought and action in the middle ages

My talk is about how and why a specific metaphor – the bride of Christ – emerged from the world of theological texts and came to shape central aspects of the ideological and institutional development in later medieval Europe. As bridal imagery moved between the ideological hothouse of the cloister and the political and pragmatic arena of the reform papacy, it engendered complex ideological models that established and negotiated both the institution of marriage and structures of political hierarchies in Western Europe. Imbued with specific inferences regarding nurturance, fecundity, femininity, and sexuality, bridal imagery was then distributed to the wider population by means of marriage sermons.

Here it seems we have a clear instance of figurative language impinging on political, cultural, and institutional processes, rather than just vice versa, as is more commonly construed. But how are we to assess implications of imagistic thinking as being intrinsic to broader cultural processes? How did bridal imagery produce and propagate cultural meaning? In what ways were concepts and representations of mystical marriage mapped onto other ideas, and how did those mappings result in new conceptions and representations? And more broadly still: How can visual thinking have social and political impact?

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