Biblical Images and Liturgy

In his often very droll and always very enlightening Christianity in the West 1400-1700, the late John Bossy noted that the motto of the Reformation really should have been in principio erat sermo. The Reformation's focus on (fetish for?) written texts like Scripture and their homiletical exposition often came, as we know, at the expense of the other senses, including the eyes, leading to outbreaks of iconoclasm ("stripping of the altars") not just in Calvin's Geneva or Knox's Scotland but in England and elsewhere.

But over the last quarter-century, many Protestant scholars have begun to re-examine Christian history and even to ransack it for things missing in their own traditions today. Thus we have, e.g., as I've often noted on here, a huge new interest in icons and iconography as well as patristic and sacramental theology.

Now a new book comes along, building on such Orthodox scholars as the late Alexander Schmemann, to repair some of the gaps in Protestant approaches to Scripture and liturgy: Gordon Lathrop, Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy  (Fortress, 2017), 224 pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

The Protestant Reformation emphasized the centrality of Scripture to Christian life; the twentieth-century liturgical movement emphasized the Bible’s place at the heart of liturgy. But we have not yet explored the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy, argues Gordon W. Lathrop. He seeks to remedy that lack because it is critical historical scholarship that has shown us the grounding of the text in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. “Saving” and revitalizing images of the past are at the heart of Scripture and are the work of the gathered community. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the “shape” of liturgy (after Dix and Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer. He lifts up the visual imagery at the Dura Europos house church and elsewhere as a corrective to the supersessionist impulse in much Christian typology. He identifies the liturgical imperative as seriousness about the present rather than an effort to dwell in an imagined past. Saving Images is a call for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.

Byzantine Art and Devotion

As I have very often noted on here, interest in all things "Byzantine" remains high, and this is never more true than when it comes to Byzantine art and iconography, as three recent publications happily illustrate. The first, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium by Ivan Drpić, has just appeared in a Kindle edition from Cambridge University Press, 2016, 514pp.
by Ivan (Author)

About this book we are told:

This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpić argues, constitutes a critical - if largely neglected - source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

The second also comes to us from Cambridge UP. Authored by Cecily J. Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline, at 424pp. is a hefty tome about which the publisher tells us:

The Late Byzantine period (1261 1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris and Moscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual. By questioning how political decline refigured the visual culture of empire, Cecily J. Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires."

The third collection treats biblical art in Byzantium but also more widely: Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World  (Thames and Hudson, 2016, 336pp.).

About this book we are told:

A beautiful and informative exploration of the illuminated manuscripts of the Bible over a millennium and across the globe, shedding new light on some of the most significant, yet rarely seen, paintings of the Middle Ages

For two millennia the Bible has inspired the creation of extraordinary art. Within this history illuminated biblical manuscripts are among the best tools for understanding early Christian painting and artistic interpretations of the Bible.

This extensively illustrated new book, compiled and written by two internationally renowned experts, transports readers, by way of forty-five featured manuscripts, across the globe and through 1,000 years of history. Passing chronologically through many of the major centers of the Christian world, from Constantinople and imperial Aachen to Canterbury, Mozarabic Spain, Crusader Jerusalem, northern Iraq, Paris, London, Bologna, and Rome, Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages, and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it.