Overview

An exploration of how power and political society were imagined, represented and reflected on in medieval English art Images and imagery played a major role in medieval political thought and culture, but their influence has rarely been explored. This book provides a full assessment of the subject. Starting with an examination of the writings of late twelfth-century courtier-clerics, and their new vision of English political life as a heightened religious drama, it argues that visual images were key to the development and expression of medieval English political ideas andarguments. It discusses the vivid pictorial metaphors used in contemporary political treatises, and highlights their interaction with public decorative schemas in English great churches, private devotional imagery, seal iconography, illustrations of English history and a range of other visual sources. Meanwhile, through an exploration of events such as the Thomas Becket conflict, the making of Magna Carta, the Barons' War and the deposition of Edward II, it provides new perspectives on the political role of art, especially in reshaping basic assumptions and expectations about government and political society in medieval England. LAURA SLATER is a Fulford Junior ResearchFellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford.

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9781783273331

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Slater provides us with a very valuable survey of the kind of visual language - expressed in texts and in material culture - that underpinned and helped to shape political discussions and debates among the political elite of Angevin and early Plantagenet England. * JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES * [A] work of intellectual history that makes a prominent space for images within the cross-section of political thought that it reveals. . . . Slater has . . . made a solid case for the mutually reinforcing coherence of verbal imagery and images-figures and figurae-in dictating the coordinates of political thought and action in an important period of England's bureaucratic development. -- Sonja Drimmer * Speculum *

Slater provides us with a very valuable survey of the kind of visual language - expressed in texts and in material culture - that underpinned and helped to shape political discussions and debates among the political elite of Angevin and early Plantagenet England. JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES

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