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"In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. They also presented the mendicant saint as both potent thaumaturge and efficacious 'social worker'. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city"--
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. The Vita icon reimagined: new (and old) saints, new (and old) miracles; 3. Storytelling with saints: pictorial narrative and viewing experience; 4. Girls in trouble: gendering possession and exorcism; 5. Assault, amputation, absolution: visualizing the power of confession; 6. Thinking with Julian: marital violence and elite masculinity; 7. Bernardino the Peacemaker: visual hagiography and factional violence; 8. Cannibal mothers: picturing madness and maternal infanticide; 9. Making innocence visible (and audible) in the Basilico del Santo.
About the author
Diana Bullen Presciutti is Professor of Art History at the University of Essex. Her first monograph, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2015), explores how visual culture both framed the social problem of infant abandonment and promoted the charitable work of the foundling hospital. She has published research articles in Art History, Artibus et Historiae, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Renaissance Quarterly and Renaissance Studies, as well as several chapters in edited collections. She is also the editor of Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City (Brill Press, 2017).
Summary
The book reveals how images of saints' miracles shaped perceptions of social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor in Renaissance Italy. It will be of interest to specialists in late medieval and early modern culture (especially art history, social history, gender, and religion) as well as undergraduate and graduate students.
