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In bringing together work on optic theory, ethnography, and the visual cultures of Christianity, this volume offers a sense of the richness and the complexity of early modern thinking about the human eye. The seven case studies explore the relationship between vision and knowledge, taking up such diverse artifacts as an emblem book, a Jesuit mariological text, Calvin s Institutes, Las Casas s "Apologia," Hans Staden s "True History," the "Codex Telleriano-Remensis," and an exegetical painting by Herri met de Bles. Argued from different disciplinary perspectives, these essays pose crucial questions about the eyes, asking how they were construed as instruments of witnessing, perception, representation, cognition, and religious belief.
About the author
Walter S. Melion, Ph.D. (1988) in Art History, University of California, Berkeley, is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries. His books include
Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's "Schilder-Boeck" (University of Chicago, 1991) and
The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print (Saint Joseph's University, 2009).
Lee Palmer Wandel, Ph.d. (1985) in History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Visual Culture, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her books include
Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli's Zurich (Cambridge University, 1990),
Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge University, 1994), and
The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge University, 2006).
