Medieval Visions

Undergraduate / Graduate

This seminar will introduce students to key medieval theories of vision in western Europe ranging from the theological to the scientific. We will explore the ways in which beholders approached and interacted with images, as well as how they understood and theorized these visual experiences. Ultimately, this course will interrogate the overlaps and gaps between theories of looking and practices of looking in order to better understand what looking at an image in the Middle Ages entailed. Topics will include, but are not limited to: visionary experience; optical science; female mystics; devotional images; the Book of Revelation; dream theory; and changes in pre-modern "visuality" on the eve of the Reformation.