The absent image : lacunae in medieval books / Elina Gertsman.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Intro -- COVER Front -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- introduction -- Notes to Introduction -- Chapter 1: Imaginary Realms -- Notes to Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2: Phantoms of Emptiness -- Notes to Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3: Traces of Touch -- Notes to Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4: Penetrating the Parchment -- Notes to Chapter 4 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui--the fear of empty space--is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world's creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

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