Eyes of the Body, Eyes of the Soul (in Motion)

In recent years, scholars of medieval art history have been quietly nudging the broader discipline forward in terms of methodological, theoretical, and multidisciplinary innovation. As a result, traditional connoisseurship – focused mainly on artists and style – has been recalibrated to scrutinise the full materiality of visual objects and the contingent dynamics of viewer reception. Furthermore, images have been integrated into historiographic explorations of theories of vision, especially in relation to medieval debates over the use of art in worship, as well as its role as an instrument of religious knowledge and intellectual practice.1 These two essay collections – both beautifully produced and abundantly illustrated – provide a sampling of this expansive field. The themes and topics of both overlap considerably; although, as their titles suggest, one is more invested in art's material, corporeal, spatial, and specifically kinetic dimensions, and the other emphasises the visual as an instrument of...