Look, and Look Again
At the end of his Good Friday sermon in 1272 or 1273, an anonymous Paris-ian preacher motions towards a crucifix and invites his audience to look at Christ: ‘“Oh true Christian, look, look how he has his head leaning down to kiss you, his arms extended to embrace you!”’1 Forceful repetition of the imperative ‘look’ (‘regarde’) highlights the importance of a Christian’s looking in their relationship with the Lord. A pious Christian must grasp the image initially with a look, but then caress the image with a gaze which reveals its true significance. The preacher does not address his flock in the plural, but rather with the singular ‘Christian’ (‘chrestien’): visual adoration of Christ is a deeply personal and intimate undertaking. Stimulated by the true Christian’s gaze, the viewed image/object will gesture back, enfolding the onlooker in an embrace. Given such descriptions, it is little wonder that medievalists have identified the eye as the ‘privileged sense organ’ of the period, with intellectual knowledge expressed again and again as a product of sight.2 At the turn of the thirteenth century, the ritual of the elevation of the Eucharist during mass was instituted. Later traditions such as Corpus Christi proces-sions, the ringing of bells at the moment of elevation, and the popularity of monstrances led ‘to an emphasis on “seeing God”’ as a central worship practice.3 Nevertheless, haptic perception was central to medieval optical theories. As such, touch is ultimately the most privileged sense in the era.4
Medieval optical theories maintained that touch was integral to sight.
All objects emitted species, intangible and corrupted – yet nevertheless authentic – versions of the object. For sight to occur, the species had to touch the viewer’s eye and become imprinted. The species operated in two manners. In extromission, they were expelled from the object in an outwards beam. With intromission, a catalyzing beam from the viewer’s eye provoked the species’ trajectory backwards, towards the viewer. Roger Bacon (d. 1294), however, conjoined the two theories, and posited a model of synthesis. The
1 My translation. ‘“Ha! Veroi chrestien, regarde, regarde, comment il a le chief encliné por toi beisier, les bras estendu por toi embrachier!”’ Cited in Lipton, p. 1172, from the transcription in Bériou, pp. 787-99. The sermon appears orginally under the rubric ‘Passio’in Paris, BNF, MS lat.
16482, fols. 136r-141v.
2 Müller, p. 206. See also: Akbari, p. 3; Denery, p. 9; Hahn, ‘Visio Dei’, pp. 169, 180; Starkey, p. 2.
3 B. Newman, ‘Clash’, p. 16. See also: Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 126; Hahn, ‘Visio Dei’, p. 175.
4 Hahn, ‘Visio Dei’, p. 180.
viewer emitted an actualizing beam which hit the viewed object, whilst the viewed object also radiated its species to the viewer’s eye. According to Bacon, both intromission and extromission were essential for sight. This synthesis destabilizes the categories of subject and object, as both the viewing and the viewer gaze at each other and touch each other with their species.
The Baconian synthesis is the theoretical scopic model which chiefly preoccupies modern medievalists in discussions of historically grounded vision.5 Bacon’s theory reigned dominant in the discipline of perspectiva (optical theory) in the thirteenth century and thus is a natural object of contextualized medievalist scholarship.6 The Baconian synthesis’ partial dissolution of the dichotomy of active subject and passive object, and the concomitant importance of touch to visual perception, has attracted most interest from medievalist critics. For example, Suzannah Biernoff notes that Bacon’s insistence on ‘physical contact’ as a basis of visual perception results in the equation of looking and touching.7 Emma Campbell and Robert Mills articulate the same understanding of medieval vision, announcing that ‘[s]eeing is not so much believing as feeling’, in both the physical and emotional sense.8 Much, if not all, of the recent scholarship on medieval vision is based on the analysis of differences between modern and medieval visual mechanisms. Biernoff proclaims, for instance, that ‘the model of [medieval] spectatorial reciprocity’ she discusses is fundamentally differ-ent ‘from the now dominant formulations of the “male gaze” or “Western ocularcentrism”’.9 Dallas G. Denery calls for precise historical contextualiza-tion of scopic regimes, i.e. an understanding of theoretical differences and evolutions, in order to understand contemporary Western ‘ocularcentrism’.10 Similarly, Kathryn Starkey maintains that studies of medieval perception produce both familiarity and alienation in the modern researcher.11
5 See, for example: Akbari; Biernoff; Campbell and Mills (eds.), Troubled Vision; Caviness;
Denery; Nelson (ed.); Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun (eds.); Starkey and Wenzel (eds.).
6 Lindberg, Theories, p. 116. On Bacon’s influence in the period, see in particular: Denery, pp. 75-115. Bacon’s theories were not always easily distinguished from those of his predecessor Alhazen, from whom he drew heavily: Lindberg, Theories, p. 116; Simon. Although supporters continued to champion Bacon’s optical regime in later centuries, Aristotle’s intromissionist visual theories ultimately achieved dominance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On Bacon’s debt to other theorists, see also brief discussion below: pp. 113-16.
7 P. 85.
8 Emphasis in original. ‘Introduction’, p. 4.
9 P. 162. On Western European ocularcentrism from Plato to the present, see in particular Jay, Eyes, pp. 1-82. On anti-ocularist critique, see in particular: ibid., pp. 149-586; ‘Hermeneutics’.
10 P. 9.
11 P. 2.
In this chapter, I contend that pre-existing scholarship can benefit from consideration of a different body of modern theory when studying medieval visuality. Modern theories of embodied spectatorship posit that visual and tactile perception are central to our experiences in the movie theatre.
Analyses of this strand of spectatorship theory, alongside interrogation of relevant theories of medieval looking, substantially develop the current field. This approach allows for new interpretations of modern and medieval visuality, thereby revealing linkages across temporal periods in relation to the theorization of visual economies. Existing research, on the whole, portrays medieval visuality in stark opposition to modern visual modes.
This analytical program fails to profit fully from the potential for visual continuity across time periods, ways of viewing inflected in each instance by the ‘cultural variability’ inherent in the historical moment of viewing, but nevertheless connected.12 Moreover, critical analyses invested in point-ing out what medieval sight was not often posit, implicitly or explicitly, a singular fixed form of modern visuality. As Martin Jay underscores, ocular
‘domination’ does not mean ‘uniformity’, and the mechanics of modern sight are much more complex than often imagined, or invoked.13
An acknowledgment that medieval vision entailed a haptic interchange between viewer and viewed does not nullify the overwhelming importance of the eye in the medieval sensorium. Indeed, Roger Bacon argues for the primacy of vision over all other senses in the opening to part five of his Opus majus, proclaiming that:
Vision reveals to us the differences among things, since by means of vision we experience everything in the heavens and on earth. For ce-lestial objects are observed by means of visual instruments, as Ptolemy and other astronomers teach, as are things generated in the air, such as comets, rainbows, and the like; for their altitude above the horizon, their size, shape, and number, and everything in them are certified by means of vision aided by instruments. Through vision we also experience things here on earth, for concerning this world the blind can have no experience worthy of the name.14
12 Jay, Eyes, p. 9.
13 Ibid., p. 45.
14 Lindberg (ed.), Perspectiva, 1.1.1.3. References to the Opus majus (English and Latin) are in the form of part, distinction, chapter, page number. See also: Lindberg’s brief discussion of this chapter (ibid., pp. xx-xxi) and Frankowska-Terlecka’s comments on Bacon’s privileging of vision above all other senses (pp. 214-15). ‘quod visus solus ostendit nobis rerum differentias:
per illum enim exquirimus certas experientias omnium quae in coelis sunt et in terra. Nam
Bacon dismisses the other senses: the senses of smell and touch are brutish and thus not suited to ‘human dignity’ (‘dignitatem sapientiae humanae’), whilst hearing does not allow for individual experiential testing of beliefs.15 Further, since a separate scientific discipline has been created for the pur-poses of studying vision (‘perspectiva’), it follows that visual perception is of particular utility to scholars. For Bacon, the superiority of vision lies in the sense’s route to truths about the mortal world, an expression of an ocularcentrist attitude which chimes with later thinking in Enlightenment empiricism.16 However, Bacon’s ocularcentrism must also be nuanced: it was also founded on the belief that the study of optics reveals religious truths.17 As Dominique Raynaud formulates, ‘optics would allow access to the Creator through knowledge of the created world’.18 Clearly, this is an important break from modern notions of vision as the route to empirical secular knowledge.
For Campbell and Mills, the significance of Bacon’s optical theories lies in the unpacking of the association of power with the male gaze, and passivity with the female gaze, thereby revealing new readings of ‘medieval gender’.19 Medieval vision ‘troubles’ the modern spectatorial dichotomy of active (masculine) and passive (feminine) as the spectator occupies both positions in the visual act. Such readings chime extraordinarily well with modern theories of embodied cinematic spectatorship. Vivian Carol Sobchack posits that the cinematic spectator evinces ‘a carnal interest and investment in being both “here” and “there”, in being able both to sense and to be sensible, to be both the subject and the object of tactile desire’.20 Seeing an onscreen body opens the spectator to becoming the body on screen, feeling both the bodies portrayed onscreen and their fleshly, fixed offscreen body as their own. The spectator is thus ‘“doubly situated”’.21 Rigid definitions of onscreen and offscreen reality, and the subject/object demarcation crumble via visual encounters in the cinema. As Laura U. Marks asserts, such theories
ea quae in coelestibus sunt considerantur per instrumenta visualia, ut Ptolemaeus et caeteri docent astronomi. Et similiter ea quae in aere generantur, sicut cometae et irides et hujusmodi.
Nam altitudo earum super horizonta, et magnitudo, et figura, et multitudo, et omnia quae in eis sunt, certificantur per modos videndi in instrumentis. Quae vero hic in terra sunt experimur per visum, quia caecus nihil potest de hoc mundo quod dignum sit experiri.’ Bridges (ed.), II, 5.1.1.2.
15 Lindberg (ed.), Perspectiva, 1.1.1.5; Bridges (ed.), II, 5.1.1.2-3.
16 Jay, Eyes, pp. 83-148; Lauwrens.
17 Bridges (ed.), III, 2.1.36. On this, see also: Lindberg, ‘Medieval Science’; Raynaud, pp. 738-40.
18 P. 738; my translation. ‘L’optique permettrait d’accéder au Créateur par la connaissance du monde créé’.
19 Campbell and Mills, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. See also: Biernoff, p. 134.
20 Emphases in original; Carnal Thoughts, p. 66.
21 Barker, p. 84.
of cinematic somatism, i.e. the enmeshment of the body in the visual act, rest upon the notion of ‘a mutual permeability and mutual creation of self and other’.22 Within this interpretive framework of cinematic spectatorship,
‘the characterization of the film viewer as passive, vicarious, or projective must be replaced with a model of a viewer who participates in the produc-tion of the cinematic experience’.23 As Bacon’s synthesis theory asserts the interconnection of sight and touch, and the problematization of subject/
object distinctions, so too do modern theories of cinematic somatism.
Such modern formulations of spectatorship, almost entirely overlooked by medievalist critics to date, offer fertile tools with which to examine, and unpack, medieval divine visions from a fresh perspective. In what ways can material from each side of the temporal divide inform us about visual praxes and the body’s implication in viewing? Where does such a comparison falter, and what can that tell us?
Films also touch us affectively.24 For example, Raymond Bellour’s primary material for his monograph analysing cinema spectatorship, Le Corps du cinéma (The Body of Cinema), consists of the films which ‘touched’ him in some way (‘chaque film qui m’a touché’).25 Bellour details how watching the repeated motif of two young boys on a bicycle in Displaced Person (Daniel Eisenberg, 1981) suddenly brought back the buried recollection of the tandem bicycle his parents used during the Occupation.26 Indeed, a large part of Bellour’s book interrogates cinematic spectatorship in terms of emo-tion. The author argues that emotion is constitutive of the ‘body of cinema’
(‘corps du cinéma’), alongside hypnosis and animality.27 Christiane Voss argues similarly that ‘affective entanglement’ is central to the structure of cinematic spectatorship, predicated on illusion formation.28 In this chapter, then, ‘tactile’ does not solely refer to the physical sensation of touch, but also more broadly to ‘feeling’, as in emotional sensibility.
With the neologism ‘cinesthesia’ – cinema, synaesthesia, coenaesthesia – Sobchack brings together the core of her thesis.29 Cinema is founded on
22 Skin, p. 149. Marks refers here to a different work: Sobchack, Address. Nevertheless, her comments are equally applicable to Sobchack’s theories from the later work which I discuss here.
23 Marks, Skin, pp. 149-50.
24 On this, see in particular Dalmasso, ‘Toucher’, p. 74; ‘Voir’, p. 119; Marks, Touch, p. 191.
25 P. 17.
26 Pp. 225-27.
27 P. 13. For emotion section, see pp. 129-412.
28 P. 139.
29 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, pp. 53-84, in particular p. 67.
synaesthetic experience, the transposition of visual into tactile perception, with the physical grasp of individual sensory experiences portrayed visually onscreen felt in the moviegoer’s offscreen body. In an essay published in 1991, Linda Williams, for example, draws attention to the ‘physical jolt[s]’
produced in the moviegoer’s body by what she terms ‘“gross genres”’, films which feature ‘heavy doses of sex, violence, and emotion’ – pornography, horror, and sentimental weepies.30 By focusing on the physical reactions of bodies on screen – from explicit depictions of gore and violent destruction to more subtle psychological stress – horror ‘assault[s] and agitate[s] the bodies of the audience’.31 Such physical effects of fear in the audience are measurable, and tests have shown increases in heart rate, skin temperature, and blood temperature in horror viewers both in the short and long term after exposure to the film.32 Sobchack moves beyond generic bounds, argu-ing that all films provoke physical sensation in the spectator’s body via the visual faculty. Further, such corporeal reactions bring the spectator back to their own body as a sensory being, an acknowledgment of the totality of their sensory experience (coenaesthesia). The film spectator is thus always a ‘cinesthetic subject’.33
In this chapter, I deploy medieval optical theories to reveal medieval sensory responses, in order to examine the medieval mystical viewer as a
‘cinesthetic subject’. Parallels between Sobchack’s schema and instances of haptic viewing in medieval hagiography are fleshed out, and differences interrogated in the formulation of a particularly medieval cinesthesia.
Holy women fuse with the divine object of their visions, a process which destabilizes seemingly fixed labels of active and passive, viewer and viewed.
In these episodes, God is posited as a projector of light, the originator of all authentic vision. Above all, vision leads to feeling, not just for the holy woman who sees God herself, but also for the onlookers who gaze upon her.
Such analyses of medieval tactile visuality ultimately bring us back to the feelings of the modern body, the contemporary moviegoer and, indeed, the academic scholar. Episodes of haptic visuality do not only occur in the space of the cinema theatre. Rather, such experiences can also be found in, and are stimulated by, written texts, particularly those invoking visions. By con-sequence, a new methodology for theorizing the haptic interplay between readers from modern and medieval eras, mediated by the manuscript, is
30 Pp. 2-3.
31 Shaviro, p. 101, p. 103.
32 On this, see in particular: Prince, p. 249.
33 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 67.
revealed. Before embarking upon this interrogation, however, a thorough grounding in the precise mechanics of Bacon’s medieval optical schema is needed. It is to this undertaking that I now turn.
Bacon’s Synthesis Theory
The basic component of Bacon’s optical theory of synthesis is the species, a concept with roots in the Neoplatonic principle of emanation, in which all things radiate their inherent power externally.34 In his reliance on the doctrine of the multiplication of species, Bacon follows and expands the earlier work of Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253). The latter had set forth the basic principles of this theory in his text De lineis, angulis et figuris, written c. 1230-1235. Using a series of negations, Bacon defines species as follows:
But a species is not body, nor is it moved as a whole from one place to another; but that which is produced [by an object] in the first part of the air is not separated from that part, since form cannot be separated from the matter in which it is unless it should be mind [also soul; anima];
rather, it produces a likeness to itself in the second part of the air, and so on. Therefore there is no change of place, but a generation multiplied through the different parts of the medium; […].35
The species is identical to that from which it is emitted in all aspects, apart from in dimension. It travels through a medium, such as air, in the manner of a wave, reproducing itself again and again, maintaining contact at all times with the originary object, until it reaches its target (the eye). Bacon’s reference to the soul (‘anima’) as the unique example of form isolated from matter shows his commitment to following Aristotle’s ‘form-matter dichotomy’, and the Aristotelian theory of the soul as the form (‘forma’) of the material body.36 By stressing that the object’s form is never separated from its matter, Bacon paradoxically allows for cogitation on the troubling
34 Lindberg, ‘Alhazen’s Theory’, pp. 335-36.
35 Translation from E. Grant (ed.), p. 394, cited in Lindberg, Theories, p. 113. ‘Sed species non est corpus, neque mutatur secundum se totam ab uno loco in alium, sed illa quae in prima parte aeris fit non separatur ab illa, cum forma non potest separari a materia in qua est, nisi sit anima, sed facit sibi simile in secundam partem,et sic ultra. Et ideo non est motus localis, sed est generatio multiplicata per diversas partes medii; […]’. Bridges (ed.), II, 5.9.4.71-72. Bacon also expounds on species in De multiplicatione specierum: ibid., II, 1.3.433-38.
36 Lindberg, Theories, p. 114.
possibility of the reverse: an object’s possession of some form of ‘soul’, a
‘forma’ separate from its matter.
Returning to Bacon’s text, the perspectivist proclaims that various terms used by fellow optical theorists are actually synonymous with the term
‘species’, including ‘lumen’, ‘idolum’, ‘phantasma’, ‘simulacrum’, ‘forma’, ‘in-tentio’, ‘similitudo agentis’, ‘umbra philosophorum’, ‘virtus’, ‘impressio’, and
‘passio’.37 When Alhazen uses the term ‘forma’, Aristotle employs ‘idolum’, or Avicenna refers to ‘lux’ in their theories, the scholars actually mean ‘species’, Bacon maintains. This systematic relabelling permits Bacon to assert that all other perspectivists are in agreement with his own theories.38 According to Bacon, the visual species is, in fact, only one form of species, and the term denotes, more generally, the ‘effect of an agent’:
Every efficient cause acts through its own power, which it exercises on the adjacent matter, as the light [lux] of the sun exercises its power on the air (which power is light [lumen] diffused through the whole world from the solar light [lux]). And this power is called ‘likeness’, ‘image’, and
‘species’ and is designated by many other names, and it is produced both by substance and by accident, spiritual and corporeal. […] This species produces every action in the world, for it acts on sense, on the intellect, and on all matter of the world for the generation of things.39
Bacon’s study of visual species, then, is a worthwhile investigation into the underlying mechanics of the universe. An analysis of visual species will contribute significantly to the comprehension of the behaviour of other species, which govern all aspects of the world.
Although Bacon argues that all perspectivists are essentially in
Although Bacon argues that all perspectivists are essentially in