Talking Images and Artefacts in the Medieval World: An Introduction
Talking Images and Artefacts in the Medieval World: An Introduction

Summary/Abstract: To speak of ‘talking images’ in the medieval world is not to introduce a modern metaphor. Within medieval churches, images and relics were encountered as presences activated in ritual use rather than observed through detached contemplation. Their efficacy lay in the ways they were positioned, approached and brought into practice. The recognition of this dimension owes much to the work of scholars who have reconsidered the status of the image in premodern Christianity. Hans Belting’s reflections on image and cult shifted attention from representation to presence, emphasising that devotional images functioned within specific ritual and communal contexts. 1 Building on such perspectives, Cynthia Hahn has shown that reliquaries did not simply display relics or confirm their contents. Their forms operated through metaphor and ritual use, allowing container and fragment to operate together without coinciding. Michael Camille drew attention to how medieval visual culture could render speech perceptible without reducing it to written transcription. In contexts shaped by vocal reading and liturgical recitation, gesture and inscription not only illustrated written words but helped to make speech visible. More recently, Matthew Shoaf ’s analysis of sculpted reliefs at Orvieto Cathedral has extended this line of inquiry. Open mouths, extended gestures and the framing of scenes produced a heightened sense of vocal immediacy that exceeded the literal content of any inscription.

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