Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
5 - Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs.
W. J. T. MitchellAs we saw in the last chapter, for John Capgrave, images are both powerful and dangerous insofar as they incarnate cultural memory. Yet for Capgrave's contemporary, Reginald Pecock (c. 1392–1460), it is precisely the corporate efficacy, physicality, and accessibility of images that validate their continued use and distinguish them from books. In his long defense of contemporary ecclesiastical structures and practices, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (c. 1449), Pecock insists that the stories of saints are remembered more easily “by siȝt, than by the heering of othere mennys reding or bi heering of his owne reding.” Just as sight impresses images upon the viewer's mind more immediately than reading a book, ritual and physical engagement embodies a lesson and facilitates the process of memory-making. Such is the case with the life of Saint Katherine:
Whanne the dai of Seint Kateryn schal be come, marke who so wole in his mynde alle the bokis whiche ben in Londoun writun upon Seint Kateryn's lijf and passiouns, and y dare weel seie that thouз ther were x. thousind mo bokis writun in Londoun in thilk day of the same Seintis lijf and passioun, thei schulden not so moche turne the citee into mynde of the holi famose lijf of Seint Kateryn and of her dignitee in which sche now is, as dooth in ech ȝeer the going of peple in pilgrimage to the College of Seint Kateryn bisidis London … Wherfore riȝt greet special commoditees and profitis into remembraunce making ymagis and pilgrimagis han and doon, whiche writingis not so han and doon.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England , pp. 155 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010