Vision Beyond Measure: The Threshold of Iacopone’s Bedroom

Abstract

There is a sense in which medieval visionary literature offers its readers a lesson in visual hyperbole: in these texts one does not just see; one pushes vision to its breaking point. In Julian of Norwich’s writings, for example, it is a question of a dialectic of the seen and the hidden, intensified by meditation: “At one time,” she writes, early in her Revelation, “I saw how halfe the face, begyning at the ere, overrede [overrode, overspread] with drie blode til it beclosid to the mid face, and after that, the tuther halfe beclosyd on the same wise.”¹ This chapter argues that—for a tradition of medieval piety that extends from Julian’s lexicon of enclosure perhaps as far back as Augustine, whose epiphany with Monica takes place, after all, precisely at the window of a villa—a mode of spatial intensification might accompany this kind of sensory intensification. More specifically, the following pages attempt to delineate the contribution of the Italian poet Iacopone da Todi (d. 1306) to a spatial optics that would also be a kind of poetics. That vision is, for certain modes of medieval devotion, not necessarily discrete from the other senses, especially touch, has been eloquently argued in a recent book by John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. Their claims, made vis-à-vis Aquinas, will haunt this chapter as it addresses to what extent sensation, in the lyrics of this radical Franciscan, might participate (never immanently but analogically) in transcendence, and to what extent this participation might be figured in terms of space.²