Abstract
The environmental sense of text as image evoked by the color-term glas requires further examining of the Otherworld trope in relation to early medieval visual theory. The “problem” of landscape in Táin Bó Cúailnge and its context in the Ulster cycle provides a place to start. The Celticist Francesco Benozzo notes that Táin Bó Cúailnge offers “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention.” But the Táin’s allusive landscape also has been highlighted by an able translator, Thomas Kinsella (among many others), for showcasing topography, “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature.” While the Táin in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces, and terrain on Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ. To read the Táin as a literary landscape that in a modern sense is “not there” but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography is necessarily to consider its context in the Ulster Cycle and related stories in the Mythological Cycle, all featuring landscape in which otherworldly and human realms interweave with natural topography. The role of such landscape echoes textually Ernst Gombrich’s view of the function of colors in visual art as Benozzo restates it, métonymic in at once being part of reality and representing it,3 but with words in topography taking the place of colors in images. The landscape of the Táín as textual image related to environment subverts Augustine’s paralleling and hierarchizing of reading over viewing, so influential in the West.4
Metonymy is (no pun intended) all over the place.
—Eelco Runia, “Presence”
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Notes
For recent discussion on the river episode mentioned in the caption for the figure at die start of the chapter, however, see Joseph F. Nagy, “The Rising of the Cronn River in the Tain B6 Cüailgne,” in Celtica Helsingiensia. Proceedings from a Symposium on Celtic Studies, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 107, ed. Anders Ahlqvist et al. (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996), pp. 129–48. Thanks to Phillip Bernhardt-House for this reference.
Francesco Benozzo, Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature (Aberystwyui, UK: Celtic Studies Publications, 2004), pp. 145–46.
Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Tain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xiii.
Benozzo, Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature, p. 185. Metonymy retains paradoxical identification, an intertwining of discontinuity and continuity, Eelco Runia notes in “Presence,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 1 [1-29]. Early medieval Christian iconography provides a model for “framing” the visual experience of such metonymy across boundaries of image and word, in a way that emphasizes Runia’s “absence of presence” with a “partial but meaningful presence” nonetheless [Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock, Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 2).
Gregory Toner, “The Ulster Cycle: Historiography or Fiction?,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 40 (2000): 6
Ann Dooley provides a very helpful analysis of patterning of place names on the cattle raid, noting difficulties with them, particularly in the Second Recension, in which they seem to become more detached from topography (though the raid in both main recensions still plays out on a fantasy-history landscape of the midlands, Ulster borderlands, and the Cooley peninsula). See Dooley, Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Tain Bo Cuailgne (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 45–47
T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 471.
Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, Theory, Culture & Society (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), pp. 84–86.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9–10.
See Tomás É Cathasaigh, “The Rhetoric of Fingal Rónáin,” Celtica 17 (1985): 144
Anne Heinrichs, “‘Intertexture’ and its Functions in Early Written Sagas: A Stylistic Observation of Heiδarvíga saga, Reykdla saga and the Legendary Olafssaga,” Scandinavian Studies 48 (1976): 127
Peter Brown, review of Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 56
See Doris Edel, “The Táin Bó Cúailnge between orality and literacy,” in her The Celtic West and Europe, Studies in Celtic Literature and the Early Irish Church (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 218
Hildegard L.C. Tristram, “Latin and Latin Learning in the Táin Bó Cúailnge,” Zeitschrift für celûsche Philologie 49–50 (1997–98): 847–77
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), pp. 74–76.
Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Images: Expressions of Faith and Power,” in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1551), ed. Helen C. Evans (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 150
Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 136–137
Theories of optical extramission and intromission were often mixed and ill-defined; see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, The Chicago History of Science and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze, The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” both in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, Seeing as Others Sawf ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 143–68
James R. Payton, Jr., “John of Damascus on Human Cognition: An Element in His Apologetic for Icons,” Church History 65 (1996): 180–1
Jas Eisner, “Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Greco-Roman World,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, Seeing as Others Sawf ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 61
Hilary Richardson, “Visual Arts and Society,” in A New History of Ireland I, Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí É Cróinín (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 691
On monasticism as rhetoric see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi, third edn (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982)
Conrad Leyser, “Lectio Divina, Oratio Pura: Rhetoric and the Techniques of Asceticism in the Conferences of John Cassian,” in Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento, ed. Giulia Barone, Marina Caffiero, and Francesco Scorza Barcellona (Torino, Italy: Rosenberg and Salles, 1994), pp. 79–105.
Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Harry Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
James H. Billington, The Face of Russia (New York: TV Books, 1999), p. 50.
Kathleen Hughes, “The Golden Age of Early Christian Ireland,” in The Course of Irish History, ed. T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin, rev. edn (Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart, 1995), pp. 76–90
Paul the Silentiary, Description of Hagia Sophia, 11. 617–46, trans. Cyril Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 85–86.
James Trilling, “The Image Not Made by Hands and the Byzantine Way of Seeing,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium held at the Bibliotecha Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1998, Villa Spelman Colloquia 6 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), pp. 125–26 [109–27]. Vincent Scully [in Architectural, the Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991)]
“The Meaning and Language of Icons,” in Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimie’s Seminary Press, 1999), pp. 23–50
Barbara Raw, Trinity and Incarnation in Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 92
Conlationes 1.15; translation from G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, The Philokalia, the Complete Text Compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, 4 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 1: 96–97
Conlationes X.3 and 10.1-3; trans. Ramsey, Conferences, pp. 372–73, 378–79; Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy, The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 66
Such apophatic metonymy also is equivalent rhetorically to the mystagogy that Edouard Je aune au has described as a master trope in Eriguena’s philosophical view of art as initiation into mystery. That view emerges from St. Paul’s description of in car national mimesis, I Cor. 11.1 and Eph. 5.1 [“De l’art comme mystagogie (Le Jugement dernier vu par Èrigène),” in De l’art comme mystagogie. Judgement dernier et des fins dernières à l’époque gouiique; actes du colloque de la Fondation Hardt tenu à Genève du 13 au 16 février 1994, éd. Yves Christe (Poitiers: Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, 1996), pp. 1–8]. Jeaneau relates Eriugena’s views to the illustrations of the Codex Aureus of Saint-Emmeram, which Michel Herren in turn has sought to relate to the Palatine Church of St. Mary at Compiêgne [“Eriugena’s ‘Aulae Sidereae’ the ‘Codex Aureus,’ and die Palatine Church of St. Mary at Compiêgne,” Studi Medievali 28(2) (December 1987): 593–608]. The codex features in one famous illustration the Lamb of God, a type of nonhuman symbolism for Christ condemned by the Quinisextum Constantinopolitan synod. Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconographie Controversy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953): 19
On the emphasis on experiential versus visionary in the Macarian brand of apophatic asceticism, see George A. Maloney, ed., Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 2.
Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London: Athlone Press, 1970), p. 33.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 164
Julia Kristeva, “Holbein’s Dead Christ,” in Black Sun, Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 132
Thomas O’Loughlin, “The Tombs of the Saints: Their Significance for Adomnan,” in Studies in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars, ed. John Carey, Maire Herbert, and Pádraig É Riain (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 3
Thomas O’Loughlin, “The Exegetical Purpose of Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 24 (Winter 1992): 40
Lisa M. Bitel, “Ekphrasis at Kildare: The Imaginative Architecture of a Seventh-Century Hagiographer,” Speculum 79 (2004): 605–27
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© 2009 Alfred K. Siewers
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Siewers, A.K. (2009). A Cosmic Imaginarium. In: Strange Beauty. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100527_5
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