Short description:

Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde examines the cross-media nature of this Arthurian story while also addressing its historical context and medium.

Long description:

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords.

The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates?the concepts of materiality and visuality?without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.

?The story of Tristan and Isolde held a special fascination for people all over Western Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and this fascination is documented in numerous works of literature as well as pictures and pictorial narratives. Yet although this extensive corpus has been studied by literary scholars on the one hand and by art historians on the other, there has not been much dialogue between the two disciplines. . . . Hence the rationale for this volume, which brings together twelve contributions by experts from art history and literary studies with the aim of stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue that, it is hoped, will lead to a keener awareness of the relations between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture.? ?Speculum