A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet

Synopsis

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastical world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. We can almost hear the clock sound from within a glass castle, taste the fire-breathing roast boar, and smell the rose water cascading in a miniature fountain. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among artists in many fields, as well as the participation of the audience. "A Feast for the Eyes"is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christina Normore draws on an array of artworks, archival documents, chroniclers accounts, and cookbooks to re-create these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which banquets were staged. Feast participants, she shows, developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment. Challenging modern assumptions about the nature of artistic production and reception, "A Feast for the Eyes"yields fresh insight into the long history of multimedia work and the complex relationships between spectacle and spectators. "

Copyright:

2015

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780226242347

Publisher:

The University of Chicago Press

Date of Addition:

11/05/15

Copyrighted By:

The University of Chicago Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Cooking, Food and Wine, Religion and Spirituality, Social Studies

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.