Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult
- 2 Satire Sacred and Profane
- 3 Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
- 4 The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
- Conclusion
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult
- 2 Satire Sacred and Profane
- 3 Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
- 4 The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract:
The introduction provides chapter summaries and a critical overview of scholarship of St. Joseph in art historical, literary, and religious studies. These have offered two very different and conflicting interpretations with respect to the presence and role of humor in religious art and practice, both of which perceive humor as the antithesis to ‘high’ veneration and theology – a notion that the book challenges. The introduction also provides the methodological framework behind the book's goal: to move beyond humor's relegation to the margins of medieval art, or to the profane arts alone, revealing the centrality and functions of humor and satire in altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.
Key Words: Saint Joseph, humor, veneration, theology, devotional art
A saint rife with paradox, and the seemingly antithetical combination of satire and devotion, guides this study of humor in devotional and ecclesiastical art made between c. 1300 and 1550. Frequently the butt of medieval jokes as the quintessential cuckold, yet simultaneously admired for his familial piety, Joseph of Nazareth became a venerated figure made powerful not merely by the endorsement of the Church, but equally, rendered potent by the humor integral to the saint in popular thought. From the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, depictions of Joseph in various media attest to the humorous and bawdy as inextricable facets of the saint's cult, even as he came to be taken more seriously as an object of devotion. Relying on extant plays, legends, tales, hymns, devotional manuals, jokes, and rhetorical theories of humor, as well as satirical paintings and prints, the following chapters explore the beneficial role of what could be called devotional humor in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in Germany, the Low Countries, eastern France, and northern Italy. In this regard, they reconcile two strands of interpretation that have polarized the saint into distinct early and late manifestations, one comical and derogatory, and the other sanctified and idealized.
Scholarship on St. Joseph's pre-Reformation representation has offered two very different and conflicting interpretations with respect to humor.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300–1550 , pp. 15 - 36Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019