Download PDF | Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak_ Martha Dana Rust - Faces of Charisma_ Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West-Brill (2018).
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List of Contributors
Joseph Salvatore Ackley Ph.D. (2014), is Term Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He researches and publishes on medieval metalwork, late medieval sculpture, the medieval church treasury, and broader questions of material, medium, and medieval strategies of accessing the divine.
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak isa Professor of History at New York University (NYU). Her most recent research on seals, signing practices, and imagistic scripts has appeared in a monograph When Ego was Imago. Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2011) and a co-edited volume (with Jefrey Hamburger), Sign and Design. Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2016).
Paul Binski is Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Cambridge University, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
Paroma Chatterjee is associate professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include the art of Byzantium, cultural relations between Byzantium and the Latin West, and medieval image theory, among others. Her current book project investigates the role of sculpture in the Byzantine literary and artistic imagination.
Andrey Egorov Ph.D. (1984), Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, is Head of Research Department and exhibition curator at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMaA). His interests range from Late Medieval visual culture to contemporary artistic practices, with a focus on political iconography, iconoclasm and image theory.
Erik Gustafson Ph.D. (2012) is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at George Mason University. He has published many articles on medieval architectural culture, and is completing a monograph entitled Building Franciscanism: Space, Tradition, and Devotion in Medieval Tuscany.
Duncan Hardy D.Phil. (2015), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Central Florida and a Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the political and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Central Europe. His first monograph, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346-1521, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
C. Stephen Jaeger is professor emeritus of German, Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. He is the author of Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012).
Jacqueline E. Jung
Ph.D. (2002) is Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her book The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2013) received the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. She has published widely on the kinetic and emotive aspects of Gothic sculpture, and is exploring these issues further in a new book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Lynsey McCulloch Ph.D. (2010), is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Coventry University. She has published widely on the relationship between literature and other arts, and is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
Gavin T. Richardson Ph.D. (1998), is Professor of English at Union University. He has published widely on classical and medieval subjects, with current work treating male revenge fantasy and Lollard antipapal polemic.
Andrew J. Romig is Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He has published several articles on Carolingian cultural history along with his monograph, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Martino Rossi Monti Ph.D. (2007) is research associate at the Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb (Croatia). He has published a book entitled I/ cielo in terra. La grazia fra teologia ed estetica (Torino: Utet, 2008), and essays on the Platonic tradition, the problem of evil and violence, and the physiognomical tradition.
Martha D. Rust is an Associate professor of English at New York University, specializing in latemedieval English literature and manuscript culture. The author of Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (Palgrave, 2007), her current book project, Item: Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late-Medieval England theorizes the list as a device that enables thinking in a variety of modes.
Faces and Surfaces of Charisma: An Introductory Essay
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Martha D. Rust
The idea for a volume entitled Faces of Charisma emerged from a conference that took place at New York University’s Medieval and Renaissance Center in April 2013. The impetus for the conference was provided by C. Stephen Jaeger’s recently published book, Enchantment: Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West.| A measure of the excitement the conference generated was the early emergence — already during the afternoon coffee break — of a conviction that the exploration of charisma that had begun that day in the form of 20-minute papers merited enlargement and dissemination in the form of a book. The present volume includes most of the papers presented at the conference, which have been subsequently expanded into chapters, as well as a number of essays written specifically for inclusion herein.
Midway through his introduction to Enchantment, Jaeger makes an arresting claim: “The terms ‘charisma,’ ‘aura, and ‘enchantment’ can be profitably rehabilitated as critical concepts to analyze art, literature, and films, their aesthetics, their impact on the audience, and the psychology of both star and fan.”* On its face this assertion might seem illogical given these terms’ usual referents: charisma, a quality of exceptional people; aura, a quality of unique things and places; enchantment, a state of mind. As Jaeger himself brilliantly demonstrates, however, a recognition of the symptoms of these phenomena together with the conditions that give rise to them affords a critic the means to study certain effects of art that otherwise elude analysis, remaining in the realms of faith, illusion, or subjectivity. Using the concept of charisma in particular, the critic is able to delineate that aspect of a life, a text, or an artifact that seems at once the most real and most ineffable to its viewers. Thus, Jaeger conceives of charisma as a quality that may apply to art as well as to person.
His conception of charismatic art springs from the category-expanding insight that charisma of person is itself a work of art since, as with a work of art, it entails representation.’ To study charisma is therefore to study representation, and to study charismatic art, as Jaeger’s work has shown, is to experiment with a theory of representation that is hospitable to the possibility of nothing less than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experience. The essays in this volume take up Jaeger’s invitation to experiment, exploring the relationship between artifact and person and between art and charisma from the perspectives of premodern history, art, and literature. Some contributions substantiate the concept of charismatic art, others test its possibilities, still others challenge its premises; all found inspiration in Jaeger’s gripping exposition.
We begin our introduction with a historiographic survey that situates Jaeger’s notion of charismatic art within the several intellectual traditions from which it draws: histories of the concepts of personal charisma, of the sublime, and of aura. Having considered the theoretical foundations for Jaeger’s charisma of art, we proceed to an analytical discussion of the three dimensions that underlie our contributors’ own approaches to charismatic art: audiences, effects, and operative modalities.
In this triadic formation, the vectors of charisma point in many directions: not only to and from the human faces that most works of charismatic art feature but also from and to a work of art’s materials, the play of light, for instance, on the surface of a gilded sculpture. In this way, these analyses raise two related questions pertaining to Jaeger’s insistence on an anthropocentric source in charismatic art: can the humanness of charisma as it is traditionally understood be imputed to things, and should the exclusivity of an anthropocentric origin in matters charismatic be challenged? Parsing this latter point, further queries emerge: Is representation of a human being a prerequisite for art to act charismatically? And if so, how mimetic does such representation need to be? Does cultural contingency play a part in determining whether or not a work of art will be perceived by viewers as charismatic, or are such responses a matter of our species’s neurobiological wiring, our tendency to see sentient life in things, or as Stewart Guthrie famously put it, to see faces in clouds?* What is the role of artistic medium and technology in creating charismatic effects? These and other concerns animate the essays gathered in this volume.
From Charisma of Person to Charisma of Art, Via the Sublime and the Aura
Max Weber to C. Stephen Jaeger: From Charisma of Person to Charisma of Art
In contemporary English usage, the word charisma is the one to reach for when we want to describe an attractive yet ineffable quality of a person, whether a movie star, a politician, a Tv newscaster, a religious figure, or even an attractive someone, spotted across a crowded room. An elusive charm, an enigmatic magnetism, an indefinable sparkle, charisma is sometimes described as the “X-factor,” a term that captures well the essence of this quality as a personal “something” that defies precise description.> Anthropologist Charles Lindholm observes that in this popular notion of it, charisma is a quality that certain individuals are perceived “to have”; that is, this X-factor is thought to “exist” in an individual in the same way “height or eye color exist,” Frank Sinatra’s blue eyes or Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s seven-foot-two-inch stature, for instance.
As prevalent as it has become as a term for such a winning trait, the word charisma is barely attested in English before the 1940s. Tellingly, the abrupt upswing in its appearance in print in that decade (see fig. 0.1) corresponds with the publication of the first English translations of the work of Max Weber. Indeed, a spike in the use of the term charisma in 1947 coincides precisely with the publication of A.M. Henderson and T. Parsons’s English translation of Weber's Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922), which contains his most extensive discussion of the concept.” Economy and Society also contains what is generally considered Weber’s most explicit definition of charisma, which appears in the course of his explication of three kinds of leadership:
The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exem-plary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.®
Within a few paragraphs of this definition, Weber expands upon it by describing the role of those by whom the charismatic leader “is treated” as such: “the recognition on the part of those subject to authority is decisive for the validity of charisma.” This all-important recognition, Weber further stipulates, “is a matter of complete personal devotion to the possessor of the quality, arising out of enthusiasm, or of despair and hope.”®
Two aspects of Weber’s definition of charisma are worth noting as starting points for establishing the theoretical basis for a charisma of art as Jaeger defines it: that is, as “a quality of works of art” that causes a range of inspiring, transformative, and elevating effects in viewers.!° First, we can discern that since its debut as a sociological term in the 1940s, the word charisma has acquired a sense in popular culture that deviates significantly from Weber's definition, for it is clear that the “certain quality” indicated in Weber’s formulation is of a different order from such genetically determined features as height or eye color. Moreover, even though Weber ascribes that inner quality — be it supernatural, superhuman, or otherwise exceptional — to an individual person, he locates the crucial power of determining its meaning in the eye of the beholder.
Whatever mysterious quality it is that sets a person apart from the crowd, the term charisma may be applied to it only insofar as it causes others to consider him or her extraordinary. In other words, in its essence, Weber’s charisma of person is less personal than interpersonal, less about an individual than about a relationship." Given that this charismatic relationship is brought into being by devotees’ assigning meaning to a personal quality, it follows that charisma of person may be understood to spring from processes of signification, if only on the relatively unconscious level of stimulus and response, and to exist not solely within the charismatic individual but rather as a kind of magnetic field that operates between him and the followers he attracts. In this way, Weber’s definition of charisma — the very locus classicus of the modern idea of charisma of person — already admits of its possible application to art, for interaction with a work of art is also a matter of stimulus and response, and the sensory stimuli a work presents to a viewer may also arouse a sense of devotion that may be experienced as an effect of a special quality of the work. Broaching the possibility of such an alternative use of the term charisma brings us to the second noteworthy aspect of Weber's definition: its self-consciously ad hoc nature. Opening with the declaration “the term ‘charisma’ will be applied,” Weber clearly signals his act of appropriating for the purposes of sociological analysis a term with a broader range of senses than the specific phenomenon that he goes on, ever so influentially, to define as charisma.
With Weber’s deed of disciplinary term-setting in mind, we may quickly recognize Jaeger’s parallel act when, in the opening pages of Enchantment, he declares that his study will deal with a subcategory of the sublime “which J will call ‘charismatic art.” Just as Jaeger implicitly acknowledges his debt to Weber in this echoing phrase (and explicitly elsewhere in the book), Weber also acknowledges the source from which he drew in turning the word charisma to his own use. In Economy and Society he notes, “[t]he concept of ‘charisma’ (‘the gift of grace’) is taken from the vocabulary of early Christianity. For the Christian hierocracy Rudolf Sohm, in his Kirchenrecht, was the first to clarify the substance of the concept.”3 A look at Sohm’s writing on charisma will allow us to situate both Weber’s and Jaeger’s concepts of charisma in the context of its usage in the New Testament, where we will discover the origins of Weber's interpersonal charisma as well as key features of Jaeger’s charisma of art: in particular, its experiential and medial aspects. Following our discussion of the legacy of Sohm in both Weber and Jaeger, we will turn to more recent writing on charisma in order to provide a context for another major factor in Jaeger’s concept of the charisma of art: that is, its precondition in the needs and aspirations of a work of art’s audience and its stimulation of an audience's imagination.
While Weber's definitive statements on charisma make their first appearances in Economy and Society, his first use of the word appears in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, 1904-05). Speaking of the Zinzendorf branch of Pietism, he remarks that it “glorified the loyal worker who did not seek acquisition, but lived according to the apostolic model, and was thus endowed with the charisma of the disciples.”!* Reading this remark with our post-Weberian understanding of charisma in mind, it may strike us as odd that a lowly “loyal worker” would have even a hint of it, accustomed as we are to thinking of charisma as a quality that sets a person above and apart from such anonymous and subservient figures. As John Potts explains, Weber’s evocation of the Christian disciples’ charisma in this remark reflects his study of Sohm’s Outlines of Church History (Kirchengeschichte im Grundriss, 1894) and, in particular, its portrayal of the government of the early Christian community. In Sohm’s account, the primitive church was understood to be governed by Christ alone, his followers knit together “solely through the gifts of grace (yapicuata, charismata,) given by Him.
For this reason, the Greek word ecclesia was well suited to the early church, for it was an assembly of people “ruled, not by man’s word, but by the Word of God.”!® As Paul stresses in his first letter to the Corinthians, each member of the ecclesia has his own gift, and though these gifts are various, the same spirit works in them all, for the good of all: “Now there are a variety of gifts (yapicudtwy), but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”!” In the light of Paul’s use of the word charisma (yapigua), we can see that Weber’s “loyal worker” does not “seek acquisition” because he is already “endowed.” He sees his work as an expression of his charisma: that is to say, his God-given gift, or, as Weber puts it elsewhere, his “life purpose willed by God.”!8
In addition, we can see in Paul’s writing that the charismata — the gifts of grace — constitute the medium through which the Spirit works. Like so many nodes in a charged network, the gifts establish the ecclesia as a gathering capable of holding and transmitting the beneficial charge of the Spirit, a gathering in which the difference between human and divine is thus at least partially dissolved. Writing at quite a different time and on a rather different topic, Jaeger describes the charisma of art in similar terms: that is, as a “medium” in which “opposites coalesce.’ He writes, “[t]he dichotomies of real and illusion, life and art, so fundamental to the cultic experience of art in the West, are resolved in the medium of charisma.”!’ And just as the gifts of grace sustain an elevating current in the early Christian community, a work of art, according to Jaeger, may “operate on the viewer” in such a way that “you live briefly in its field of forces.’ Beyond touching on the medial aspect of charisma, Jaeger’s use of the second-person in “you live” serves to bring out the experiential quality of charisma, a quality that is also implicit in Weber’s description above of the loyal worker who “lived according to the [charismatic] apostolic model,” which was so rewarding in itself as to preclude acquisitive seeking.
Weber clearly understands the Pauline sense of charisma as a divinely given aptitude that contributes to group cohesion and well-being; how does he arrive at an idea of it as a specific aptitude for leadership and one, moreover, that sets a person above his community? A prompt for this shift may also be detected in the writings of Sohm. While stressing how egalitarian the early church was, Sohm also speaks of the “divinely gifted teacher,’ an individual who would appear to rank just below the apostles and prophets, according to 1 Corinthians 12:28: “And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers.
The ecclesia “obeys” the words of the gifted teacher, Sohm asserts, “only if, and so far as, it recognizes therein the Word of God.”?! In this description of the divinely gifted teacher, we can see a prototype of Weber's charismatic leader. Just as Sohm’s “gifted” — that is, charismatic — teacher elicits obedience to the extent that church members recognize his giftedness — in this case, his capacity to convey the Word of God — so Weber's charismatic leader is only manifest as such to the extent that he attracts followers who recognize something in him that is extraordinary, which makes him worthy of their devotion. But where for Weber, charisma stems from “a quality of an individual personality”, for Sohm, it is a function of a person’s ability to convey God’s Word. On this aspect of Pauline charisma, New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn affirms Sohm resoundingly: charisma, he writes, “is not to be confused with human talent and natural ability”; instead, it is “typically an experience, an experience of something being accomplished through me.’2* Putting it in terms of our metaphor of energy transmission above, Sohm’s charismatic teacher has the “capacity” to be a conductor — or mediator — of a current that the community shares.?° By contrast, in the case of Weber’s charismatic leader, the current of energy flows to him, in the form of his followers’ adulation. Weber's charismatic leader is less a conductor than a magnet, as the popular notion of the “magnetism” of a charismatic person attests.
If Sohm and Weber part ways on the issue of where, exactly, charisma is located — whether in the charismatic person or in the charismatic community — Weber’s inheritors part ways with him on the issue of which comes first — or warrants the closest study — the charismatic individual or his followers, the magnet or the filings. Especially in work on charisma since the late 1960s, researchers in the fields of political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology all tend to focus on followers while characterizing the charismatic leader as an expression of those followers’ needs and aspirations, thus anticipating Jaeger’s assertion that charisma of person is a matter of representation.?4 In the vanguard of this new emphasis in the study of charisma were historian Robert C.
Tucker and social anthropologist Peter Worsley, whose independent publications in 1968 may be seen, in retrospect, as having set the research agenda for much of the study of charisma of person that has followed. In his publication, which appeared in a special issue of Daedalus devoted to the topic of leadership, Tucker argued that in order to understand the sway of charismatic leaders, “we must focus attention first upon the followers and their needs.”25 Worsley struck the same chord in his The Trumpet Shall Sound, adding that looking solely at the “personality” of a charismatic leader “distracts us” from [his] “social significance as a symbol, a catalyst, a message-bearer.’2 In this triadic description of the charismatic leader’s significance, Worsley captures well the complex dynamics of representation, stimulus and response, and energy transmission that we have already seen at work in the New Testament notion of charisma and, at least with respect to the stimulus and response mechanism, in Weber's concept of it as well. As we shall see, these processes of mediation are also central to the workings of Jaeger’s charisma of art.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, research on charisma took the idea of the charismatic person as a symbol and message-bearer further, in effect reversing its terms by arguing that both symbol and message are creations of the charismatic’s followers. Writing in 1973, psychologist Irvine Schiffer is already explaining that act of “creation” in terms of artistic production. The charismatic leader, Schiffer argues, is a product of a group’s “creative process of charismatic imaging,’ a process that culminates in the group’s “projecting [the charismatic image] outwards onto a suitable chosen object.’2” Even though Schiffer sees the group as the prime mover in the making of a charismatic figure, he still envisions a part for the charismatic himself to play: leader and follower alike, he contends, are “artists of sorts” participating “in an aesthetic illusion.”28
While Schiffer’s description of the charismatic phenomenon — with its references to imaging, artists, and aesthetic illusion — suggests a kinship between the creation of a charismatic person and the creation of a work of visual art, Pierre Bourdieu’s 1987 study of the charisma of prophets implies a likeness between charisma and the production of literary art. Akin to Sohm’s gifted teacher, Bourdieu’s prophet is charismatic by virtue of his “prophetic word.””9 But while the gifted teacher mediated the word of God, the prophet, as Bourdieu sees it, mediates the already present but inarticulate distress or longing of the people, people who become the prophet’s ardent followers precisely because of his ability to represent their feelings. Bourdieu describes this interaction as a semiotic process: the prophet “brings about, in both his discourse and his person, the meeting of a signifier and a pre-existing signified.”3° Expanding on Bourdieu, we might say that in signifying unspoken feelings and dreams, thereby arousing a devoted following, the charismatic prophet is like a poet, who, by presenting readers with a recognizable but previously unarticulated complex of sorrow or joy or desire, may leave them feeling not only “entranced,” as Shelley described the nightingale poet’s auditors, but also mystically allied with and grateful to the poet him or herself.#!
What are the preconditions of the creative acts Schiffer and Bourdieu describe? They, along with Tucker, Worsley, and other members of the “social construction of charisma school,” uphold Weber's view, quoted above, that followers cleave to a charismatic leader “out of enthusiasm, or of despair and hope.”? In this way, Tucker notes that a group’s “acute malaise” predisposes it to follow a “salvationist character,” and Bryan R. Wilson argues that the “growth of anxieties and the disruption of normal life” create a “demand” that is met by a person of “supposed extraordinary supernatural power.’3? These and other late 20th-century scholars also follow Weber in appreciating that a group's distress may take many forms; Weber lists “psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, [and] political.’3* Tucker’s more concrete list runs from such threats to bodily integrity as “persecution, catastrophes (for example, famine, drought)” to threats to cultural identity such as “the feelings of oppression in peoples ruled by foreigners.’ On the topic of identity, developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson counts living in an “identity vacuum” as a contributor to the condition of being “charisma hungry.”3 In speaking of such a range of preconditions, these writers also support Weber’s contention that charisma is a phenomenon related to “[a]ll extraordinary needs, i.e. those which transcend the sphere of everyday economic routines.”>” Such “extraordinary needs” lead to Wilson’s “demand” for the charismatic leader, to Erikson’s “charisma hunger,” and to Schiffer’s “creative process of charismatic imaging”: all activities that also uphold Weber’s view that charisma is “the specifically creative revolutionary force of history.’38
To the extent that charisma is a creative force, it is arguably also a force that draws upon our faculty of imagination, and here our survey of the reception of Weber meets up with Jaeger, who writes that one of the effects of charisma of person is that it stimulates the imagination.*9 His conception of the charisma of art also entails the activation of viewers’ imaginations as it may not only respond to a viewer’s enthusiasm, despair, or hope but also create visions of an extraordinary, heightened level of existence. Reference to such elevating and transporting visions, however, does not appear in the history of the concept of charisma; to place that aspect of Jaeger’s charisma of art in its larger context, we must turn to the history of the sublime, for Weber’s writings, however influential, do not exhaust the sources upon which Jaeger has built his own approach to charisma. In fact, he may be the first scholar to integrate the phenomena of the sublime, charisma, and the aura.*9
The Sublime, Charisma, Aura Jaeger understands charisma to be a subcategory of the sublime, but embedding medieval charisma within the sublime is an interpretative move that is beset with challenges. The sublime, a high rhetorical and literary style cultivated in antiquity, was specifically examined in a 1st- or 3rd-century CE unfinished treatise, On Sublimity (Tlept tipous, Peri Hupsous).*! Written in Greek and attributed to the rhetorician Longinus, this treatise was unknown in western Europe until the 16th century. During the 18th century, modern interpretations of Longinus transformed his sublime (Aupsos) into an influential critical concept in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy.*? Perhaps paralleling the historical diffusion of Longinus’s disquisition, modern scholarship on the Middle Ages has tended to be equivocal about the question of the sublime, often concluding that its apparent absence in medieval culture is in character with the alleged mediocrity of the period.*? The revivification of a medieval sublime by Jaeger is integral to his conception of charismatic art.44
Jaeger’s approach to the sublime claims roots in Longinus, but a Longinus interpreted by a historiography that tends to downplay the Peri Hupsous’s status as a technical treatise for teaching the sublime style, rather considering the work to be an investigation of the sublime as a transcendent quality present in writing.*° This shift of emphasis, from the technical brilliance of'a sublime text to the sublimity encountered in written discourse originated with Nicolas Boileau’s French translation, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, traduit du grec de Longin (1674). Boileau transformed Longinus’s sublime style, which belonged to language as an objective quality of discourse, into the sublime, conceived as an independent transcendent essence, expressed in and through language to be sure, but expressible by other arts as well.*® Boileau’s redefinition of the sublime was immensely influential and, relayed by the codifications of Edmund Burke and Kant, still carries much weight in current scholarship as an aesthetic concept associated with a particular experience of art, nature, and the self.4” Boileau’s neologism, however hermeneutically fruitful, nevertheless rests upon a reading of Longinus that remains controversial to this day.4* Interpretation of the Peri Hupsous is complicated: the surviving treatise is fragmentary, and the attribution to Longinus, though widely accepted, is still debated. Furthermore, the treatise does not fit neatly within the framework of didactic technical writing on rhetoric,49 while Longinus propounded no straightforward definitions of the sublime, offering only oblique descriptions.°°
Scholars who resist the transformation of the ancient sublime into an essence, argue that for Longinus sublimity pertained to an elevated style of rhetorical expression and did not extend to the visual arts, which were to be judged by other criteria.5! They contend that Longinus situated his work within the tradition of didactic and technographic exposition of rhetoric; that he was primarily providing practical advice for achieving greatness in discourse so as to produce a specific type of literary effect.5? They emphasize his characterization of language as a light for thoughts and arguments.°? They quote his statements on the effectiveness of purely stylistic devices,*+ his examples of sentences that achieved sublimity purely through sentence-construction,®> and his allusions to the sublime as a discursive excellence that secured the everlasting fame of great writers while provoking an astonished and overwhelming ecstasy in the souls of experienced literary readers. Longinus’s sublime is more than convincing: it is compelling and irresistible.5° However it seems to require education, moral stature, and expertise on the part of all involved for its grandeur to have full effect. Yet Longinus did also posit the universal impact of genuine sublimity, universal consent being for him the ultimate marker of truth.5”
Scholars maintaining that the sublime in Peri Hupsous is rhetorical are aware that Longinus identified five sources for the magnification of style: “thought, emotion, figures of thought and speech, diction [...], and composition [...]5° Particularly with reference to thought as the first-mentioned factor for elevating speech, they stress that the great thought at work in Longinus’s literary sublime consists primarily in the ability to balance in discourse the selection, combination, representation, and amplification of components so that the resultant phrases will grip and transport their readers.59 For Longinus, “thought in discourse and its expression are for the most part mutually implicated.”®° He even questioned whether expression devoid of great thought could achieve sublimity and concluded his consideration of Demosthenes’s Marathon Oath with an assertion that in this text no thought could have achieved sublimity independently of expression.©
It is from Longinus’s list of the five sources of sublimity that many interpreters, in the wake of Boileau, have come to consider that his Peri Hupsous was not about a category of style but concerned with transcendence instead.® Since Peri Hupsous shows Neoplatonist tendencies and discusses the sublime as a human desire to reach “near to the greatness of the mind of God,’® they raise this aspiration for greatest things to the status of a sine qua non condition for sublimity,®* thus situating both the modes (high-mindedness, great thought, noble passions) and the effects (ecstasy, self-transcendence) of the sublime in the subject. This notion of the sublime thus originates in the subjectivity of the great, and affects the subjectivity of its audience directly. No longer a dynamic logic of expression that sets forces into motion,® the sublime here becomes an essential component of style, a revelation of a transcendental thought or being which, animating representation, produces rapturous emotion. Art discloses, in a flash of epiphany, that grandeur that imprints its sublime quality.°° From having been understood as a powerful capacity of expression,®’ the sublime comes to be judged primarily by its effects within texts and on readers, as if its own reality were an ideal, not of this world.
Interpretations of the Peri Hupsous’s legacy, thus, have been divided about the very nature of hupsos — whether it is a feature of rhetoric, or an un-locatable force — and about the degree to which subjectivity or craft, nature or art, may spark a sublime experience. Such interpretations are nevertheless unanimous in agreeing that the sublime produces elation, inspiration, transportation, and self-transcendence in beholders.
The philosophical and Neoplatonic Longinus has appeal for medievalists. His sublime condones religious transcendence as well as a belief in humankind’s natural vocation to transcend sensible limits. It also implied the reality of the lofty powers (both divine and human) operating through representational media capable of generating transformative experiences of the grand, the marvelous, and the supernatural.®* Such a sublime rendered sublime; it was an intersubjective dynamic that communicated high-mindedness and was therefore also didactic.®
In surveying this theoretical history of the sublime within which Jaeger has developed his reading of Longinus’s hupsos, it becomes apparent that Boileau’s realist and philosophical reading readily accommodates medieval understandings and experiences of grandeur, wonder, reality, pedagogy, subjectivity, and religious rapture. One may indeed wonder if Boileau’s reading of the sublime might not in fact have been informed by an understanding of such medieval experiences, which were not confined to texts alone but occurred in the natural and artifactual world.’”° This possibility, which would argue in favor of a medieval contribution to a post-Longinian understanding of the sublime,” becomes more convincing if the Peri Hupsous is read as a late antique rhetorical treatise. In that case, it is possible to trace, through 15th-century (and later) translations and interpretations of the Peri Hupsous, accretions that were generated by a medieval search for “the greatness of wonder,’”? which lifted experience beyond the sensible world.”?
Our interest in Jaeger’s treatment of the medieval sublime centers on his conflation of charisma with sublimity. Whereas the sublime has fairly recently entered the orbit of Jaeger’s scholarship, charisma has long been a focus of his attention. In his Envy of Angels (1994), he presented an uth-century culture of charisma centered on the cultured body as a work of art capable of inspiring emulation and of didactically forming disciplined bodies. Both personal and exemplary, such charisma was communicable and transformative of raw material into talented human beings.” Jaeger observed, however, that by the 12th century the charisma of human presence had become susceptible to textual representation, so that individuals were primed to realize that texts, and other lifeless forms of representation could, if skillfully crafted, both embody heroic and exceptional characters and compel admiration and imitation.
In Enchantment, Jaeger further investigates the themes he developed in The Envy of Angels, but on a wider cultural scale extending from the world of Homer to that of Woody Allen. His essay in the present volume compares a charismatic personality (St. Francis) capable of being textually represented, to charismatic texts that had been authored by a charismatic figure (St. Bernard) whose personal charisma failed to come through in stories written about him by others. Bernard’s own writings, however, are charismatic because, though not biographical, they present an unmediated encounter with his personality infused within his sublime style.”6 It is in such circumstances that the overlap of Longinus’s sublimity with Jaeger’s charisma would be expected, since Longinus’s sublime can affect audiences through such techniques as style. Jaeger, however, sees charisma as rooted in physical presence and character, and his concept of charisma encapsulates a sublime intrinsic to its effects, namely the ecstasy and alteration of the self. There might perhaps have been here an opportunity to consider how Longinus’s technical approach to sublimity of style would have helped to produce a theoretical underpinning for analyzing the effective expression of charisma by art.
Jaeger’s charismatic art is necessarily representational, rendered hypermimetic by the appeal of that which it represents, typically a charismatic person.” One is reminded of a late medieval conception of the term sublime as an alchemical operation that transformed a solid thing into a higher natural form.’§ As with alchemy, the operation of reciprocal mimesis — between living characters and their inanimate representations further capable of prompting imitation by entranced beholders — tends to remain mysterious in Jaeger’s Enchantment.
The primary title of his book, Enchantment, indeed suggests an exploration of charismatic art by consideration of the magical fascination it exerts upon viewers. The actual transfer of charisma from person to object is explained (away) by hyper-mimesis, while the artifactual embodiment of the living reality of a person is inferred from the fact that charismatic art blurs the line between empirical reality and fiction, producing the enchanting illusion of a higher yet attainable reality. Because of its primary situation in emotional reactions, charisma seems principally to be a matter of subjectivity, that of the charismatic persons whose self-presentation and performance aesthetically display their extraordinary characters, as well as that of their enchanted followers. Jaeger’s charisma of art seems fundamentally affective, measured by the beholder’s stirred perception and imagination. The ability of art to be charismatic, remains rooted in the subject’s acts of perception, and as such many additional factors that may contribute to the phenomenon remain to be explored.
Jaeger’s concept of the aura reinforces the primacy of a beholder’s subjectivity still further. Well aware of the decades of analysis devoted to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Jaeger follows another lead, Benjamin’s essay on Charles Baudelaire, to articulate his own definition of aura as a diaphanous halo of imaginative and commemorative associations an object triggers in the mind of a viewer.”9 As Jaeger has it, aura truly exists only in the mind of the beholder, who nevertheless projects back the aura onto the object of its activation, which is then perceived as auratic in and of itself.8° Aura thus overlaps with charisma, both being rooted in a subjective perception or collective consciousness, though without aura, there is no charisma.*! Aura therefore is the catalyst of charisma, a property held by a person, a style, or any medium and its entrancing recognition by an individual or group’s reception.®? A product of a viewer’s imagination, aura forms around all sorts of things; charisma, on the other hand, requires a person, who radiates toward an auratically susceptible beholder. Human bodies and subjectivity are critical to Jaeger’s conception of the integrated operation of aura, charisma, and enchantment.
Enchantment. Charismatic Art, Agency, Materiality In Enchantment, Jaeger considers the role of literary plots and artifacts for the construction and transmission of charisma, as well as the representational qualities of works of art which, magnifying the persons or worlds they represent, are capable of lifting their viewers beyond the natural human scope of their daily lives.% Jaeger’s commitment to reveal charisma’s aesthetic processes supports an argument about the power of art to aggrandize, to shape a hyper-reality, to impact human thought and behavior.** As such, Enchantment engages developing trends in art history that consider works of art as possessing qualities and capacities of living beings.
As we have seen, however, Jaeger eschews a systematic tracking of the means by which art produces charismatic effects, preferring to infer charisma from a work’s reception.®® Our volume seeks to counterbalance Jaeger’s primary focus on reaction by considering the performance of charismatic art via its artifactual modes. We do not posit qualities inherent in the artwork, but we do complicate its representational strategy by drawing attention to a network of interactions particularly among its physical components, such as technicity, composition, dazzling arrangement of materials, inner dynamics of form and matter, tendencies for particular situational locations, any active combination of which may enthrall.8” Artifacts create settings that trigger cognitive and emotional reactions to be sure, but they also generate direct physical engagement and stimulate practices that play an important role in transformative experiences. By examining both action and reaction as actions, we emphasize the multi-faceted agency of charismatic occurrences, querying the relationship between art and beholder so as to identify the multidirectional intermediary axes of relations between them.
Charisma, in this volume, transports and translates both artifacts and beholders;88 both reciprocally exercise agency and endure metamorphosis. Agency is traditionally considered an attribute of persons, and is controversially extended to the inanimate world.89 Yet when agency, defined as the capacity to cause, is distinguished from intentionality, a psychological human trait, it becomes possible to conceive that, in its extraordinary effect, charismatic art has agency, and not only as a mimetic mediator of personal charisma or a crystallizer of aura.9° It is to the study of the modalities of this particular agency that the present volume is devoted.
Charismatic Art
Audiences Jaeger, as we have seen, argues that evidence of a work’s widespread appeal validates its charisma. For this reason, his study of charisma of art entails first and foremost a study of viewers and of reception, and the authors of all the essays in this volume highlight the popular renown of their objects of study. Indeed, taken together, these objects make a hit parade of some of the most well-known works of medieval art, not to mention the human figures they represent: from Andrew Romig’s study of the biography of Charlemagne (d. 814) by Einhard (d. 840), to Jacqueline Jung’s study of the Wise and Foolish Virgins of Magdeburg Cathedral, to Andrey Egorov’s study of statues of the Nine Worthies, to name only three. What was it about these audiences that made them respond to these works in such numbers and what did they find in them that was so attractive? With respect to their characteristics and sensibilities, the audiences discussed in this volume vary widely: from Joseph Ackley’s church-goers dazzled by the sight of a winged altarpiece opened to reveal its gilded reliquaries to Lynsey McCulloch’s savvy theater audiences enjoying the enchantment of seeing through the enchantment of automata. Similarly, in examining such audience responses, our authors vary widely with respect to their views regarding where exactly, between art object and art viewer, the charisma of a work of art lies.
In Jaeger’s view, a state of need coupled with aspiration makes readers and viewers especially receptive to the spell of a work of art.°! In the essays collected here, this all-important mixture of psychological need and aspiration often pertains to matters of identity and recognition within a context of some form of redemption a work of art seems to proffer. The charisma of Eric Gustafson’s Franciscan space, for instance, is grounded in the laity’s yearning for a liturgical space that fostered intimacy with the praying friars and promoted a sense of spiritual ascent toward God. Paroma Chatterjee’s spellbindingclassicalstatues served to differentiate the educated elites of Constantinople, who perceived their wondrous sway, from the brutish Latin crusaders, who could not. In Gavin Richardson's psychoanalytical analysis, Thomas Hoccleve's Tale of Jonathas redeems Hoccleve (c.1368-1426) himself. The charismatic force here was self-reflexive: the poet responded to the tale’s allure in translating it and that very process transformed him into the recipient of the redemptive effect of what Jaeger calls “life writing.’9* In the examples of Andrew Romig’s Carolingian biography and Jaeger’s Franciscan hagiography, the projection of valor, beauty, virtue, and humility exerts a magnetic pull on beholders, persuading them to imitate the greater model. The brief openings of winged altarpieces described by Ackley offered tantalizing glimpses of elevated dimensions, thus fulfilling a desire both for extra-ordinary experience and a heightened sense of corporate identity.
To the extent that audiences respond to charismatic art on the basis of their hopes and dreams, hopes and dreams that may flame all the more brightly for having been awakened from states of privation, charismatic art entails certain forms of audience engagement and suppresses others. Audiences who respond to the charisma of a work of art tend to engage with its surface rather than its depth since they are drawn to imitate rather than to interpret it. In Enchantment, Jaeger writes that the question viewers put to this kind of art is not ‘What does it mean? but rather, ‘How must I act to be like Gawain, Tristan, or Lancelot, Jesus or Buddha?’ He insists that meaning, interpretation, and hermeneutics — the apparatus of commentary inherited from Western exegetical tradition — are minor in the face of charismatic force; they are an intellectual charade played behind or above the surface drama of authority and influence.9? Many authors in this volume have this kind of audience engagement in mind in discerning the aspects of a work of art that may be subject to charismatological analysis.°* In this way, Ackley suggests that the symbolic meanings of silver and gold notwithstanding, his audiences were likely moved primarily by these precious metals’ physical brightness. Similarly, Jung focuses on the facial expressions of the Wise and Foolish Virgins of Magdeburg as the sculptural innovation that would have made these Virgins charismatic compared to other instances of the motif that were only didactic. Again, Egorov argues that the gazes of viewers encountering the Nine Worthies of Mechelen would have been drawn less to their coats of arms, which register their historical significance, than to the gazes these figures seem to return.
Given an understanding of the charisma of art as an art of surfaces, one might conclude that an educated, interpretive approach to it would miss the point entirely, would break the spell. According to other authors in this volume, however, charisma of art is not so fragile. In Binski’s view, audiences did not respond to the crafted surfaces of Gothic art with either emotion or with a desire to emulate. From the reactions such art caused, such as the awakening of charitable impulses, Binski concludes that Gothic statuary operated at the intersection of pleasurable experience and meaning. Whereas for Jaeger, critical judgment kills enchantment, for Binski, the experience of wonder and the apprehension of significance are inseparable aspects of viewers’ engagements with works of Gothic art such as the Lady Chapel at Ely. Perceptions of the significance of a work of Gothic art would spring from its viewers’ education. Education is also a key factor in Chatterjee’s study of the projected audiences of De signis by Byzantine chronicler Nicetas Choniates (d. 1217), according to whom only those viewers endowed with rhetorical and historical sophistication were susceptible to the living, spellbinding quality of the classical statuary that adorned the city of Constantinople. Yet to be susceptible to charisma did not mean, for this audience, to be swept away by overwhelming emotion; instead, it meant willingly acquiescing to the emotions of admiration and awe while also retaining the critical distance necessary for recognizing an artwork’s historical significance, thereby investing it with meaning as well as wonder. It is this level of emotional and cognitive refinement that Choniates deploys as a shibboleth to distinguish the people of Constantinople as ideal viewers of its statuary from the Latin crusaders, whose gross ignorance rendered them impervious to its aesthetic and historical emanations. Blinded by their lack of education, the Latin conquerors of Constantinople had no compunction about sacking the city and purloining its art, turning a timeless historical fabric into booty.
Certain characteristics of audiences thus acted as filters, screening them from charisma’s power. In Byzantium, an inadequate education was a bar to experiencing charisma; in the Carolingian world studied by Romig, the opposite situation prevailed: there, the desire to resist charisma — to throw up one’s own screen against it — was a mark of wisdom. In this way, in his De imagine Tetrici (829, On the Statue of Tetricus), Walahfrid Strabo (808/809-49) mused over a statuary group centered on Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths (454-526), which had enthralled Charlemagne to the point of having it installed in Aachen. Romig’s reading of the poem points to the charismatic effect the statue had on Charlemagne but also draws attention to Strabo’s denunciation of Charlemagne’s enchantment as a form of idolatry. As the poem continues, Strabo attempts to shield Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, against the influence of such art, asserting that it provided a false model of kingship.
Thus, some of the audiences analyzed in this volume’s essays, though acknowledging the impact of charisma, proved insensitive or resistant to it. That audiences’ reactions can fall short of enchantment raises a crucial question concerning the locus and operations of charismatic force, a point to which we shall return.°°
Effects We began our discussion of the audiences of charismatic art by noting that their large size is their single shared characteristic and also the single best validation of a work’s charisma. As we turn to the effects of charismatic art, we return to this statement to note its logical implication: the same widespread response that validates the charisma of a work of art also constitutes the primary effect of charismatic art, for it is only in the hearts and minds and bodies of those large audiences that charismatic effects are felt. Further differentiation of charismatic effects is a matter of identifying the varieties of response that a work induces. In Jaeger’s view, charismatic art registers its effects in readers’ or viewers’ sense of intoxication and enchantment, in their urge toward devotion or imitation, in their coalescing around a cause or group identity, in their flights of imagination, and in their rapt participation in a heightened life, a life that seems to proceed in a realm between life and art, one whose real brilliance is a function of its admixture of illusion.%” In all of these ways — again, in Jaeger’s view — charisma of art is like romantic love: though in most cases its beguiling force is for the good, it may also render a person vulnerable to such negative effects as seduction, obsession, disillusionment, and even hatred.98
The focused and historically contextualized studies in this volume contribute new examples of the beneficent effects of charismatic art but also present several cases of its provoking negative attitudes or behaviors. Jaeger’s and Hardy’s essays both deal with works that expand the field of energy surrounding a charismatic individual — be it Francis of Assisi or the king-emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg (reigned 1411-37) — thus inspiring devoted, loyal, and enduring followings. A trio of essays examines aspects of church architecture, sculpture, and furnishings that have the effect of intensifying lay devotion. In Ackley’s, recurrent opening of winged altar-pieces to reveal tiers of gilded figural reliquaries draws the laity to an experience of a higher plane, inspiring them both to worship and to give. In Gustafson’s, the order of architectural space in Franciscan churches shepherds both the faithful and the friars into a single praying body, thus also granting the laity the experience of a realm apart from their ordinary lives. In Binski’s, the wondrous surfaces of Gothic art also impel viewers to strengthen the church with gifts. In another group of essays, charismatic art elevates its viewers by nurturing virtue or refined habits of mind: Jung’s Wise and Foolish Virgins positioned at a portal to the Magdeburg Cathedral inspire repentance as churchgoers enter and empathy as they depart. Egorov’s figures of the Nine Worthies model virtuous civic leadership among burgomasters. McCulloch’s automata reward curiosity among theatergoers. Choniates’s statuary, discussed in Chatterjee’s essay, at once calls forth and ennobles the educated sensibilities of the citizens of Constantinople. To the extent that Choniates arouses disgust in readers toward the Latins, he also demonstrates that the purported charisma of art may be used for divisive purposes. While in Chatterjee’s essay this dark side of charisma is implicit, other essays address negative charismatic effects explicitly, all of which have to do with improprieties of gazing that a charismatic work of art may compel, whether it be a work of statuary, as in Romig’s essay, or a spectacle of misogynistic revenge, as in Richardson’s.
While it is possible to document that all of the works of art examined in these essays had the primary charismatic effect of generating a robust audience response, the particular nuances of that response must, in most cases be inferred. Our authors could not avail themselves of any collections of interviews with medieval viewers and readers to match a volume like Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans, which was so useful to Jaeger in Enchantment for describing a range of charismatic effects beyond the sheer fact of a work’s striking a chord among a large group of people.99 Lacking first-person testimonials to these works’ effects, our authors take what documentation they have of a work’s appeal as a starting point and infer a more nuanced understanding of its charismatic effects by examining the needs, aspirations, or filters its audience would have brought to an encounter with the work. Such considerations of audiences and charismatic effects lay the groundwork for the research that is ultimately of most interest to our contributors: the task of identifying the particular ways that a work of art achieved its charismatic impact.
Modalities
Once the charismatic effect of a work is attested, charismatological analysis necessarily turns to the work of art itself to elucidate the mechanisms by which it produces that effect.!°° Recurrently in Jaeger’s work and in the essays collected here, such operative devices effectively redraw and even blur the boundaries between life and art, between presence and representation. The representational mode of charismatic art focuses on reality by way of mimesis and then casts a glow on it — makes it more real than real — through its use of hyper-mimesis. Even while positing that the charisma of texts and objects originates in the living bodies they represent in this mimetic-hyper-mimetic mode, our contributors also advance the idea that the charismatic flow may at times run in the opposite direction: that is, the force of enchantment may spring from a work of art and flow toward the living person it represents.!© For instance, texts and images referring to Sigismund, discussed in Hardy's essay, enlivened his persona, the personal image he projected. Hardy’s essay as well as Romig’s and Egorov’s thus demonstrate that a central task of charismatology is to apprehend the circulation of charismatic forces among individuals, texts, and objects. As for the channeling of that force, the studies gathered here demonstrate the ways that narrative, ekphrasis, commensurability, sculptural technique, non-figural materials (gold, silver, gems), technological expertise, and audience participation may all be modes that mediate the flow of charisma, thus also serving as conduits of charismatic power.
Given the importance of mimesis for charismatic art, one might assume that cleverly mechanized statuary would be its highest form. McCulloch's essay on automata argues otherwise, though. As crafted entities that parodied life rather than actually being lifelike, automata tended to arouse beholders’ curiosity. In McCulloch’s argument, the mystique surrounding wondrous animation produced a fascination with the technological substructure of this phenomenon. Mystique alone would produce unintelligibility, which in turn would disenchant. Disenchantment, in McCulloch's analysis, was not a matter of demystification but of an obfuscating esotericism that prevented appreciation of technological wonder. Similarly, Egorov’s study of the statues of the Worthies, and Binski’s exegesis of Alfred Gell’s enchantment of technology!” suggest that viewers’ apprehension of the mechanical achievements responsible for amazing phenomena actually contributed to the force of their impact rather than detracting from it. It was not their eerie identity with life that made moving statues fascinating, but rather an appeal based upon the audience's complicity in acknowledging the mechanical expertise capable of transforming inertia into movement. In such cases, art is rendered charismatic by a particular type of reception that derived from a critical appreciation of facture. As Binski argues, and as Jaeger shows in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), technology (or rhetoric) can mediate artistic effects to produce responses that range from overriding emotions to critical judgments. At the same time, to the extent that they provoke excitement, curiosity, and a thirst to know and to understand the nature of the prodigy, works of technological virtuosity stand as cases that prove by contrast that what sets charismatic art apart from fascinating art is its projection of lifelikeness, whether veristic or idealized — mimetic or hyper-mimetic — inspiring audiences’ veneration and dreams of self-improvement through imitation. However, for Binski, who challenges the notion of charismatic art, the attractive beauty of the sinuous and insinuating forms of Gothic statues is a technique deployed to engineer thinking. Their gestural bodies are rhetorical, not mimetic; they persuade but they do not represent. This is a point also made by McCulloch. Binski and McCulloch thus complicate both Jaeger’s concept of charismatic art as essentially mimetic and his notion that the characteristic response to it is emotional and imitative.
While most of the volume’s essays touch in some way on mimesis, Ackley’s and Jung’s essays deal most directly with issues of mimesis and hyper-mimesis.
Jung comments upon the trajectory of mimesis in medieval sculpture, from its absence in the early Middle Ages when statues were associated with real bodies (reliquaries, tomb effigies) to the emergence of a statuary art no longer affiliated with dead bodies that endeavored to simulate the movements and beauty of the living. Ackley’s analysis of late medieval, German figural reliquary statuettes in polychrome wood and precious metal shows that mimesis of the living could occur in the context of relics. Jung is sensitive to the context of mimetic representation, while Ackley points out that mimesis operates along a spectrum, with its processes modulated by the very mediation of the materials a statue might contain (relics), and by those used (metal, wood) in their making.
Both Jung and Ackley thus introduce variables within the concept and practice of mimesis, and explore their implications for charismatic art. The overarching question motivating Ackley’s piece stems from Jaeger’s argument that the power of Christian icons is seated in their simultaneous representation of a saint’s human and divine qualities: the human in individualistic portraiture, the divine in hyper-mimetic focal points, such as large, dark eyes that seem to gaze directly at the viewer.!°3 Given an icon’s two targets of mimesis, Ackley asks, what is the role of medium in representing relatively more of either a saint’s human or divine qualities? And what are the effects of this balance on the image’s charisma? To answer these questions, Ackley presents two late medieval figural reliquaries: one in polychrome wood, the other in hammered silver and gilded except for the figure’s skin. He argues that the materials of these reliquaries regulated their mimetic and hyper-mimetic display, thereby heightening the humanity of one and humanizing the divinity of the other. In her comparative study of Gothic statues of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Jung finds two forms of mimesis. In most instances of this statuary motif, mimetic renderings of the Foolish Virgins’ courtly attire and ungraceful or flirtatious gesticulations make a strong visual contrast with the serene body language and demure accouterments of the Wise, thus prompting viewers to make moral judgments about the contrasting behavior of the two groups. The Wise and Foolish Virgins at the Cathedral of Magdeburg, however, display a sartorial consistency, all modeling a seductive elegance; they are distinguished only by facial expressions of inner emotions: the faces of the Wise evoke progressive contentment while the foolish visages crumble by degrees into despair. By eschewing the representation of proper and foolish behavior by means of a figural mimesis internal to their group and instead focusing on facial expressions, these statues create empathy in viewers for those virgins denied entry into heaven. It is through identification with the pain of damnation that beholders may form a desire to avoid it by reforming their own lives. The effect of such charismatic art rests upon a two-tiered mimesis, which first stresses similarity among all the Virgins, leading onlookers to ponder the causes of joy and sorrow, and then steers them toward a personal mimetic experience, an identification with the suffering women and an imitation of their penitential mode. Jung concludes that the mimesis at work in Magdeburg’s statues of the Wise and Foolish Virgins imparted their charismatic message less with didacticism than with the inspiration to cultivate empathy, an important aspect of 13th-century spirituality.
While both Jung and Ackley thus explore the variations of sculptural mimesis in the production of charismatic art, Romig, Jaeger, and Hardy undertake analogous investigations with respect to narrative mimesis. Jaeger argues in this volume that the sensational rhetoric and fabulous episodes of biographies, which make the subject come alive for readers, work charismatically because of their commensurability with that person’s actions and attitudes toward the world, as related by his contemporaries. In the case of St. Francis, humility, charity, courage, mildness in overpowering violence, are all attested, and thus authentic. When the same qualities are depicted in tales of Francis that would seem inauthentic because they strain credulity — such as the fable of the Wolf of Gubio — they come across instead as hyper-authentic, or hyper-mimetic. In the case of Charlemagne, as Romig shows, the qualities of leadership, patronage, and effective imperial authority that are conveyed in his biography are all congruent with the testimony of multiple sources and thus have the ring of authenticity. Similarly, Hardy demonstrates that the noble guise, extravagant generosity, and golden tongue attributed to Sigismund in texts and images originating at his court are consistent, though idealized, with the writings of contemporary chroniclers. In these essays, a charismatological reading of texts has epistemological consequences since it provides a solution for the difficult task of separating the legendary from the historical in hagiographic and biographical writing. Moreover, these charismatological analyses reveal that charismatic biographies do not so much infuse words with the power of their referents, replacing presence with representation, but rather render moot the impossible ideal of real presence since, as these analyses show, charismatic individuals are actually fictions both in their own lives and in their constructed legends. In life as in legend they are representations, actors of their own attributed virtues and status.!°4 Perhaps therein lies the source of their charisma: an alluring capacity for self-fashioning. It becomes problematic, then, to return to the received wisdom, which holds that hagiographers and biographers devised stories in order to revivify their protagonists since in fact these writers were expanding upon what was already a representation, sustaining its reality by a hyper-mimetic representational process. So it appears that two modes of representation are at work in charismatic biographies. Charismatic art mediates a fictional subject, replicating its representational performance.!%
If biographies may transmit charisma of person, what about a charismatic person's own writing? May it also transmit charisma, or act as a charismatic text? Jaeger remarks in his essay for this volume that Bernard’s recorded vita radiated little if any charisma. His life as represented did not fire up the imagination because, as in a comparison with George H.W. Bush made by Jaeger, the stories told about him, however impressive, were just history, not the stuff of myth-making that instigates emulation. Yet, there were two ways in which Bernard was charismatic: he preached, and he wrote, thereby igniting the devotional ardor of his audiences and propelling multitudes onto the path of crusaders. Bernard’s theological writings have been inspirational to a large audience over the longue durée. Bernard’s charisma, it seems, was only projected when personally presented by him. Only he, not his biographers’ representations, could infuse words with his personality.°° The ongoing impact of Bernard’s writings thus raises interesting questions about their discursive nature. Have these texts worked charismatically, by indexing Bernard’s very being, so that readers perceived them as seamless emanations of his vital, authorial, self? If so, unlike those of his biographer, Bernard’s writings do not represent him; rather, they stand for him. The force of Bernard’s personality is present in the force of his rhetoric. Bernard’s ideas and religious sentiments inserted themselves vitally into his writing, offering captivating models of behavior, by virtue of his style and technique. Thus Jaeger’s argument that Bernard's charismatic writings, though rooted in the individual living body, were significantly mediated by technique, shares the perspectives Binski and McCulloch advance in this volume about the ways art acts upon its viewers.
To the role of technique in mediating the agency and, or, the charisma of art, Binski, Chatterjee, Romig, and Hardy add that of contextual knowledge. Binski brings up the tomb effigy (c.1290) of King Henry 111 of England and a 14thcentury statue of Charlemagne (at Aachen), both strikingly beautiful. He doubts, however, that viewers would see beauty — let alone charisma — in both given their knowledge, mediated by independent texts, that Charlemagne was a model emperor while Henry 111 was a failure. Chatterjee makes a similar argument in her analysis of ekphrastic descriptions by the Byzantine poet Choniates. The ancient statues of Byzantium come to life by the means of such ekphrasis, but they lent themselves to ekphrastic treatment because they were already alive with the aura of their accumulated history, of which their educated viewers were well aware. Choniates’s reference to Helen of Troy, for instance, blurs the differences between the statue and the historical character as known by beholders. Romig and Hardy both consider iconographic representations of rulers whose charisma was generally acknowledged, focusing in particular on Diirer’s portraits of Charlemagne and Sigismund commissioned by the city of Nuremberg. It is noteworthy that, although both figures in this diptych stand for archetypical emperors, Charlemagne’s image is idealized (hyper-mimetic) whereas Sigismund’s is based on a physiognomic portrait (mimetic). Sigismund remains a historical figure but Charlemagne seems larger than history. Yet as bearers of imperial insignia, both compel the gaze, illustrating what Binski in his essay calls the contextual and insufficient nature of medieval art.!°”
While Weber asserted the role of charisma in buttressing authoritative rulership, he opposed the idea of charisma as a feature of governmental institutions, locating charisma in the ruler’s personality.!°° In conveying the personalities of Charlemagne and Sigismund, however, Diirer makes use of material and official symbols: that is, the trappings of these rulers’ governmental institutions. Picking up on the implications of Diirer’s painterly choices, Hardy develops an appreciation of the charisma of authoritative institutions, seeing its output — in the form of documents, seals, livery badges — as capable of animating the idea of empire among independent local power centers of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. Sigismund’s subjects responded both to his living personality, and to the texts and objects that, diffused by his administration, bore his name or image. Charismatic art, in this way, extends active rule throughout an extensive and diffuse political space, and does so by conjuring the enthusiastic support of local elites and governments, keen to secure imperial privileges sealed in gold with the imperial image, with the effect that they acknowledged the legitimate hegemony of imperial rule.
One may well wonder if the golden seals so eagerly commissioned and then preserved by German corporate bodies were seen as invested with some protective, talismanic powers. In the Tale of Jonathas written by Hoccleve and here analyzed by Richardson, three such objects inherited by the titular Jonathas set his tale’s charismatic power in motion: a ring that will get the wearer everyone’s love, a brooch that will bring the wearer everything he wants, and a carpet that will take whoever sits on it wherever he wants to go. With the powers of the ring and brooch in particular, one might imagine Jonathas as being possessed of such charismatic traits as the magnetism of Charlemagne, the imperial authority of Sigismund, the generosity of St. Francis, or the good looks and appealing voice that were signs of charis among the ancient Greeks. As it turns out, Jonathas’s gifts are only magical objects — not charis at all — and only isolate Jonathas from the world of actual human relations, triggering a narrative that ultimately leads to a horrific act of revenge. In Richardson’s analysis, however, this same narrative presents perhaps the most complex operation of hyper-mimesis examined in this volume, for as he argues, Jonathas’s story works as a hyper-mimetic reflection of the famously troubled Hoccleve himself and thus — in the act of his translating it from the Latin — relieves him of his personal demons and offers him a redemptive path to “translating” himself back into society.
While Richardson sees Hoccleve as both the author and audience for the charisma of his Tale of Jonathas, Gustufson finds the lay worshipers in 13thcentury central Italian Franciscan churches playing a similar role, also reminiscent of audience participation in Sigismund’s administrative output, this time in the production of charismatic space. With the very idea of charismatic space, we would seem to bea long way from Ackley’s and Jung’s sculptural works, whose charisma flowed so directly from their imitation of human forms. However, recalling that the charisma of those works was also a function of their locations — the winged altarpieces of Ackley’s figural reliquaries, the cathedral portal of Jung’s Virgins — we may recognize that those locations became zones of charisma themselves, the charged places of viewers’ worshipful transport or moral transformation. In the same way, we may recognize that Choniates’s descriptions of Constantinople’s statuary define the city and its appreciative dwellers before its invasion by the barbaric Latins as a charismatic space.
The only iconographic representation in Gustafson’s Franciscan space is a crucifix, but the more living works of art it houses are the members of the Franciscan Order themselves, who model their lives after the example of the charismatic St. Francis. By choreographing the movements of the faithful in the church, first through the nave, then through a narrow door in the tramezzo screen into a space just adjacent to the intimate space of the friars’ choir, the design of Italian Franciscan churches responded to the laity’s desire to participate in the mystic process of ascent to intimacy with God as envisioned and practiced by the Franciscans, thereby partaking of the gifts of holiness — the charismata as Bonaventure called them. In this way, the charisma both of Franciscan churches and of Sigismund’s seals and documents had a living fabric, one infused less with mimetic or hyper-mimetic representations of leaders — whether Francis or Sigismund — than with the participation of living audiences whose physical role in the staging of liturgical events or the creation of documents was both constitutive of their charisma and essential for the higher status the same audience-creators derived from them.
Charisma. A Face-Lift
The charismatological analyses of audience and reception, effects, and operational modes advanced in this volume often identify the human visage as a radiant locus of charisma, emitting magnetism or a secretive ambiguity that keeps viewers at some distance. Our title for the present volume advertises the special relationship between charisma and visages, while also indicating our hope to contribute to Jaeger’s extraordinary project of giving charisma a facelift, in multiple senses. In applying the concept to art, Jaeger gives charisma a face-lift in the sense of a makeover, one that entails its own methodology — charismatology — just as there is an art and science to cosmetic surgery. Jaeger’s project also gives charisma a face-lift in that it lifts the charismatic face — be it the compelling face of an icon or the sur-face of an inspiring biography — to investigate the anatomy and physiology of its glow.
In our authors’ furtherance of this investigation, historical contexts emerge as a significant component of charisma. In his essay, Binski emphasizes that backstories count. Martino Rossi Monti’s essay makes clear that the notion, understanding, and terminology of charisma all have a history. In classical times and Late Antiquity, the concept of charisma was deployed to designate exceptional individuals and to note their endowment with special qualities. A charismatic person had a beautiful soul, which was reflected in his body. Physical beauty could thus be seen as a sign of divine favor and so, instrumental in winning the favor of others. Charisma implied mutuality between body and soul, between beauty and virtue or, at least recognition of the body’s role as a medium for the expression of grace and consequent powers that rendered individuals thus endowed magnetic to their audiences. In the growing Christian context, charisma became identified as a gift of divine grace, often but not exclusively associated with prophecy, a connection, as we have seen, that underlies the Weberian and Jaegerian understanding of charisma as a relational phenomenon between person, art, and audience. Gustafson’s reading of the Breviloquium by the Franciscan Bonaventure, however, exposes aspects of medieval charisma that insisted on the individual and inner-oriented character of grace. For Bonaventure, charisma as a gift of grace works from within, directing the ascension of the Christian soul toward God. According to this understanding, a charismatic person results from the blessing of charismatic grace combined with his or her own personal effort to achieve spiritual unity with the divine. Thus, charismatic individuals are works of art themselves in Jaeger’s felicitous formulation,!°° but their art-self has become an end in itself, a part of the universal being. This scenario, however, leaves space for an intermediary type of charisma, animated by Francis’s notion of exemplarity, and articulated through the architectural design of Franciscan churches. The Franciscan ideal of providing models and methods for approaching intimacy with God permits us to understand that even though charisma of person has outward-facing effects, it may spring from a person’s inner-oriented, giftassisted growth. Such an understanding of charisma emerges from a careful reading of medieval sources on the topic and stands as just one demonstration of the importance of using modern definitions of charismatic force with care so as not to obscure the medieval experience.
Relatively absent from this volume are reflections on gender and charisma. Franciscans did not prohibit women from moving through charismatic space, but Hoccleve and his character Jonathas relate to women as negative charismatic figures. The walls of town halls featured the figures of the Nine Worthies but not of their female companions, the Nine Female Worthies. Charismatic representations of historical and secular personages tend to be males, while compelling images of biblical and religious individuals such as those examined by Jung tend to represent women. How might a study of gender and charisma help us deepen our understanding of their roles in medieval society?
Other arguments presented in this volume consider the negative aspects of charisma of art and thus challenge Jaeger’s tendency to speak of charisma of art as positive by definition. If the effects of a work of art are not ennobling then its allure ought to be given another term, such as seductive or fascinating. Certainly such a boundary has not been drawn for charisma of person — Hitler being a primary example of negative charisma — should art also be considered capable of having a force for ill?° Several essays find medieval authors considering this question. Romig’s Strabo, in his De imagine Tetrici, staged a charisma whose attractiveness he derided and resisted on the grounds that the material stuff of images cannot convey special power. To this deceptive charisma, Strabo contrasted the properly charismatic art of writing, exemplified by Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne. Carolingian intellectuals trusted the charisma of words, but not of images. Conversely, Chatterjee’s Choniates, writing in the aftermath of the destruction of Constantinople by Latin crusaders, warned against words, encouraging viewers to let themselves be seduced by images, though not all images. Choniates’s ekphrasis praised ancient statuary, but not Christian icons. Richardson’s Hoccleve worried about the hate-mongering misogyny of the tale he was about to translate. All of these authors implicitly raise further questions: could charisma be controlled, directed? And what would it mean for a medieval writer to try to do so?
Perhaps the question that is most often raised in this volume has to do with the locus of charisma. The arc described by Weberian and Jaegerian scholarship enlarges that locus to include art and literature as well as human beings. Several authors in this volume contribute to this expansive project by identifying cases in which the medieval record itself explicitly locates charisma in works of art. Ackley notes, for instance, that Bernard of Clairvaux’s biographer, wishing to convey the living image of Bernard’s radiant body produced a description that calls to mind a figural reliquary executed in precious metal. The indwelling charisma of a work of art would also be indicated by its inspiring its own following in the form of similar works of art, which is what Egorov finds in the case of the Nine Worthies sculptural motif. As we have already mentioned, an effect of these figures was to inspire city councilors to lead a civic life of high ideals, but that was not the only impact the images of the Worthies had: they also inspired the making of other images, modeling artistic formulae of grandeur and dignity. Moreover, when the burgomasters of Liineburg decided to commission their portraits, the resulting stained-glass depictions were couched in the iconographic vocabulary of the Nine Worthies. An instance of the flow of charisma moving from art to person, here living persons sought to infuse their own being with the charisma of the Worthies’ images. The charisma of the burgomasters was derived from the particular material presence of the Worthies, mediated by a mimesis linking the portraits of the Worthies and those of the burgomasters. Charismatic art had itself become a model, less a representation than a persuasive formula for a communal audience eager to be governed by a charismatic leadership. Similarly, as Jung shows, the figural art of late Gothic sculpture offered to the living, “in a kind of feedback loop,’”™ models of spiritual excellence, worth imitating to achieve moral distinction. For their part, Hardy and Gustafson suggest that the locus of charisma might be further extended, from human leaders through art to the viewers themselves, for audiences too may generate charisma, not only by adhering to persuasive leaders (the traditional argument) but also by their own participation in the production of charismatic art.
In its consideration of the locus of charisma, our volume hosts a ghost that challenges our very project. The ghost of a question that acquires a shadowy presence in Binski’s essay, where the author contends that for art to have the effects of a living charismatic person, it needs an injection of aura, of an independent critical judgement and appreciation. Art must needs have charisma bestowed upon it. Binski insists on an unbridgeable ontological gap between life and art: artifacts cannot see, behave, or have intentions. Such a statement seems self-evident, yet challenging voices have arisen from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and material culture studies."* That intentionality is a human trait is not in question, but it is a trait that is pre-disciplined by and executed within the cultural and material environment in which human beings are situated. Charisma, as a particular form of agency, invites a reconsideration of the traditionally unassailable distinction, so dear to western thought, between things and people. In many instances of the relationships between charisma and art presented in this volume, the charisma of art cannot simply be reduced to being an effect of its mimetic connection with human life. Nor does the critical role played by artifacts in the circulation of charisma appear to have been unilaterally conferred by particular human protagonists. For were that the case, how would we explain unwelcome surpluses of charismatic art, the impact of its materials and techniques, or the unsettling hybridity of automata?
The Volume
In the first section of the present volume, “Medieval and Modern: The Hermeneutics of Charisma,” contributors embed their interpretation of terminology (charis), cathedral statuary (Magdeburg), and English Gothic within historical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the study of charisma and art. In his essay, “The Mask of Grace: On Body and Beauty of Soul between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Martino Rossi Monti traces the development of the concept of charis (grace) from its attestations in Homeric poetry to its manifestations in ancient Roman culture under the term gratia to its adoption by Christian hagiographers. As Rossi Monti shows, this history is one of a gradual evaporation of charis from the body. Though always understood to be god-given, charis was first considered a wholly embodied quality, recognizable in such traits as a beautiful physique and an appealing voice. Beginning with Plato, however, a parallel tradition held charis to be a function of the beautiful soul instead, a quality that radiated through the body even as it was a force unto itself. Early Christian hagiographers took this dualistic understanding of charis further: for them the radiance of charis originated in neither the body nor the gifted soul but rather in the soul’s surrender to Christ. In a paradoxical last stage of this rarefication of charis, hagiographers see only the brilliance of divine charis in their saintly subjects, and their physical characteristics disappear behind what Rossi Monti calls “the mask of grace.”
In “Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish Virgins in Gothic Sculpture,’ Jacqueline E. Jung glosses Jaeger’s analysis of the statues of the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the west facade of Strasbourg Cathedral (end of 13th century)" by considering the slightly earlier rendering of the Wise and Foolish Virgins at Magdeburg Cathedral (c.1250). Jung argues that in the Magdeburg group interior emotional states were, for the first time, externalized in the Virgins’ bodies which, dazzlingly carved, expressed joy and sadness even as they masked the moral conditions that had inspired the Virgins’ attitudes. Whether foolish or wise, the Virgins resemble each other, compelling viewers to bask in their youth and loveliness, and also to consider self-reform channeled by empathy with the sad beauties who had preferred human praise to a good conscience.
In his “Charisma and Material Culture,’ Paul Binski considers the concept of charismatic art in the course of critically engaging with Alfred Gell’s notion of the enchanting power of technology. Binski attributes to the curvilinear bodies and wondrous, insinuating surfaces of 14th-century British art, exemplified by the Lady Chapel at Ely (c.1320), a persuasive capacity and especially the power to convince beholders to practice charitable gift-giving. Rendered effective by virtuoso facture, this art, without expressing psychological states, seeks to guide its audience along a thinking, utilitarian path. For Binski, the agency of art is “causal and social,’ and highly contingent upon an enabling contextual network of ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and experience. Extending beyond the specific case of English Gothic art, Binski probes the extent to which charisma, as a form of agency, inherently animates artifacts. He concludes that charisma is a quality bestowed upon art by human consciousness.
The second section of the volume, “Charismatic Art,” considers instances of charisma as a function of representation. Andrew Roming’s “Charismatic Art and Biography in the Carolingian World” analyzes a reflection in Walahfrid Strabo’s poem De imagine Tetrici (829) upon what constitutes good and bad charismatic art. The poem warns against the statue of the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great (d. 526), which Charlemagne had brought from Ravenna and installed in Aachen, denouncing its idolatrous quality and its power to lead viewers astray, and reproaching Charlemagne for being seduced by its false charms. Romig stresses that few images of Charlemagne himself circulated in his lifetime (a situation that dramatically reversed after his death), which paralleled his court’s iconophobia evident in the Opus Caroli Regis (Libri Carolini). Romig submits that such distrust of images may account for the revival of secular biography at that time (exemplified by Einhard), based on the Augustinian notion that words provided a truthful medium for conveying charismatic representations of rulership.
In his essay “The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form: Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi,’ Jaeger asserts that the publication history of Francis’s biographies together with the novels and films they have inspired evince the charisma of his life story. Acknowledging that some episodes in Francis’s biographies appear patently untrue, Jaeger argues that they comprise the essence of his enduring legacy nevertheless. Moreover, he finds a kind of truth in the fables of Francis in the form of their commensurability with the narrative arc they share: the story of a humble, gentle, and courageous person who succeeds in not only overcoming dangerous and powerful foes but also in winning them over. This is the “real” Francis, Jaeger argues: the character whose story is conveyed in plausible and implausible episodes alike. By contrast, the sole major biography of Bernard of Clairvaux portrays him as unapproachable in his holiness, lacking, in other words, a basic element of charisma, that it inspires imitation. And yet, as Jaeger points out, Bernard is posthumously charismatic, thanks to his own writing, rather than to writing about him by others.
In this section’s final essay, “Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the Nine Worthies in Northern European Town Halls of the 14th to 16th Centuries,” Andrey Egorov traces the power these effigies had to create spaces of exhortation where civic leaders were inspired to live according to the highest ideals of good government in Cologne, Mechelen, and Liineburg. The topos of the Nine Worthies had originated in aristocratic culture, and Egorov argues that its surprising appeal for urban magistrates, who typically attained their dominance by challenging claims of local lords, lay in the charisma of the Nine Worthies’ material presence ensconced in town halls. Highly individualized figures positioned within broader iconographic programs that exemplified ancient and biblical justice, The Nine Worthies portrayed a history of good governance and materialized an imaginary genealogy of forefathers. Corporeal and mimetic as sculpture, numinous as stain glass, the Worthies enveloped the council members in the aura of their representational idiom. The Worthies and the magistrates formed a single auratic body of exemplary individuals.
The third section of the volume, “Dazzling Reflections: Charismatic Art and Its Audience,” features essays that explore the charisma of art that offers viewers inspiring or redemptive reflections of themselves or that transmit ennobling reflections of themselves to others. Paroma Chatterjee’s essay, “Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’s De signis,’ studies the contrast Choniates (d. 1217) makes between Constantinople as a zone of historical and aesthetic consciousness owing to the beauty of its statuary and its appreciative Byzantine viewers, and the Constantinople that was brutally sacked in 1204 by marauding Latins unmoved by the charismatic power of those same public sculptures. Her close reading of Choniates’s descriptions of Constantinople’s life-like statues in the De signis elicits the Byzantine author's view that works of art function according to a principle of reciprocity, whereby individuals and cultures receive a measure of grace for their appropriate response to them. Chatterjee further examines the ways in which Choniates’s reflections shaped viewers’ ability to perceive and respond to this grace as an index of cultural characteristics and as a critical tool for investigating aesthetic and political trends.
Gavin Richardson’s “Disenchantment: Hoccleve's Tale of Jonathas and Male Revenge Fantasy,” focuses on the Middle English translation of the extremely popular story of Jonathas by Thomas Hoccleve (c.1368-1426), which Richardson classifies as a male revenge fantasy: that is, a tale in which a male lover wreaks usually violent and sexualized revenge on a woman by whom he feels himself to have been shamed. As Richardson shows, Hoccleve’s example of the genre makes for an elegant case study of disenchantment — what happens when a charismatic object is withdrawn — and of the virulent misogyny that emerges when the object is (or was) a female lover. The essay concludes with a suggestion that in the light of his bouts of madness, Hoccleve may have found a reflection of himself in the dark charisma of Jonathas’s life story, a reflection that may have served as a “writing cure.”
The final essay in this section, “The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1368-1437): Charisma and Government in the Later Medieval Holy Roman Empire,” by Duncan Hardy, centers on the eventful career of the emperor by considering the narrative and visual evidence of his energetic personality’s broad and transformative impact on the European political landscape. As Hardy shows, Sigismund’s energy was effectively relayed and transmitted by such various institutional media as seals, documents, livery badges, and portraits. To explain the scope of the emperor's influential outreach, Duncan deploys the notion of charisma as an integrative force. Personally and institutionally projected by the monarch, promoted and perpetuated by admiration for and memory of a respected ruler, such charisma durably constructed and united an imaginary political community. Hardy therefore contends that charismatic leadership was a prominent operator in late medieval politics, challenging Weber's notion that European governmental structures were antithetical to the exercise of charismatic rulership.
The fourth and final section of the volume, “Mediation: The Intermediary Spaces of Charisma,” includes essays that provide a perspective on realms intermediate between art and life that the charisma of art may call into being. Together these essays contribute to our understanding of charismatic art as capable of generating an enhanced environment, either secular or sacred.
In his essay “Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic Space,” Eric Gustafson explores the agency of architecture in 13th-century central Italian Franciscan churches in leading lay people — both men and women - into a realm that inspires, feeds, and confirms a desire to draw nearer to God both within the church and in their daily lives. The partitioning of the church interior into three spaces is key to the creation of this charismatic space: in particular, the division between the nave and the lay choir, by means of the tramezzo screen. Upon entering the church, a worshiper would be drawn forward by the sight of the door in the middle of this screen and by the crucifix above it. In passing through the door, a layperson would find him or herself in an intermediary space that corresponds, Gustafson argues, to the second of three levels of ascent to the divine articulated by Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (1221-74) in his Breviloquium. At this stage, the Christian's ascent is supported by the gifts of the Holy Spirit — the charismata, as Bonaventure terms them — and inspired by the life of Christ. Considered in relation to this second stage of Christian practice, the unique space of the Franciscan lay choir may be considered in itself a gift of grace.
Joseph Ackley’s essay, “Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and Mimesis in the Late Middle Ages,” examines two northern-European figural reliquaries that together define a polarity between mimesis and hyper-mimesis. The first is a bust of a radiant and rosy-cheeked Catherine of Alexandria in polychrome wood (produced in Germany around 1465-67). The second is a mid-14th century German Virgin and Child statuette in hammered silver, gilded except for the figures’ skin. This second object would seem to be much less mimetic than the first; however, Ackley suggests that of the two, the precious-metal Virgin and Child figure might provide the stronger likeness of divinity, for it accurately pictures the radiance of saintly bodies, which Bernard of Clairvaux had compared to the luminosity of sunlight shining on silver or gold. Ackley’s further discussion of the winged altar piece, the site in which the gilt of both polychrome wood and precious-metal figural reliquaries would have been viewed by medieval Christians, situates both objects as a part a drama of technological brilliance, which functioned both to fill viewers with reverential awe and to inspire them to participate in the church's financial support.
In the final essay in this section, “T’ll make the statue move indeed: Charismatic Motion and the Disenchanted Image in Early Modern Drama,’! Lynsey McCulloch traces the material presence and literary motif of animated statues in early modern culture, arguing that their auratic appeal was informed less by their esoteric than by their exoteric features, in particular their intelligibility. As McCulloch points out, early modern audiences were quite familiar with automata. They were featured in the theater as both devices and characters (Hermione in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Brazen Head); they adorned pageants and urban buildings; they were incorporated into Catholic church services — and exposed as tricks by Protestant Reformers — and they loomed large in contemporary scientific and philosophical treatises. While the latter provided explanations of self-moving devices that ranged from the natural to the supernatural, the other media did not elucidate the origins of sculptural motion. Spectators and readers were thus presented with the choice of being enchanted by the supernatural, by the technological, or by both since, as McCulloch shows, an understanding of technical ingenuity did not necessarily limit the sense of wonder inspired by mysteriously moving objects.
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