Chapter 24
“Textual images” and “visual texts”
Since the dawn of literature, text and image have accompanied one another not merely as
competing but also as cooperating media. Based on theoretical considerations of their relationship and their
expressive possibilities on the one hand, and on the conditions of the culture of writing and images in
antiquity and late antique Christianity on the other, this piece portrays the collaboration between text and
image to aid the reader across genres and throughout the ages with an outlook towards vernacular literature
and translations.
Keywords: text and image, text-image ensembles, text-image-hybrids, figure poems, illustration of biblical and liturgical books, illustration of biographies, novels and chronicles, illustration of popular genres and translations, images as commentaries, images as symbols of the divine, didactic pages and diagrams, images as support for the “semiliterates”
Article outline
- Introduction
- Text and image: similarities and differences
- Text-image ensembles and imageless visualized texts
- Text-picture ensembles: Occurrence
- Texts visualized without images: Inscriptions, labels, diagrams, and charts
- Text-based images without accompanying text
- Text-image-hybrids
- Figure poems
- Images with text
- Illustrated texts
- Reference books in antiquity and the Middle Ages
- Illustration of literary texts in antiquity and the Middle Ages: Popular genres
- Illustration of “high literature” in antiquity
- In Christian late antiquity and the Middle Ages: Examples and literary genres
- Biblical and liturgical books
- Illustrated biographies
- Novels and chronicles
- In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
- Summary and outlook
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Notes
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Bibliography