Full Description
Explores the commemoration and memorialisation of the Canterbury martyr in visual and material culture.
In life, and especially in death, Thomas Becket was nothing short of a medieval celebrity, whose significance spanned the European high Middle Ages in to the sixteenth-century. Henry VIII's suppression of his cult in 1536 only served to enhance his popularity elsewhere. Visual depictions of his life, high-profile careers, spectacular demise, and posthumous legacies, are numerous. These images document both the extent, and the efficacy, of his invocation across religious, political and civic agendas. Becket remains the stuff of literature and legend, art, drama and cultural commodification.
This volume explores Becket imagery, both in such traditional media as stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, and less common objects: toys, baptismal fonts, and vernacular almanacs. Its essays provide new interpretations of the archaeological, iconographic, and historiographic spectrum of Becket imagery by, for example, deconstructing religious-secular binaries in the study of pilgrim badges and revising long-established interpretations of Canterbury stained glass. They also expand the Becket visual canon into broader geographic and temporal contexts, from medieval Denmark and Spain to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and twenty-first-century Boston. Meanwhile, contributions which look at the appropriation and use of Becket imagery in the aftermath of the English Reformation break new ground in scrutinizing a subject well traversed in text, but that has only begun to be explored in visual and material culture.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction. Images of Thomas Becket: An Historiographical Journey - Kay Brainerd Slocum
I Images of Thomas Becket in the Medieval West
2. Pilgrims at Becket's Tomb and Shrine: Stained Glass at Canterbury Cathedral and St Mary's Church, Nettlestead, Kent - Rachel Koopmans
3. Viewing the Becket Leaves: Word, Image, and Audience - Kay Brainerd Slocum
4. Becket on a Peacock: The Manufacture of Devotional Toys and Their Use in Civic Devotion - John Jenkins and Eliot Benbow
5. The Lyngsjö and Nora fonts from Medieval Denmark and Gotland: Thomas Becket, the Cistercians, and the Baltic Crusades - Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens
6. Constructing Becket's Cult in Castilla c.1170-1220 - Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo
II Images of Thomas Becket after 1400
7. The Role of Becket in Folded Calendar Almanacs - Kathleen Doyle
8. Tradition and Transmission: A Comparison of the Pilgrim Badges of St Thomas Becket and Henry VI - Frederick A. S. Lloyd Williams
9. Becket and the Antiquarians: Collecting, Discovery, and Display - Naomi Speakman
10. The St Thomas Becket Altar in Coutances: Religion, Politics, and the Modern Afterlife of a Medieval Medicus - Alyce A. Jordan
11. A Unique Representation of Archbishop Thomas Becket and his Cross-Bearer Edward Grim in Late-Twelfth-Century Stained Glass from Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury - Madeline Harrison Caviness
Select Bibliography of Works on Thomas Becket
Index
