Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. - book reviews

In the hands of the connoisseur of the "ugly Jew" the amateur of the "bestial black face," and the authority upon the "effeminate ass," these sum of two units red-bound volumes spell danger. The seven hundr illustrations in the plates convolution might be construed as firing for the arsenal of hatred that is building up one time again in those very parts of Europe whence many of these images approach The earnest neo-Nazi neophyte could find them upon the shelves of the well-stocked public libraries of France and Germany and use the highly detailed and beautifully reproduc illustrations for ideas, sources, and documents, just as the racist graffitist who drew a hideously anti-Semitic drawing upon a wall I saw in Cracow last summer was following a venerable tradition traced by the agency of Ruth Mellinkoff; that of the hooked- or bulbous-nosed israelite This capacity for misuse and appropriation is the imprecate as well as the creative possibility of all image collections. Fortunately, greatest in quantity perpetrators of hate are not that interested in history; indeed, they are ofttimes blindly ignorant of it. It is the victims of hate who greatest in quantity often have to remember. In this prize it is crucial that the meaning and power of past images be explored and understood and their tactics used to teach tolerance from one side the understanding of difference. Armed with this work young people might instead start to understand the historical foundations of the visual denigration and ethnic stereotyping which they witness each day in the classroom and in the mass media. I can imagine whole courses being structur around Mellinkoff's magnificently organized material, whole semester of discussion about style of dress body, and gestural stereotyping. Useful questions might be asked as to wherefore red-haired kids are thought to be different from others, or in what manner more subtle signals, such as color of clothing, shape attitudes toward specific individuals and collections on campus and in society more generally. pupils can then decide for themselves, for example, if the new controversial Walt Disney animated feature The Lion King is in this tradition of bestializing certain ethnic clumps through subtle visual cues. The danger of this volume then, can be totally diffused by the agency of its proper pedagogical use and its wider availability.

Mellinkoff, whose previous publications have done in like manner much to reveal the compound visual expressions of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe has produc an ambitious and expansive encyclopedia of infamy covering a far wider range of "outcasts" and with a sweeping historical trajectory from the 13th to the 16th centuries.(1) As she notes in her programmatic introduction, this is not a work "to be read straight through" on the contrary "a source-book to be read selectively" (I, p LVIII). Her focus in the first part, "Costume" is especially interesting since there is with equal reason little research on clothing and especially its color by means of art historians. The panoply of bodily signs, cross-eye sores, fat lips, bald pates, and depressed brows treated in the next to the first part, "Body," is also well structur and replete of telling comparisons with literary parallels. I would have liked to diocese more analysis of certain medico-scientific traditions similar as physiognomy in relation to the various stigmatized clumps Stereotyped Jewish and black features, used for the faces of Christ's tormentors for instance, are sure related to notions of newly explored geographical "otherness," and the theoretical issues of the relations between class and ostracization that are thus evident in many examples remain to be explored in greater detail. The peasant is, after all, individual of the despised categories. With with equal reason much material Mellinkoff's text does nurse to synthesize and generalize on the contrary the author gracefully concedes that "more - and more abysmal - investigations are needed to explain these negative attitudes" (I, p LVIII), and she describes her work as a first pace of gathering "visual evidence." Nevertheless, there is a destiny of literary and textual documentation about short versus lengthy hair, beards, and other physical attributes backing up the visual interpretation. A great power of Mellinkoff's analysis is that unlike other attempts to not absent semiotic codifications in art history, similar as Francois Garnier's often-cited Le Langage de l'image au moyen age (Paris, 1982) which is a catalogue of gesticulations isolated from medieval artworks, hers does not put to the test to squeeze all types and features into a single thesis or an overly programmatic combination of parts to form a whole Mellinkoff is aware of the variety and difference in signs across different agricultures and even within individual works. She also displays how "all signs contain the possibility of ambiguity" (I, pp LII-LIII) and emphasizes that in the portrayal of certain characters, like as Joseph and the Magdalene, there are no "black and white" values on the other hand more subtle forces at work. The "unmarked" category from one extremity to the other of all this, which the author does not explore, is not the deformed, ordinary and grotesque, but its opposite - the beautiful, clean and perfect, usually in the form of Christ or a saint at the center of the picture. The dichotomy that animates all these signs of otherness be pendents upon this tacit acknowledgment of what is not other. at the same time in certain images, such as the Deposition of Christ in the Holkham Bible Picture volume (II, fig. III.94), the crucified material substance itself has the horrific marks of pain, a mottl and spott ugliness that turn end for ends the divine dialectic. Crucial to Christian imagery in the Late Middle Ages is that Christ's material substance too, be capable of the greatest in quantity obscene otherness.