What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny. The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real. In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.

Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England

Arts & Photography

Camille, Michael

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Most of the seven million people who visit the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris each year probably do not realize that the legendary gargoyles adorning this medieval masterpiece were not constructed until the nineteenth century. The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument. Michael Camille begins his long-awaited study by recounting architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration of the structure from 1843 to 1864, when the gargoyles were designed, sculpted by the little-known Victor Pyanet, and installed. These gargoyles, Camille contends, were not mere avatars of the Middle Ages, but rather fresh creations—symbolizing an imagined past—whose modernity lay precisely in their nostalgia. He goes on to map the critical reception and many-layered afterlives of these chimeras, notably in the works of such artists and writers as Charles Méryon, Victor Hugo, and photographer Henri Le Secq. Tracing their eventual evolution into icons of high kitsch, Camille ultimately locates the gargoyles’ place in the twentieth-century imagination, exploring interpretations by everyone from Winslow Homer to the Walt Disney Company. Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred images of its monumental yet whimsical subjects, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is a must-read for historians of art and architecture and anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the lovable monsters gazing out over Paris from one of the world’s most renowned vantage points.

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity

Sculpture

A high-quality introductory volume to the spectacular achievements of Gothic culture, which not only illustrates the stylistic trademarks and their developments but also offers a radical reappraisal of the standard appreciation of Gothic art, seeing it as a highly innovative art form, encompassing new ways of perceiving the world.

Gothic Art

Weidenfeld &Nicholson

This work investigates the theoretical and personal understanding of death, and its implicit relationship with birth, as perceived in medieval society. It studies the work of one specific illuminator, reniet, whose pictures embody medieval attitudes towards death.

Master of Death

Yale University Press

By examining the theme of idol-worship in medieval art, this book reveals the ideological basis of paintings, statues and manuscript illuminations that depict the worship of false gods in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By showing that images of idolatry stood for those outside the Church - pagans, Muslims, Jews, heretics, homosexuals - Camille sheds light on how medieval society viewed both alien 'others' and itself. He links the abhorrence of worshipping false gods in images to an 'image-explosion' in the thirteenth century when the Christian Church was filled with cult statues, miracle-working relics, and 'real' representations in the Gothic style. In attempting to bring the Gothic image to life, Camille shows how images can teach us about attitudes and beliefs in a particular society.

The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

Cambridge University Press

Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture)

A gargoyle lurks at the corner of a Gothic cathedral. A monstrous face peers from the margin of a medieval text. At the far reaches of cultural spaces a chorus of odd and arresting figures assembles, commenting endlessly on the world it surveys. What these characters are doing at the margins is the subject of Michael Camille's new book, an exhilarating account of the medieval imagination testing--and defining--its boundaries.Where others have isolated the marginal image as a detail, Camille considers such marginalia in direct and complex relation to the whole work. Ranging with graceful authority through the culture of the Middle Ages, from art to architecture, music to illustrated manuscripts, courtly romances to social rituals, he finds in the margins a distorted yet apt reflection of medieval conventions. It is here at the edge--of the monastery, the cathedral, the court, the city--that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for glossing, parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it. Viewing marginalia in their proper social and cultural context, Camille reveals scandalous and subversive aspects, as well as apparently paradoxical stabilizing functions. He rejects oppositions such as high and low, profane and sacred, and instead projects a vision of medieval culture in which marginal resistance, inversion, and transgression play an integral, even necessary, role.Chimeras as disruptions of religious order; gargoyles as embodiments of fears and temptations; scatological drawings as manifestations of crisis in the chivalric class; charivari as ritual reinscriptions of social norms: Image on the Edge presents a vivid picture of a medieval world in which contradictions were not only tolerated, but worked with exquisite detail into the very fabric of society. With a richness of expression in keeping with his subject--and with a wealth of sumptuous illustrations--Camille illuminates these details; in doing so, he revises and enhances our understanding of medieval culture's self-representation.

Graphic Design

Harvard University Press

Camille considers marginalia--in the cathedral, the court, the monastery--in direct and complex relation to the whole work. Ranging through the culture of the Middle Ages, he finds in the margins a distorted yet apt reflection of medieval conventions. It is here that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it.

Sumptuous colour illustrations of objects and images dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries complement a text which explores both real and symbolic aspects of medieval love and romance. Highly recommended.

The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire

Harry N Abrams B.V.

What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

Reaktion Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Camille, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Camille, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Camille, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity

Gothic Art

Master of Death

The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture)

Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture)

The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire

Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture)