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Winner of Peking University's 2025 New Oriental Young Scholar Award
Early modern reformers claimed to reject a superstitious, image-obsessed medieval past—but what if medieval thinkers had already begun to critique sacred images? This book reveals how late medieval literature reimagined breaking images as radical creation, not destruction. Step into the world of Arthurian legends, The Romance of the Rose, and saints’ lives, where shattered statues and broken relics generate new meaning. Explore the writings of Chaucer and Julian of Norwich, who grapple with divine truth not by preserving images, but by dismantling and remaking them. This book uncovers a literary self that is dynamic, assertive, and subversive centuries before the Renaissance claims to invent it.
Early modern reformers claimed to reject a superstitious, image-obsessed medieval past—but what if medieval thinkers had already begun to critique sacred images? This book reveals how late medieval literature reimagined breaking images as radical creation, not destruction. Step into the world of Arthurian legends, The Romance of the Rose, and saints’ lives, where shattered statues and broken relics generate new meaning. Explore the writings of Chaucer and Julian of Norwich, who grapple with divine truth not by preserving images, but by dismantling and remaking them. This book uncovers a literary self that is dynamic, assertive, and subversive centuries before the Renaissance claims to invent it.
Price: $119.00
Pages: 262
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts
Publication Date:
16 October 2025
ISBN: 9789004745803
Format: Hardcover
Yun Ni, Ph.D. (2019), Harvard University, is currently an assistant professor of English at Peking University. Her research focuses on medieval English literature, political thought, and intellectual history.