Project Details
Projekt
Subproject 3: Intermediality of Fluid media salutis in European Meditative Poetry of the Early Modern Period (Italy, England, France)
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435118611
The aim of this subproject is to highlight the central significance of fluid media salutis in early modern meditative poetry and religious emblematics in Italy, France, and England, and to explore their intermedial effects in interdisciplinary cooperation. In both devotional areas, representations of fluids are directly related to the divine mediation of salvation through the sacramental grace of water and wine, to the blood and sweat of the Passion, and to tears as the meditator’s response. Drawing on a vast repertoire of canonical and largely unknown texts, it is argued that metaphors and imagery of fluidity linked to salvation negotiate the core soteriological conflict between the superabundance of divine grace, manifested in the shedding of Christ’s blood and the invincibility of the sacraments, and the abundance of human sin. This tension between the abundance of grace and human inadequacy often results in a specific dialectic (vertical vs. horizontal; abundance vs. paucity; contained vs. exuberant) and ultimately also concerns the nature of the media that express it, entailing poetological and mediological questions about the potential impact of human artefacts and the relationship between form and content. The semantics of fluidity provide a unique perspective for examining how boundaries between media are reflected and dissolved in the interplay of text and image, visual poetry, mise en page procedures and conceptual iconicity and acoustics. From this emerges a specific form of spiritual intermediality, the exploration of which promises new insights into the early modern understanding of divine grace and the problems of its medial translatability and comprehensibility. The project builds upon key arguments of the research unit about the relationship between vertical and horizontal intermediality to trace the directionality of divine mediation and the necessity of horizontal attempts at fixation through textual and pictorial representations of fluid media salutis. In three parallel fields of investigation, this subproject explores how early modern religious poetry and emblematics reflect both the possibilities and limitations of the media available to postlapsarian humankind in the meditative contemplation, poetic design, and intermedial staging of liquid substances as an expression of the divine mediation of salvation. In this respect, the project benefits hugely from the results obtained from the first funding period, which was concerned with the reflection on and constitution of media. Further, there are also plans to make early modern poetry accessible to an interested public.
DFG Programme
Research Units
