Chapter 2 looks at the continuities in perception of the city between antiquity and the later period, looking at representations (images) and panegyrics. In terms of how cities were represented (especially in painting and sculpture), there is striking continuity in the emphasis on the wall circuit with gates and towers as the defining element of the city. The extensive tradition of panegyrics of individual cities (laudes urbium), the models set by Greek and Roman rhetorical manuals, was followed into the Middle Ages. The principal contrast lies in religion, but the economy, politics, and physical structures of the city are treated as belonging to a continuous tradition, and later cities are celebrated for the imitation of antiquity and, above all, of Rome.

Since Bonaventure could not generate an entire treatise out of one Psalm verse, instead we find in each chapter of the Itinerarium a host of divisions and sub-divisions borrowed from earlier texts. Sometimes he borrowed divisions from his own earlier works, especially his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. But in many cases, he borrowed divisions from other works, especially those of the Victorines and St. Augustine. In Chapter 3, “Where Did Bonaventure Get His Divisions?” I trace the sources of Bonaventure’s subsidiary divisions within each section of the Itinerarium and show how tracing these divisions back to their sources can help the reader better understand what Bonaventure is trying to accomplish. I give special attention to the sources of Bonaventure’s key distinction between “vestiges,” “images,” and “likenesses” of God and the distinction between “seeing through” and “seeing in.”

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

This Introduction configures Messiaen’s life and works, and the culture, aesthetics, and legacy of his art in terms of various kinds of images. In particular, this chapter focuses on the complexity and construction of these images, which are sometimes surprising and contradictory, to reveal the ‘contexts’ that inform this book.

This chapter re-examines the image of a canopied building supported by columns that often appears as the concluding page to the prefatory paratext to the gospels known as the Canon Tables, which was devised by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century. A catalogue of surviving examples of the so-called tholos image is provided, followed by an argument that the image is underdetermined and polyvalent, and that it operates together with the rest of the Canon Tables decorative scheme to invite an imaginative response from the viewer. The latter half of the chapter turns to two texts in Eusebius’ corpus to elucidate the way in which he used sacred architecture as a means of mapping the theological truths and ritual activities associated with such spaces. The same approach can be applied to the architectural decorative scheme adorning the Canon Tables, including its richly symbolic tholos, which can be seen as a potent symbol that can be activated through a biblically inspired ekphrasis and used as a ‘cognitive machine’ to theorise Christian knowledge and practice.

In this chapter we review the research evidence on the relationship between social media use and self-harm. There is much discussion about the possible role of social media in rising rates of self-harm, seen especially in young girls, a discussion that is accompanied by a worry that there may be an associated increased risk of death by suicide. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to go into detail about current understanding of why some people self-harm and some die by suicide - suffice to say that reasons for both are complex and multifactorial. Here we focus specifically on what we know about any potential role of social media and discuss possible mechanisms of action towards harm or benefit in relation to self-harm content.

1986 marked a fresh departure in W.G. Sebald’s literary œuvre. Having written poetry for decades and, for a short time, worked on experimental scripts, Sebald reinvented himself as a prose writer and concentrated on fashioning an innovative form of highly stylized, illustrated docufiction. From approximately July 1986 to early 1988, he worked on a first collection of literary prose that had no official working title and was usually referred to simply as the Prose Project. An unsuccessful funding application provides a detailed insight into what the overall project was supposed to look like, but while Sebald worked on it, the project underwent adaptations and was never published in the originally envisaged form. This essay considers archival material relating to the Prose Project, which reveals the common origins of Vertigo and The Emigrants, and assesses the development of Sebald’s ground-breaking intermedial process and the poetological implications of his turn towards narrative prose.

This chapter is centered on the scientific conceptualization of the term “photography” and its relationship with the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer, including that which is existent between the photographer and the camera, especially the chemistry between both lenses — biological and technological — the synergy and the differences. Photographs, according to the chapter, are representations of the reality of a particular timeframe. By answering certain expedient questions, the author engages his collections (with pictorial evidence) to illustrate the nature of photography vis-à-vis other factors that contribute to the shot, such as the camera and how it is received by the people. Moreover, the chapter views photography as a “social contract” between the photographer and the photographed, and “construction” as the process of taking the shot and reproducing the image. As for the interpretation of the picture by the viewer, it is believed that the pictures themselves dictate how they are to be interpreted or engaged, although this is also highly dependent on the viewer’s understanding. In addition, the chapter explores the effect of photography at its dawn and what its exclusion of African peculiarity, color-wise, meant.

This chapter analyses the move of historians away from text and towards the interpretation of visuals. Starting with art history’s turn to the social and the cultural, it traces the interest of historians for an ever wider group of images, including popular images. It also highlights the emergence of perspectivalism and transdisciplinarity in the field of visual history. The main bulk of the chapter is taken up with presenting a range of examples showing how the visual turn in historical writing has contributed to deconstructing national identites, class identities and racial/ethnic identities. Ranging widely across different parts of the globe it also discusses the deconstruction of religious and gender identities through visual histories that have in total contributed much towards a much higher self-reflexivity among historians when it comes to the construction of collective identities through historical writing.

The fifth chapter provides a synoptic chapter about the objects of theoria, both as they relate to traditional theoria and to philosophical theoria. The objects of the former kind of theoria, namely, festival- and sanctuary-attendance, are the images of the gods on temples or the gods themselves. In the case of philosophical theoria, or contemplation, the objects are more abstract entities, namely, forms, that Plato and Aristotle take to comprise the highest objects of philosophical study, or contemplation. The philiosophers consider that when we apprehend these objects, we are in possession of scientific knowledge that they compare to divine activity. In both kinds, the apprehension of the objects of theoria is reached through an activity that is directly perceptual or mediated by perceptual experience.

This introduction focuses on how dead body images, seen as taboo, are framed in various ways to humanize or dehumanize the dead. The graphic nature of images of the dead in humanitarianism is framed as precisely what provides the grounds for their power to effect change; the social and cultural taboo against viewing dead bodies means that when we are invited to view them, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and viewing is itself posited as a political act. Yet critics have raised the issue of voyeurism, pain porn, or compassion fatigue. In the context of dead enemy bodies, images of enemy dead are often viewed in a context that perpetuates a distancing between the viewer and the subject of the image, designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred, and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy. These framings are introduced precisely because the binary between bodies we display and bodies we don’t display needs to be examined and problematized. This begins to illustrate what is at stake in the context of the politics of emotion, in the sense that emotions are constructed and shaped through binaries of self and other, though these distinctions are always tentative.

Focus on multimodality looks beyond spoken and written language to how people communicate about their religious experiences using other resources, like gesture, showing how insights can be gleaned about how people think and talk about their experiences by specifically looking at how they gesture.