How to recognize a Gospel when you see one: Canonical systems and the intersection of signification between biblical interpretation and art in late medieval Europe

Utilizing literary theory, this dissertation explores the ways communities receive texts and images by exploring why seemingly different contextual frames utilize texts and images similarly. By using discourse analysis, the concept of community reception broadens to incorporate discursive tendencies within the context of what has been called the Christian life. By using the discursive totality of the Christian life to investigate the canonical systems of monasticism and scholasticism, a shift in discursive formation can be seen as it manifested in the interpretive system of the four fold senses of the Bible.;When the convergence of a variety of points created space, in the newly developed academy during the later Middle Ages, for the introduction of Aristotle into Christian discourse, demonstrated by scholastic biblical interpretation, there entered into the discourse of the Christian life a theoretical shift from the spiritual sense as the goal of biblical studies, the interpretive goal during the earlier medieval period, to the literal sense, the goal in the later Middle Ages. No longer did the literal serve as a crust to be penetrated in order to reach the Platonic higher goal of the spiritual; instead, meaning rose to meet the literal as the Aristotelian shift in discourse allowed the spiritual to be contained in the literal. This shift served to flatten the possibilities of interpretive motifs available in the later medieval period.;Biblical studies in the Middle Ages demonstrated this shift as one compares the interpretative moves in monastic and scholastic texts. One hundred years later, a similar shift occurred in the artistic depictions the Life of Christ found in different devotional biblical codices. Since the interest in the literal narrative movement of the life of Christ coincided with the shift in interpretive focus, artists often utilized elements of non-canonical Gospels to fill in gaps left in the canonical telling.;Therefore, how to recognize a Gospel functions as a means to consider assumptions of what is typically defined as a Gospel in the discursive totality of the Christian life, and to suggest that the history of interpretation and influence offers surprising answers to the question that still has implications for the reception of what is a Gospel in contemporary western culture.