| This dissertation argues that, for scholars and enthusiasts of the late-medieval world, 'misericords'---decorative carvings on a class of liturgical furniture---evince long-forgotten aspects of the social and religious milieu which inspired and produced them. Each chapter seeks to incorporate the circumstances, literary and historical, that gave rise to multiple subjective viewing experiences in the English later Middle Ages. To this end, I focus on the range of interpretive possibilities which would have (or could have) been available to a clerical viewer with a certain degree of cultural and religious literacy, arguing that the cultural memes and ideas which informed any given clerical 'reading' of a seemingly secular misericord scene were always highly metonymic and based on a range of shifting visual signs and metaphysical signifiers.;Medieval clerics were adept at symbolic interpretation, yet they were not formulaic analysts. This study argues that the socio-cultural discourses behind any given medieval artwork were generally formulated long before its creation; by, for instance, venerable Church Fathers, homilists, and anonymous writers remembered only as fountains of folk wisdom. That is, it is heavily invested in shifting the paradigm away from staid analyses of artistic intention in order to open the image to the more myriad possibilities for viewer reception. Ultimately, I use misericords as a case study to suggest that even the humblest creations of men can be read through the lens provided by a range of medieval literary and historical texts---as well as comparative artistic media---to peel back layers of time, thereby recovering points of contact between secular and religious attitudes toward a variety of themes, topics, and ideas. |
