Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the place of tears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural discourses, providing a key resource for scholars interested in exploring medieval notions of emotion, gesture, and sensory experience in a variety of cultural contexts.

Gertsman brings together essays that establish a series of conversations with one another, foregrounding...

In Worlds Within, Elina Gertsman investigates the Shrine Madonnas, or Vierges ouvrantes--sculptures that conceal within their bodies complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s and reached a peak of popularity during the following three centuries. Gertsman argues that the appearance of these objects--predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation--points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex, performative ways in which audiences were expected to engage...