This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

Acknowledgements Notes on the Editors Notes on the Contributors List of Illustrations Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image WALTER S. MELION, CELESTE BRUSATI AND KARL ENENKEL I. VERBUM VISIBLE: THE AUTHORITY OF THE VISIBLE WORD The Dominican, the Duke and the Book. The Authority of the Written Word in Dirc van Delft’s Tafel vanden kersten gelove GEERT WARNAR Producing Texts for Prints: Artists, Poets and Publishers PETER VAN DER COELEN Embodying Hermeneutics: Rabelais and the Pythagorean Symbola ANITA TRANINGER Nature Discerned: Providence and Perspective in Gilles van Coninxloo’s Sylva CATHERINE LEVESQUE II. THE AUTHORITY OF VISUAL PARATEXTS The Author’s Portrait as Reader’s Guidance: The Case of Francis Petrarch KARL A.E. ENENKEL Solomon Writing and Resting: Tradition, Words and Images in the 1548 Dutch “Louvain Bible” WIM FRANÇOIS III. READING SCRIPTURE THROUGH IMAGES Eloquent Presence: Verbal and Visual Discourse in the Ghent Plays of 1539 BART RAMAKERS The Earthly Paradise: Herri met de Bles’s Visual Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 MICHEL WEEMANS Representations of Adam and Eve in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Embroidery ANDREW MORRALL IV. VERBAL AND VISUAL INSTRUMENTS OF DEVOTIONAL AUTHORITY “Practical Devotion”: Apotropaism and the Protection of the Soul JOHN R. DECKER Highways to Heaven (and Hell): Wayside Crosses and the Making of Late Medieval Landscape ACHIM TIMMERMANN Images, Rubrics and Indulgences on the Eve of the Reformation KATHRYN M. RUDY The Stigmata Debate in Theology and Art in the Late Middle Ages CAROLYN MUESSIG Towards a Transconfessional Dialogue on Pre-Modern Theological Texts and Images: Some Adnotationes on Nadal, Lipsius and Rubens BIRGIT ULRIKE MÜNCH Responding to Tomb Monuments: Meditations and Irritations of Aernout van Buchel in Rome (1587 – 1588) JAN L. DE JONG Miracle Books and Religious Architecture in the Southern Netherlands. The Case of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen MAARTEN DELBEKE V. PICTORIAL ARTIFICE AND THE WORD Prayerful Artifice: The Fine Style as Marian Devotion in Hieronymus Wierix’s Maria of ca. 1611 WALTER S. MELION Secret Wisdom: Antoon Wierix’s Engravings of a Carmelite Mystic JAMES CLIFTON Working the Senses with Words: The Act of Religious Reading in the Dutch Republic ELS STRONKS