Denery Review

Bringing together scholarship on medieval optical science, theology and religious practice, Dallas G. Denery’s exploration of ‘seeing and being seen’ is strongly rooted in late medieval debates about and trends in epistemology: indeed, in many ways, it is a reflection on the limits and bounds of knowledge (of the self, of the world, of God) as mediated by sight and perceptual processes.

Denery’s analysis divides into two distinct parts: one (‘being seen’) tracing the role of representation in the religious technologies of knowledge (in particular that of self-knowledge, constructed through confession to a priest); the other (‘seeing’) examines the role of sight in acquiring knowledge and the resulting problem of visual error, which speaks more broadly to the conflict between study and religious life.

Seeing and Being Seen begins by establishing the context for a late-medieval religious preoccupation with vision by means of an examination of mendicant preaching and confessional practices. At once making a characteristic move to a very specific case in point, Denery outlines developments in the Dominican order, arguing that the twelfth-century emphasis on preaching led to a separation of study and prayer, to a move away from contemplation and to a growing need to be ‘learned’. Through a close reading of two thirteenth-century Dominican manuals – Humbert of Romans’ Liber de eruditione praedicatorum and an anonymous novice manual, Libellus de instructiones et consolatione novitiorum – Denery assesses the impact this move to preaching has on the importance of appearance and self-perception for the preacher, positing the emergence of an ‘heuristic of adaptation’.

However, inherent in this process, in which the preacher and novice become thoroughly public beings, is the problem of the relationship between self-presentation and the ‘real’ inner self. Now focusing on confessional manuals, Denery argues that the self-examination structured by confession leads to a particular kind of self-knowledge: through the complete statement of sin, the penitent comes to know the truth about him or herself. However, at the same time that a complete confession is urged the impossibility of such a confession is recognised. Denery therefore argues that the act of confession is open-ended; truth is always just out of reach and a proliferation of self-presentations ensues. The self-knowledge produced by confessional structures denies the penitent ‘any privileged, epistemological and private access to self.’ Instead, the self is ‘understood through its endless self-presentation’ and so the presence of self is infinitely deferred. By focusing almost exclusively on confessional handbooks, however, Denery’s argument privileges the (learned) knowledge of the priest over the experience of the (variously learned or ‘lewed’) confessant.

Having established seeing and being seen as fundamental preoccupations of medieval preaching and confession, Denery examines the impact of perspectivist optics (in particular, that derived from Alhacen’s De aspectibus (a1030)) on these preoccupations. It is this science of vision that, whilst generated in an elite university setting, Denery suggests feeds into and is evidence of the religious concerns about and uses for vision and visual analogy. To Denery’s mind these two strands – university and religious practice – come together in Peter of Limoges’ Tractatus moralis de oculo (1280), which applies perspectivist optics to spiritual life. Essentially, the Tractatus discloses the inadequacy of spiritual and physical vision, fostering a particular interest in visual error that Denery suggests ‘foreshadows fourteenth-century debates concerning the nature of vision and the distinction between what appears and what exists’.

The thesis therefore culminates in a discussion of debates about perceptual error, focusing on the works of two men at the University of Paris in the fourteenth-century, Peter Aureol and Nicholas Autrecourt. As Denery observes, Autrecourt’s preoccupation with visual error leads him to assert the notion of probability rather than of certitude; knowledge does not progress but goes in circles, leading – just as the proliferation of presentations of self in preaching and confession – to an endless deferral of knowledge of a thing. Thus, the conclusion reached by the end of Seeing and Being Seen is that ‘in a very real sense, the identity of the one who sees is constituted in and through what appears, multiplied, fragmented and forever deferred through the appearance.’

Although Denery argues that the importance of visual error was not restricted to university contexts but was ‘part of larger cultural and religious currents in which the (spiritual) experience of visual error had already come to occupy centre stage’ we are left with little indication of how this might filter through to everyday religious practise and individual experience. The broad claims of the title – seeing and being seen ‘in the Later Medieval World’ – are perhaps not fully borne out in the work; the popular reach and trajectory of the first part of the book narrows in the second part to the esoteric learning and debate of Parisian scholars, which leaves the reader with an enriched sense of optics and theology but a more impoverished sense of religious life.

Nonetheless, Seeing and Being Seen is a valuable work, both because it contributes to the important project of considering the confluence of science and religion and also because it foregrounds otherwise little-known and under-utilised texts in the field of medieval epistemology. If there is a limitation of Denery’s approach, however, it lies in the very fact of its valuation of vision over other sensory perceptions: thus he writes ‘in many respects, people had come to think of themselves in primarily visual terms’ – an assertion which seems to me to overlook the everyday experiences of pain and suffering, taste and touch, sound and smell that must very often have intruded upon and overwhelmed these ‘visionary terms’. Important works like Denery’s that further the study of medieval vision therefore need to be considered from the perspective of (and perhaps balanced by new scholarship on) the whole human being, and so also make account of hearing, olfaction, taste and touch.

Katie Walter, U. of Cambridge