Ebook: Desiring Truth: The Process of Judgment in Fourteenth-Century Art and Literature

This is a book inspired by frustration and delight in almost equal measure, provoked by the elusiveness of much of the great art and literature of the fourteenth century. I initially came to the literature of this period expecting to find systematic order and coherent structure underpinning the wealth of narrative detail; I hoped eventually to be able to "crack the code" of Ricardian texts, and define their meaning once and for all. I What I found instead, of course, seemed closer to bedlam: unstable narrators; multiple authorial revisions; scribal variation; tangential marginalia; bewildering programs of illustration; unsatisfactory conclusions, to name but a few familiar, irreconcilable elements of fourteenth-century art, which confront the reader/viewer with detail that seems to proliferate even as he or she engages with it. Eventually, though, it was the realization that we do still engage with fourteenth-century art, despite its complexities and the lack of closure, that encouraged me to approach these texts in a different way. I came to believe that fourteenth-century texts invite us to interpret them, to reach conclusions, but offer no hope of satisfaction, so that the participation of the reader or viewer (who is sometimes one and the same) becomes integral co each work as a whole. Texts from this period very often demand and depend upon such a relationship in the production of meaning: judgment, the willed act of moral engagement, therefore becomes a process, a living, evolving relationship, an open circuit between text and respondent.