{"title":"Mitchell B Merback","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"thief-the-cross-and-the-wheel-book-mitchell-b-merback-9781861890986","title":"The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel","description":"When spectators in the Middle Ages examined images of Christ's crucifixion on Mount Calvary, did they ever consider them as representations of capital punishment? This book traces out the extraordinary connections between religious devotion, bodily pain, criminal justice and judicial spectatorship to explain why this was so.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49569454948625,"sku":"GOR004302867","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1861890982.jpg?v=1750964562"},{"product_id":"thief-the-cross-and-the-wheel-book-mitchell-b-merback-9780226520155","title":"The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel","description":"This text reconstructs the religious, legal and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is an account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience. Mitchell Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. He explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50658458009873,"sku":"CIN0226520153G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226520153.jpg?v=1751037703"},{"product_id":"perfection-s-therapy-book-mitchell-b-merback-9781942130000","title":"Perfection's Therapy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlbrecht D rer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled \u003ci\u003eMelencolia I\u003c\/i\u003e, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the image of images for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, \u003ci\u003eMelencolia I\u003c\/i\u003e also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In \u003ci\u003ePerfection's Therapy\u003c\/i\u003e, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in \u003ci\u003eMelencolia'\u003c\/i\u003es opacity, its structural chaos, and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that D rer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMerback deftly resituates D rer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing D rer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths D rer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the Apelles of the black line in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the D rer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. \u003ci\u003eMelencolia\u003c\/i\u003e thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054303412497,"sku":"NIN9781942130000","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1942130007.jpg?v=1751187735"},{"product_id":"pilgrimage-and-pogrom-book-mitchell-b-merback-9780226520193","title":"Pilgrimage and Pogrom","description":"In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, \"Pilgrimage and Pogrom\" reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation. Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, \"Pilgrimage and Pogrom\" is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53336301830417,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53336302321937,"sku":"NGR9780226520193","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226520193.jpg?v=1774307645"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-mitchell-b-merback.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}