History and Images: Towards a New Iconology

This versatile collection of essays sets out to underline the new visual agenda in today’s research into history and the history of art. The impact of alternative imagery, of image databases and of computer-generated material has effectively revealed a separate resource-category, offering further definitions of meaning and information and requiring new methodologies of interpretation. The volume’s subtitle, ‘Towards a New Iconology’, makes the point that our conventional approaches towards the image may no longer be adequate. Its nineteen contributions all represent a moving-away from the tradition passed down ever since Gregory the Great famously pronounced images to be the Bible of the illiterate. On the contrary, the authors of this volume demonstrate that images constitute another world altogether, with its own ideology and store of information, and with its own emotional charge and seductive qualities. History and Images contains articles by eminent scholars from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and USA.