"Judging a book by its cover": meditation, memory, and invention in seventeenth-century Ukrainian title pages. Issue 1 (3rd April 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bartolini, Maria Grazia
• Is Part Of: Canadian Slavonic papers. Volume 59:Issue 1/2(2017)
• Page Start: 21
• Page End: 55
• Publication Date: 2017-04-03
• Subjects: Visual paratext -- title pages -- meditation -- memory -- seventeenth-century Ukraine -- Baranovych -- Radyvylovs'kyi; Slavic philology -- Periodicals; 891.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2017.1302644
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0008-5006

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article concerns the use of visual paratexts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, and of illustrated title pages in particular. The books under analysis represent three crucial monuments of seventeenth-century Ukrainian sacred oratory. These are: Lazar Baranovych's Truby sloves propovidnykh na narochityia dni prazdnikov (Kyiv, 1674), and Antonii Radyvylovs'kyi's Ohorodok Marii Bohorodytsy (Kyiv, 1676) and his Vinets Khrystov z propovidii nedelnykh (Kyiv, 1688). The author concentrates on the "cognitive" aspect of their titular pages, dealing with them as a rhetorical process that emphasizes meditation, invention, and memory. More specifically, she investigates the correlation between the visual and the written as a specific literary-figurative "mode of thought" that stands in a long Christian tradition of expounding images as meditational tools. She shows how Baranovych and Radyvylovs'kyi interact with this tradition, arguing that their title pages provide readers-viewers with both a machina meditativa, a meditative apparatus for reflecting upon the mystery of the Incarnation, and a machina rhetorica, a repertory of images that the users of the books, often themselves preachers, could use to compose new texts.