Reviews and Features

"Spencer-Hall’s text is a perceptive interdisciplinary work that would be of benefit to scholars of religion and film both." - Stephen Okey Journal of Religion & Film (2021)

"This book is an innovative, interdisciplinary and informative study of an allegedly less well-covered topic in the medieval studies. It analyses the virtual worlds of the internet (...) as thoroughly as it deals with the female mystics of Liège. This book offers much inspiration for such dynamically developing disciplines as Fan, Audience and Celebrity Studies as well as Game Studies. Catholic Hagiography has never had a more skilled, feminist-secular female 'Influencer'." - Ludger Kaczmarek, MEDIENwissenschaft 03/2019 (originally published in German).

"Alicia Spencer-Hall’s Medieval Saints and Modern Screens is a work of impressive breadth and erudition that brings the study of hagiography in mediaeval scholarship into dialogue with contemporary issues of media materiality, ontology and embodiment in photography and film, as well as with the study of spectatorship, celebrity culture, fandoms and virtual environments." - Caroline Bem, Screen, Winter 2019

"For a reader who also approaches the medieval through medievalism, there is a lot to like here. The playful, lively and often 'heretical' reading of the Middle Ages offers an excellent pedagogical tool. Spencer-Hall’s refreshing re-reading of medieval sainthood thus resists any such outmoded and performative ‘contemptus mundi’ in order to lay the present alongside the past in (to adopt another film metaphor) a kind of Eisensteinian montage, a dialectical collision between the old and the new." - Andrew B.R. Elliott, English Historical Review, September 2019

"For researchers and students interested in medieval literature, hagiography, mysticism, theology, popular culture, fandom studies or any combination thereof, this volume is essential; Spencer-Hall masterfully takes the reader through a radically new perspective on a predominantly androcentric field of study, and in so doing, opens up anew both media theory and medieval studies through finding an unprecedented correspondence between the two." - Anthony Ballas, University of Colorado at Denver, Film & History Volume 49, Number 1, Summer 2019

"Medieval Saints and Modern Screens sparkles with moments of provocation and insight. It offers hope that modern life and thought might one day yield a true vision of life in the past. I expect that Spencer-Hall’s next book will truly dazzle us." - Lisa Bitel, University of Southern California, H-France Review, Volume 18 (2018)

"Medieval Saints produces a robust response to decades of neglect of hagiographical sources. Through her trans-temporal, transmedia study, Spencer-Hall repeatedly demonstrates how much the narratives of holy women might contribute to a number of studies outside the direct field of hagiography, including lay theology; the theorisation of vision and time; discussions of medieval self-creation; textual production and performance studies. While the lives of these women have frequently been marginalised in scholarship Spencer-Hall powerfully demonstrates their immediacy and relevance for our current times." - Daisy Black, University of Wolverhampton, Medievally Speaking.

"Medieval Saints and Modern Screens is a lively and engrossing book that brings theories from contemporary media studies together with medieval women mystics, particularly from the Liégeois corpus [...] The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the application of modern media studies to medieval contexts, and it should also prove useful to scholars who teach medieval hagiography, as it offers wonderful hooks for drawing students into these (frequently difficult) texts." - Jessica Barr University of Massachusetts Amherst, The Medieval Review.

Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience

This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.

Author

Alicia Spencer-Hall

Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (UK). Her research interests include medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture, and film and media studies.