The grotesque Middle Ages. Research and medieval reversal

The theme of this article are the grotesque and obscene aspects of medieval art, and how this phenomenon has been dealt with in art historical study during the last ten to fifteen years. It begins by asking, as did Umberto Eco in his essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages", why we dream of the Middle Ages, and what reasons might lie behind a scholarly interest in the bodily and burlesque features of medieval art. It continues by tracing the bachtinian (as in the russian theorist Michael Bachtin) influence in the writings of Michael Camille on obscenities in medieval art. In doing this, it argues that Camille's emphasis on medieval art as ambiguous, to a large part emanates from a postmodernist fascination with transformation, bybridity, liminality and irrationality. As for the actual understanding of the imagery, Camille's interpretative frame works mainly to confirm the idea about the medieval culture as an arena of confronting dichotomies: noble/vile, sacred/ profane, spiritual/carnal. The last part of the paper reviews a number of studies of base and blasphemous motifs in Scandinavian medieval art. It concludes that even if the theoretical framework of postmodern thought is manifest in recent writings, Scandinavian scholars in general have remained firmly rooted in the conviction that the motifs in question are best understood as part of the moral catechization of the Church.