Chapter 24. “Textual images” and “visual texts”

Abstract

Since the dawn of literature, text and image have accompanied one another not merely as competing but also as cooperating media. Based on theoretical considerations of their relationship and their expressive possibilities on the one hand, and on the conditions of the culture of writing and images in antiquity and late antique Christianity on the other, this piece portrays the collaboration between text and image to aid the reader across genres and throughout the ages with an outlook towards vernacular literature and translations.