This study brings together for the first time scholars of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and music to reconstruct the complex intersection between art, architecture and sound in the medieval world. Case studies explore how ambient and programmatic sound, including chant and speech, and its opposite, silence, interacted with objects and the built environment to create the multisensory experiences that characterized medieval life.
Medieval art has most often been extracted from its audible ambience, denying us means to understand the way it would have been experienced in a sonic context. Although sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. This volume brings together specialists in architecture, manuscript illumination, and musicology to reconsider the relationship between sound and image in the visual cultures of eastern and western Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The authors of Resounding Images take a variety of approaches to the now-missing intersection between the visual and the aural.