Kloster Champmol - Thresholds and boundaries: liminality in Netherlandish art (1385-1530)

Part I
Introduction

Part II
Case studies

Part III
Studies in format

Part IV
Coda

The idea for this book arose thanks to Jeffrey Hamburger, who asked me, after I had presented a paper on relations between triptychs and manuscript illumination, Arent you really just talking about liminality? He was right: thats what I was talking about. And so spurred by the encouragement of Erika Gaffney and Allison Levy I decided to keep talking about it.

In preparing this book I am particularly grateful to my anthropologist colleagues Tim Landry and especially JoAnn DAlisera, who patiently got me up to speed on van Gennep and Victor Turner, answered innumerable questions and suggested many useful references. I would also like to thank the many scholars for their help with this project, especially Ann Adams, Anne Margreet As-Vijvers, Douglas Brine, Gregory Clark, Lynda Coon, Raymond Eichmann, Wayne Franits, Paul Freedman, John Friedman, Thomas Kren, Sherry Lindquist, Heidi de Mare, Michele Marincola, James Marrow, Leo Mazow, Elizabeth Morrison, Marius Rimmele, William Robinson, Frank Scheide, Heike Schlie, Kim Sexton, Larry Silver, John Treat, and Diane Wolfthal and the late David Smith. The library staff at the University of Arkansas especially the wonderful folks at Interlibrary Loan and the indefatigable Phillip Jones, Associate Librarian at the University of Arkansas were unfailingly and enormously helpful. David Chioffi kindly gave of his time and his amazing design skills to help me with the cover design. Portions of initials drafts of this book were presented at conferences the New Perspectives on Flemish Illumination colloquium in Brussels (2011), the College Art Association conference (2013), and the Foldable Pictures conference in Zurich (2014); I very grateful to the organizers of these conferences for including me, and I benefitted much from the comments I received from other participants. I am very, very grateful to Todd Shields, Dean of Fulbright College, for providing financial support for the production costs of this book and for his continued support for the advancement of research at the University of Arkansas. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Jeremy Hyman, who offered help with a myriad of scholarly, transportation and cyber problems that arose during this work, and my son, Jonah, who brought much needed levity to the project with his regular reminders that in his opinion liminality wasnt a real word an opinion with which I, of course, respectfully disagree.

The term liminality is not used in everyday conversation. But the term threshold and its conception as the sill of a doorway, the entrance to a building or the point of entering or beginning is a quite common and not particularly obscure word. So while liminality is a technical term with a large body of scholarly literature exploring its meaning and implications in quite sophisticated, theoretical ways the terms links to the notions of the threshold and the boundary mean that liminality is rooted in very basic human experiences.

Arnold van Gennep, an anthropologist, is credited with having invented the term liminality in his 1909 book, Les Rites de passage. In this book, van Gennep focused on identifying and characterizing rituals that enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined social transitions that included, for example, birth, social puberty, marriage, parenthood, advancement to a higher class and death.

Van Genneps analysis of rites of passage and, in particular, the liminal phase of rites of passage had little scholarly impact until these ideas were probed and developed in the work of another anthropologist, Victor Turner. Turner would come to call this kind of comradeship communitas.