Veiling: Mourning between Body and Image
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In late medieval Europe, veils signified mourning by covering either images or bodies. During Lent, they were draped over religious images in an iconoclastic gesture that marked Christ’s suffering and death, setting the stage for their dramatic unveiling on Good Friday to enact his resurrection. Similarly, mourners wore black robes that covered their heads and bodies during funerals. Though these two practices have been studied separately, this paper examines them together by comparing two sets of images: depictions of the veiled Christ in scenes of the Mocking, and representations of mourners, especially those on the tomb of Louis of Laval in his book of hours. I argue that Lenten veiling, funerary robes, and images of the veiled Christ all perform a state of ‘deanimation’, a suspended condition between life and death. Veiling enacts this by treating bodies like images (through iconoclastic concealment) and images like bodies (by presenting them as suffering). Building on studies by Amy Knight Powell and Noa Turel, I adopt the term ‘deanimation’ to show how these visual performances draw on Pauline image theology: the idea of Christ as both body and image, and the Church as his body awaiting transformation into his image at the Last Judgement. This theological framework also helps explain the hierarchical distinctions expressed through mourning robes, which have previously been described as a ‘liminal’ form of dress. Given the Church is a collective body, its images do not ‘constitute’ bodies, to draw on frameworks analysed in the introduction to this collection, as though images and bodies were clearly distinct. The ‘deanimate’ body, whether individual or collective, is rather both body and image, articulating mourning for the dead in being bodies that do not yet conform to the image of Christ.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".