Brigitte Buettner is Louise I. Doyle ’34 Professor of Art at Smith College. She is the author of Boccaccio’s “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript.
Reading The Mineral and the Visual made me feel like a student again, filled with curiosity and excitement. This book is rich, interesting, complex, refreshing. -Elina Gertsman, author of The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books The Mineral and the Visual offers readers a rich and compelling journey through the world of medieval minerals. Of interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike, it advances theoretical and methodological discussions of materials and materiality and expands our ideas about stones, gems, and the natural world. Weaving together a vast array of sources, both textual and visual, Buettner's study presents a new understanding of the field of discourse in which these fascinating objects operated. -Heidi Gearhart, author of Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art Buettner weaves together scintillating description, meticulous scholarship, and current theory to create an unrivaled picture of her subject. She makes the case that gems are the apex of materials: substances that are active, global, exotic (and paradisaical), kingly, and in all ways powerful. -Cynthia Hahn, author of Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204 The way the author combines stones with ideas . . . and the economics behind them over a longer period of time is innovative, and based on a richness in sources that is as dazzling as the medieval artworks discussed themselves. -Sigrid van Roode, Bedouin Silver