Blurred boundaries in pre-modern texts and images: Aspects of audiences and readers-viewers responses

This article explores recent scholarship on the dynamic interaction among artistic manifestations of various categories, such as sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and conflicting emotions in pre-modern texts and images. Inspired by Hans Georg Gadamer's perspective on interpretation and reader-response criticism, it examines how audiences perceived and received these works from a socio-historical standpoint. Relevant research reveals that medieval societies did not rigidly adhere to these cognitive categories as absolute dichotomies. Instead, for reading communities, art viewers, and object users, these categories are often blended, negotiated, and intertwined with one another. This perspective challenges earlier paradigms that depicted domains such as sacred and secular as separate and hierarchical. It argues that medieval audiences adeptly navigated between the holy and the mundane, embracing the fluidity of these concepts without experiencing cognitive dissonance. The aesthetic preferences of the authors and artists played a significant role in connecting the moral and spiritual dimensions of artistic works with everyday life experiences, presenting a pre-modern understanding of the permeability of these concepts.