Reading Images focuses on the multi-layered relationships between the textual image and its reader-viewer in the Apocalypse manuscripts produced in England during the thirteenth century, a period of profound changes in the social and cultural fabric. The exponential expansion in the production and dissemination of illuminated manuscripts that occurred at this time provided a critical, cultural mechanism for the creation of new technologies of the self. Within the framework of this newly-discernible subjectivity, Suzanne Lewis examines how reader-viewers cultivated the art of memory and contemporary theories of vision, which invested images with the power to promote memory and offer spiritual sustenance, and also to articulate and activate dominant ideological positions regarding the self, society, and the 'other'. As the Apocalypse narrative was visualised in pictures, it became a powerful paradigm within which problematic contemporary experiences such as anti-Judaism, the later Crusades, and expectations of the world's end could be defined.
Reading Images explores the kinds of contemporary mythologies that constitute ideology, a realm in which visual representation becomes an agent rather than a reflector of social change.