Art, devotion, and the utility of sight in the Carolingian Church

This thesis is an exploration of Carolingian art within the context of religious devotion. The second chapter investigates the theoretical aspects related to the use of images by examining historical sources. These texts offer insight both into the types of anxieties images raised as well as contemporary attempts to reconcile these concerns. In order to determine how these theories were put into practice, the third chapter considers the manners in which the visual experience was orchestrated. To do so, shrines and reliquaries, as well as textual accounts describing encounters with them, are used to explore the messages that religious art conveyed and the means by which they did so. The fourth chapter focuses on the figure of the maker of sacred art. The theories of religious art and implementation of them, as discussed in Chapters II and III, fundamentally relied on the craftsman who fashioned them.