The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

of Nola created a context for apprehending body parts as relics by exercising what I have called a corporeal imagination, one that uses textual images whose ocular and affective immediacy contributes to, or even creates, the religious significance of the thing that is their focus. Their powerful verbal representations, often in the form of ekphrases, were a major component of the aesthetic style that vested in bones a signifying capacity that marked their emergence as relics. Further, their reliance on “dazzle”—that is, on the aesthetic sensibility associated with the late ancient cultural taste for color and brilliance—will be presented as an important contributor to the sensuously intense atmosphere within which the cult of relics achieved expression. Here, the “dissonant echoing” discussed in the previous chapter, which denotes a sensibility that avoided complete identification between matter and meaning, will be presented in terms of a poetics of the body that deformed ordinary perception in order to produce the figural gaze so crucial to the cult of relics.