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Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300-1600 ce) . Edited by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger . Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia. Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection , 2016. x + 294 pp. $75.00 cloth.
Book Reviews and Notes
The relationship between image and text has a long and complex history. Emerging from the 2012 conference at Dumbarton Oaks, the essays collected in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300-1600c.e.), edited by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, comment and expand on this history in exciting ways. In their introduction, the editors describe the volume's intentional shift from "an interest in text and image to a concern for the dialogic role of image in writing," which in turn corresponds to a shift from the binary of image and text to a quintet of "the interactive grouping of support, space, letter, image, and word" (2). One of the goals of Sign and Design is described as pausing "before considering the reference, meaning, or agency of scripted material so as to capture the moment when the hand drew the letters, remembering them not only as shapes but also as gestures of devotion, worship, ritualistic performance, public statement, and cosm(et)ic illumination" (14). That is, this collection of essays assesses the visual, communicative, and performative functions of image as text and text as image, as well as a range of phenomena in between....