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riotsquirrrl's review against another edition
3.0
Pictorial evidence: 4.5 stars
Accompanying text: 2 stars
In the accompanying text there's a lot of hand waving and a lot of supposed meanings for this motif; the most believable meaning from this book being that the green man was a depiction of Natural Law, inspiration, or is a depiction of holy speech. I don't really follow much of the earlier conjectures made from a couple of examples shorn of their context. The modern chapter could have been skipped entirely.
The black and white pictures work quite well instead of feeling dated. I'm not sure that the few color photos were made that much better for being in color. But otherwise this is a vast trove of images from across Northern Europe & do clearly show the evolution of the symbolism from man-who-vomits-leaves to man-who-is-leaves. A few I thought were edge cases but I think are still useful for comparison.
In general this ended up being a good addition to my interest in foliage in medieval art and I wish I had known about Hildegard of Bingen's book on plants about 10 years ago.
Accompanying text: 2 stars
In the accompanying text there's a lot of hand waving and a lot of supposed meanings for this motif; the most believable meaning from this book being that the green man was a depiction of Natural Law, inspiration, or is a depiction of holy speech. I don't really follow much of the earlier conjectures made from a couple of examples shorn of their context. The modern chapter could have been skipped entirely.
The black and white pictures work quite well instead of feeling dated. I'm not sure that the few color photos were made that much better for being in color. But otherwise this is a vast trove of images from across Northern Europe & do clearly show the evolution of the symbolism from man-who-vomits-leaves to man-who-is-leaves. A few I thought were edge cases but I think are still useful for comparison.
In general this ended up being a good addition to my interest in foliage in medieval art and I wish I had known about Hildegard of Bingen's book on plants about 10 years ago.
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