Summary

A challenging issue in the field of religious studies is the relationship between preaching and art, particularly the manner in which preachers used works of art in their preaching and described specific pictures in their sermons; the way theological discourse influenced religious architecture; and the form and function of the preaching platform, whether a pulpit in Christianity, the minbar in Islam, or the bima in Judaism. There is a growing interest in the interrelationships among art, performance, and preaching in the early modern world; there has also been recent engagement in the way visual culture enhanced the power that preachers had over their audiences, and the interactions between preaching and visual culture in the various European and Mediterranean communities. When approaching this topic, one should apply an interdisciplinary approach by focusing across the historical, literary, and art-history fields in the increasingly active area of global studies. One should also consider the interactions between the visual and the verbal; the exchange between sermons and images, preaching and the arts through the lens of performance theory and models of word and image; and the exchange between textual and visual cultures.