Page - 23 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 23 being characterized as sinful, but such witness to private virtue is also an important saintly topos authenticating prayer.”68 St. Alban’s voyeurism becomes instrumental to his conversion just as the novices peeping at their master, St. Dominic, is instrumental to their training and their spiritual (as well as social) progress. I began this essay with Boccaccio’s novel about a monk and an abbot, whose hierarchical order is inverted when the abbot fails to obtain the voyeuristic gaze. The abbot, who was eaves- dropping on the sinners, acquired only partial information on the nature of the sins being committed, and therefore needed the actual sight of the maid in order to extract ‘truth’. His failure to effect surveillance through voyeurism became his trap: seeing the maid directly, face to face, and not watching her from a distance, he capitulated to his lust, objectifying himself to the peeping eyes of the monk and thereby losing his privileged position in the monastic hierarchy. The voyeuristic gaze thus appears as a powerful and subversive one. Such love narra- tives were not entirely fictional or disconnected from daily habits; voyeurism could constitute an effective legal means of collective surveillance, as demonstrated, for example, in Nuptial Books. These popular manuals intended for newlyweds illustrated the rituals connected to the first act of sexual intercourse, located within the sphere of procreation.69 A miniature from the Livre des Propriétez des Choses (how material things 5: Life of St. Alban, Alban spies Amphibalus before the Cross, ca. 1240, Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 177, fol. 31r 68 Hahn, Visio Dei (cit. n. 4), p. 176. 69 For an introduction, see for example: J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago 1987; M. Camille, Manuscript Illumination and the Art of Copulation, in: J. Schultz/K. Locherie/P.