“O mother Europe […] ‘Old drunkard and madwoman’ Norwid wrote of you”, expressing his disillusionment with European civilisation, which has repeatedly in its history adopted, and continues to adopt today, this forlorn, clownish figure from the margins of culture. Foucault was right to ask, then, why Western culture had pushed to the periphery all that in which it stealthily recognised its own face. It is there, in the cultural dustbin of masks that have not undergone aesthetic or ideological recycling, that we find Anti-Beatrice, a figure who is the antithesis of all that is desirable and good. Her cultural nature is most fully revealed in her archaic figure of negation, an inappropriate image, something peculiar and disgusting at the same time; as ridiculous as she is, she fits into the most vile and perverse model of love. Her hortus deliciarum is the town’s bathhouse, brothel and infernal inn, where she, a drunken and frenzied old woman, is a mere prostitute, a panderer or, at most, a vicious bona and guardian of her young protégée’s ‘chastity’. She is one of the unexpected (anti-)incarnations of the Warburgian Nymph, an inverted nymph, an old jester, a non-beautiful figure, one of the ‘unbearable things’.

excerpt from the book

“A fascinating and disturbing image of old age, femininity and intoxication has been found and presented by the authors of this book. Undoubtedly, we are dealing here with an outstanding and in many respects innovative work, especially when it comes to combining literary and linguistic methods and the study of images. It is also a valuable work within cultural studies of a truly interdisciplinary nature. It is to be hoped that the intriguing subject matter and (here it is not a reviewer’s platitude) the controversial, shocking nature of the book will trigger readers’ interest and even fascination”.

From the review of prof. dr hab. Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel