The invention of the printing press shifted Western Civilization from an image culture to a text culture. What did we gain and what did we lose in that process?
One thing that should be added which complicates but reinforces your main point: Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory shows convincingly that medieval approaches to text were highly memorial (because books are scarcer, you as reader have to commit more to memory), and that practically this means making use of mental images among other techniques to memorize text. So on the one hand it’s not that the elite are only textual, but that their way of being textual is highly bound to the image.
One thing that should be added which complicates but reinforces your main point: Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory shows convincingly that medieval approaches to text were highly memorial (because books are scarcer, you as reader have to commit more to memory), and that practically this means making use of mental images among other techniques to memorize text. So on the one hand it’s not that the elite are only textual, but that their way of being textual is highly bound to the image.
Bravo! The importance of art for the understanding of theology cannot be overstated.