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Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), perhaps the most famous of all German artists, embodies the modern ideal of the Renaissance man—he was a remarkable painter, printmaker, draftsman, designer, theoretician, and even a poet. More is known about his thoughts and his life than about any other Northern European master of his time, since he wrote extensively about himself, his family's history, his travels, and his friends. His woodcuts and engravings were avidly collected and copied across Europe, and they quickly established his reputation as a master. Praised in life and elegized in death by such thinkers as Martin Luther and Erasmus, he served Emperor Maximilian and other leading church and secul...
Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.
This interdisciplinary collection addresses the location of women and their bequests within the single most important public and social space in pre-Reformation Europe: the Roman Catholic Church. This innovative focus brings attention to gender and space as experienced in the medieval parish as well as in monastic and cathedral space. Through provocative handling of historical content and theory, the contributors explore strategies of exclusion and of inclusion and note patterns of later writers who neglect or rewrite records of female presence. Essays on the York religious cycle, the chronicle of the monastery at Ely, and The Book of Margery Kempe explore how medieval writers used texts as fictive spaces on which to graft responses to the gendered uses of real church buildings. These text-based essays are juxtaposed with tightly focused archival research in art history and history on Florentine patronage and English parish seating, as well as with more broadly synthetic studies on access of women to shrines and on gendered left-right placement in ritual art.
Based on papers given by historians, art historians and musicologists during two conferences devoted to memoria in the Middle Ages, held in Utrecht in 2000 and 2001.
The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women is the first volume exclusively devoted to an examination of the significant role played by women as patrons in the evolution of medieval culture. The twelve essays in this volume look at women not simply as patrons of letters but also as patrons of the visual and decorative arts, of architecture, and of religious and educational foundations. Patronage as a means of empowerment for women is an issue that underlies many of the essays. Among the other topics discussed are the various forms patronage took, the obstacles to women's patronage, and the purposes behind patronage. Some women sought to further political and dynastic agendas; others were more c...
Studies the thought and actions of the Reformation's central figures - reformers, counter-reformers, and their supporters - in the light of ordinary people.
What is the sixth sense? Is it physical, mental or spiritual? Do we all possess it or is it unique to exceptional individuals? Might there be a seventh sense and an eighth sense as well? What role does culture play in determining the range of our perceptual abilities? The search for a supplementary sense has taken many directions and yielded numerous possibilities for an "additional faculty" of perception - from magnetism and movement to dreaming and clairvoyance. Stimulating reflection and debate, The Sixth Sense Reader explores the cultural contexts which give rise to such reports of "psychic" and other powers that exceed the ordinary bounds of sense. In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation.
English In Eine wahrhaft königliche Stadt, Daniela Kah describes how contemporary residents and visitors were able to experience and perceive the presence of the Holy Roman Empire (or its representatives, e.g., the king) in three late medieval cities -- Augsburg, Nürnberg and Lübeck. After receiving privileges from the king, these cities initiated large construction projects designed to assert their imperial status. These projects had a major impact on everyday life and made the Empire visible and graspable within the city. However, in the 13th century the cities increasingly deployed symbols and signs to represent their self-understanding as 'imperial'. ‘Being immediate to the Empireâ€...
New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental...
The twenty-four studies in this volume propose a new approach to framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women, moving beyond today's standard division of artist from patron.