You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a narrative account of the crusades in the twelfth century, but a group of studies illustrating many aspects of crusading that are often passed over in narrative histories, including the courses and historiog...
King David if one of the most central figures in all of the major monotheistic traditions. He generally connotes the heroic past of the (more imagined than real) ancient Israelite empire and is associated with messianic hopes for the future. Nevertheless, his richly ambivalent and fascinating literary portrayal in the Hebrew Bible is one of the most complex of all biblical characters. This volume aims at taking a new, critical look at the process of biblical creation and subsequent exegetical transformation of the character of David and his attributed literary composition (the Psalms), with particular emphasis put on the multilateral fertilization and cross-cultural interchanges among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
This collection includes essays on the visual experience and material culture at medieval pilgrimage shrines of northern Europe and the British Isles, particularly the art and architecture created to intensify spiritual experience for visitors. These studies focus on regional pilgrimage centers which flourished from the 12th-16th centuries, addressing various aspects of visual imagery and architectural space which inspired devotees to value cults of enshrined saints and to venerate them in memory from afar. Subjects include pilgrim dress, jeweled and painted reliquaries, labyrinths, elaborate processions, printed texts of the saint's life, shrines, sculpture and other architectural decoratio...
Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of ...
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy" by Charles W. David. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Constantinople was well known in its heyday for the enormous collection of relics housed in its churches: bones, even whole bodies and intimate possessions of holy men and women. Almost all these objects had been imported from various parts of the Roman Empire between the late 4th to the 10th centuries. They had been acquired because they were believed to have miraculous powers to ward off enemies, to heal sicknesses and to ensure that the capital was indeed the "God-guarded" (Theophylaktos) city it believed itself to be. These studies examine the means by which relics were acquired, the ways in which they were used and some of the reasons why for so long they were believed to be effective. The role of relics in the development of the cult of the Mother of God (Theotokos) is discussed as well as the curious relationship between relics and icons. The so-called 'deviation' of the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent sacking of Constantinople in 1204 may also in part be explained by an unbridled yearning to possess her relics; they were certainly pillaged and disseminated to the west, thus concluding an era of relic-history at Byzantium and initiating a different one in the west.
A comprehensive dictionary of sacred and magical gem lore that draws on the rarest source texts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages • Reveals the healing and magical virtues of familiar gemstones, such as amethyst, emerald, and diamond, as well as the lore surrounding exotic stones such as astrios, a stone celebrated by ancient magicians • Examines bezoars (stones formed in animals’ bodies) and “magnets” that attract materials other than metal • Based on ancient Arabic, Greek, Jewish, and European sources, ranging from the observations of Pliny the Elder to extremely rare texts such as the Picatrix and Damigeron’s Virtue of Stones Our ancestors believed stones were home to sacred ...