You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.
For more than five centuries The Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark called it 'the keystone of European art', and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic 'miracle'. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper is both a 'biography' of one of the most famous works of art ever painted and a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan.
Medievalists, historians, and women's studies specialists will welcome this translation of Herbert Grundmann's classic study of religious movements in the Middle Ages because it provides a much-needed history of medieval religious life--one that lies between the extremes of doctrinal classification and materialistic analysis--and because it represents the first major effort to underline the importance of women in the development of the language and practice of religion in the Middle Ages.
The concepts of popular consent and limit as applied to the exercise of political authority are fundamental features of parliamentary democracy. Both these concepts played a role in medieval political theorizing, although the meaning and significance of political consent in this thought has not been well understood. In a careful, scholarly, and readable survey of the major political texts from Augustine to Ockham, Arthur Monahan analyses the contribution of medieval thought to the development of these two concepts and to the correlative concept of coercion. In addition, he deals with the development of these concepts in Roman and canon law and in the practices of the emerging states of France and England and the Italian city- states, as well as considering works in legal and administrative theory and constitutional documents. In each case his interpretations are placed in the wider context of developments in law, church, and administrative reforms. The result is the first complete study of these three crucial terms as used in the Middle Ages, as well as an excellent summary of work done in a number of specialized fields over the last twenty-five years.
None
Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.