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Jean Givens demonstrates how medieval image making offers new insights into the syntax of visual communication and the function of descriptive art in both sacred and secular contexts. In defining late medieval visual communication strategies, Givens reveals the various modes of organizing and displaying knowledge. Her study of the working practices of medieval artists challenges many assumptions about pre-modern science and art, especially the notion that descriptive art is a natural response to scientific empiricism.
Images in medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, pharmacy, and natural history often confound our expectations about the functions of medical and scientific illustrations. They do not look very much like the things they purport to portray; and their actual usefulness in everyday medical practice or teaching is not obvious. By looking at works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century: What...
The Lithic Garden addresses the formal, symbolic, and ideological functions of foliate ornament in medieval French churches, offering remarkable new insights on the complex relationship between organic and figural sculptures, interior and exterior design, sacred and profane spaces, and artistic form and liturgy.
Making Copies in European Art 1400-1600 comprises sixteen essays that explore the form and function, manner and meaning of copies after Renaissance works of art. The authors construe copying as a method of exchange based in the theory and practice of imitation, and they investigate the artistic techniques that enabled and facilitated the production of copies. They also ask what patrons and collectors wanted from a copy, which characteristics of an artwork were considered copyable, and where and how copies were stored, studied, displayed, and circulated. Making Copies in European Art, in addition to studying many unfamiliar pictures, incorporates previously unpublished documentary materials.
A fresh portrayal of one of the architects of the African American intellectual tradition, whose faith in the subversive power of education will inspire teachers and learners today. Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers...
Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse, and layering are generally associated with the age of photography, but as Florike Egmond shows in this book, they were already being used half a millennium ago. Exploring the world of natural history drawings from the Renaissance, Eye for Detail shows how the function of identification led to image manipulation techniques that will look uncannily familiar to the modern viewer. Egmond shows how the format of images in nature studies changed dramatically during the Renaissance period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule during a robust output of plant and animal drawings. She examines what visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and she focuses on how attention to visual detail was motivated by an overriding question: the secret of the origins of life. Beautifully and precisely illustrated throughout, this volume serves as an arresting guide to the massive European collections of nature drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century.
A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evi...
In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland f...
This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.
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