You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the History of the Arts and the History of Christianity in Western Culture. The present volume was planned on the basis of the first annual international conferences at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen: a collection of 15 essays with a wide range of topics both in terms of chronology and subject matter written. The book is a special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration.
In Emotion and Devotion Miri Rubin explores the craft of the historian through a series of studies of medieval religious cultures. In three original chapters she approaches the medieval figure of the Virgin Mary with the aim of unravelling meaning and experience. Hymns and miracle tales, altarpieces and sermons – a wide range of sources from many European regions – are made to reveal the creativity and richness which they elicited in medieval people, women and men, clergy and laity, people of status and riches as well as those of modest means. The first chapter, "The Global 'Middle Ages'," considers the current historiographical frame for the study of religious cultures and suggests ways...
In order to highlight the long lines of continuity and development in the historical process of the religion, Balling (ancient and medieval church history, U. of Aarhus, Denmark) slides over many events that would illuminate the nuances and diversity of that process, and limits his study to European
By following and reproducing the cultural turn, the rhetoric of cultural mix and hybridism is disseminated today primarily in its crossing of trade barriers. Cultures reduced to their exchange value function as capital - an accumulative, speculative and, ultimately, financial affair. In some of its media and site-(un)specific manifestations, process art - which aims to encompass both old and new media art - seems to resist this pressure, despite, nonetheless, not being protected from regulations and incorporations. In the present collection of his recent essays, Slavko Kacunko discusses the process art by crossing the disciplines of art history and comparative media-, visual- and -cultural s...
Do the terms ?pagan? and ?Christian,? ?transition from paganism to Christianity? still hold as explanatory devices to apply to the political, religious and cultural transformation experienced Empire-wise? Revisiting ?pagans? and ?Christians? in Late Antiquity has been a fertile site of scholarship in recent years: the paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between ?pagans? and ?Christians? replaced the old ?conflict model? with a subtler, complex approach and triggered the upsurge of new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion. This collection of essays, inscribes itself into the revisionist discussion of pagan-Christ...
Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 focuses on the changing relationships between what gradually emerged as the Arts and Christianity, the latter term covering both a stream of ideas and its institutions. The book as a whole is addressed to a general academic audience concerned with issues of cultural history, while the individual essays are also intended as scholarly contributions within their own fields. A collaborative effort by twenty-five European and American scholars representing disciplines ranging from aesthetics to the history of art and architecture, from literature, music and the theatre to classics, church hi...
William of Norwich is the name of a young boy purported to have been killed by Jews in or about 1144, thus becoming the victim of the first recorded case of such a ritual murder in Western Europe and a seminal figure in the long history of antisemitism. His story is first told in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, a work that elaborates the bizarre allegation, invented in twelfth-century England, that Jews kidnapped Christian children and murdered them in memory and mockery of the crucifixion of Christ. In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas's account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The secon...
Religions teach their adherents how to see and feel at the same time; learning to see is not a disembodied process but one hammered from the forge of human need, social relations, and material practice. David Morgan argues that the history of religions may therefore be studied through the lens of their salient visual themes. The Forge of Vision tells the history of Christianity from the sixteenth century through the present by selecting the visual themes of faith that have profoundly influenced its development. After exploring how distinctive Catholic and Protestant visual cultures emerged in the early modern period, Morgan examines a variety of Christian visual practices, ranging from the imagination, visions of nationhood, the likeness of Jesus, the material life of words, and the role of modern art as a spiritual quest, to the importance of images for education, devotion, worship, and domestic life. An insightful, informed presentation of how Christianity has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, this work is a must-read for scholars and students across fields of religious studies, history, and art history.
Medieval pilgrims not only worshipped relics, they also venerated statues and paintings. These images or idols' were of particular importance in the day-to-day religion of ordinary people judged superstitious by the Church.
In this book, Dominus legem dat, labeled the most debated motif in early Christian art, is dealt with in all its different contexts, particularly Roman sarcophagi, where it most often occurs. In light of concurrent Roman funerary art, it offers a new understanding of the function of biblical motifs on sarcophagi, and a number of contemporary Christian texts are presented as a key for the interpretation of the so-called “traditio legis” composition. This first, richly illustrated monograph on the motif argues that it originated in Old St. Peter’s Basilica, substantiated by a broad discussion of its historical and theological context. A catalog of all occurrences is included.