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This is the first comprehensive study of the role of women in the Polish Piast dynasty from 965 until c.1144, comparing them with female members of other contemporary medieval dynasties.
This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of...
Quedlinburg Abbey was one of the oldest and most prestigious women's religious communities in medieval Germany. This essay collection conveys the abbey’s illustrious history, political importance, and cultural significance through studies on, among others, its architecture, rich treasury, and its abbatial effigies.
Provocative interrogation of how the Ottonian kingdom grew and flourished, focussing on the resources required.
This richly illustrated study addresses the essential first steps in the development of the new phenomenon of the illuminated book, which innovatively introduced colourful large letters and ornamental frames as guides for the reader's access to the text. Tracing their surprising origins within late Roman reading practices, Lawrence Nees shows how these decorative features stand as ancestors to features of printed and electronic books we take for granted today, including font choice, word spacing, punctuation and sentence capitalisation. Two hundred photographs, nearly all in colour, illustrate and document the decisive change in design from ancient to medieval books. Featuring an extended discussion of the importance of race and ethnicity in twentieth-century historiography, this book argues that the first steps in the development of this new style of book were taken on the European continent within classical practices of reading and writing, and not as, usually presented, among the non-Roman 'barbarians'.
Until recently, the phenomenon of copying in medieval book painting has been considered mainly in terms of the reconstruction of pictorial sources used for the composition or iconography of miniatures, initials, or decorative elements. Although historic sources only rarely mention the circumstances of manuscripts’ production, one particular widely-accepted hypothesis has prevailed until now, according to which artists used model drawings or sketch books with the aim of facilitating the production of copies and the creation of new picture cycles. However, it is no longer sufficient to regard medieval book painting in its diachronic dimension only through these lenses. Rather, one should consider Robert W. Scheller’s critique that “When using the model hypothesis one must always be mindful of other factors which are known to have played a part in the transmission of art in the Middle Ages”. The contributions of this volume deal with these issues by focusing on book painting between the 10th and 16th centuries.
This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approac...
This anthology honors Lawrence Nees’ expansive contributions to medieval art historical inquiry and teaching on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Delaware. These essays present a cross-section of recent research by students, colleagues, and friends; the breadth of subjects explored demonstrates the pertinence of Nees’ distinctive approach and methodology centering human agency and creativity. The contributions follow three main threads: Establishing Identity, Patronage and Politics, and Beyond the Canon. Some authors draw upon Nees’ systematic analysis of iconographic idiosyncrasies and ornamental schemes, whether adorning manuscripts or monumental edifices, which elucidates their unique visual and material characteristics. Others apply a Neesian engagement with the complex dynamics of cultural exchange, visual manifestations of political ambitions and ideologies, and selective mining of the classical past. Ultimately, this collection aims to illustrate the impact of Nees’ transformative scholarship, and to celebrate his legacy in the field of medieval art history.
It has for decades been part of the canon of maxims of basic research that most images of rulers in early medieval book illustrations have been transmitted in liturgical manuscripts, i.e. manuscripts originally intended for divine worship. There have however to date been few investigations which draw serious consequences from this and which also view miniatures of rulers in the light of their functional aspects, for example as ‘memorial depictions’ (O.G. Oexle), or on the basis of the social reality of the pious motives behind their presentation. This study gives a more precise explanation of the function and purpose of ruler-images by examining a few selected early medieval miniatures. It analyzes the historical and social contexts of their genesis and the liturgical and commemorative aims of their use against the setting of the social form of remembrance of confraternity.
The art of the emblem is a pan-European phenomenon which developed in Western and Central Europe in the early modern period. It adopted meanings and motifs from Antiquity and the Middle Ages as part of a general humanistic impulse. Technological developments in printing that permitted the combination of letterpress with woodblock, and later copperplate, images, ensured that the emblem spread rapidly by way of printed collections. With time, emblematic ideas moved beyond Europe, conveying their insights and wisdom in the compact form of the book. These same books came to influence artists and designers working in the decoration of buildings, furniture, and household items, so that emblems ent...