You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Contagion as process, metaphor, and timely interpretive tool, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Cultures of Contagion recounts episodes in the history of contagions, from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It considers contagion not only in the medical sense but also as a process, a metaphor, and an interpretive model--as a term that describes not only the transmission of a virus but also the propagation of a phenomenon. The authors describe a wide range of social, cultural, political, and anthropological instances through the prism of contagion--from anti-Semitism to migration, from the nuclear contamination of the planet to the violence of Mao's Red Guard. The book procee...
This volume addresses the widespread medieval phenomenon of transgression as both a result of and the cause for the exclusion and persecution of those who were considered different. It is widely accepted that the essence of a manuscript cannot be fully grasped without studying its marginalia. Glosses sit on the margins of the text and clarify it, adding a whole new dimension to it and becoming an inextricable part of its content. Similarly, no society can be fully understood without knowledge of what lies on its margins, for the outliers of any given culture provide us with just as much information as its alleged foundational principles. In a time when the Western world ponders building walls up against perceived threats and frightening differences, this multidisciplinary collection of essays based on original and innovative pieces of research shows that it was mostly through tearing down walls that we learned our way forward.
Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world. The essays collected here aim to highlight human encounters with the forest and its trees at the time of the European Middle Ages, when, whether symbol and metaphor, or actual and real, their lofty boughs were weighted with meaning. The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.
This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of method...
Where was the line between pleasure and irritation in the sensory overload caused by the sounds, colours, and smells of a medieval market? How could pain and suffering be relieved by hoping for, and desiring to experience, an intimate, almost familiar, contact with Christ? This volume shows the different aspects of sensory experiences that medieval people conveyed through documents, literary accounts, and religious practices. The unifying theme here is how pleasure, pain, desire, and fear appear in different—sometimes conflicting—combinations and settings: from the private space of the monastic cell to the shared hustle of the market. The geographic focus of this volume is Mediterranean Europe, although it also touches on other Western contexts. The combination of different points of view here provides an original contribution to the study of sensory experiences in the Middle Ages.
Editorial paper, Monica Centanni, Anna Fressola, Elizabeth Thomson Ernst H. Gombrich, Geburtstagsatlas: An Index of materials published in Engramma, by Seminario Mnemosyne Ernst H. Gombrich, Geburtstagsatlas für Max M. Warburg (1937). First digital edition, by Seminario Mnemosyne Ernst H. Gombrich, To Mnemosyne: An Introduction to Geburtstagsatlas (1937), by Seminario Mnemosyne Zwischenraum/Denkraum. Terminological Oscillations in the Introductions to the Atlas by Aby Warburg (1929) and Ernst Gombrich (1937), Victoria Cirlot “L’esprit de Warburg lui-même sera en paix”. A survey of Edgar Wind’s quarrel. With the Warburg Institute. Appendix: The Warburgkreis correspondence, Ianick Takaes de Oliveira A Review of Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London 1970). First digital edition, Edgar Wind A Laboratory of the Science of Culture. Review of A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (1933). First digital edition, Johan Huizinga. Edition and translation by Monica Centanni, Sergio Polano and Elizabeth Thomson Autobiography of a Warburgian Artist. Review of: Ronald B. Kitaj Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter (2017), Matias J. Nativo, Alessia Prati
Medieval philosophy is primarily associated today with university-based disputations and the authorities cited in those disputations. In their own time, however, scholastic debates were recognized as just one part of wide-ranging philosophical and theological discussions. A Hidden Wisdom breaks new ground by drawing attention to another crucial component of these conversations: the Christian contemplative tradition. The period from 1200 to 1500, in particular, saw a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of mystical and contemplative literature in the 'Christian West', by laypeople as well as religious scholars, women as well as men. A Hidden Wisdom focuses on five topics of par...
Prácticas performativas centra su atención en la ritualidad desarrollada en el espacio monástico en diferentes momentos de los siglos medievales hasta los albores de la edad moderna, por parte de diferentes "actores" y en funcionalidades diversas, desde la gestualidad de obediencia debida por los capellanes beneficiados a la abadesa, a la que se expresa en la procesión de disciplina en las cofradías andaluzas durante la Semana Santa. El presente volumen ha permitido descubrir la potencialidad de este enfoque novedoso, el de la performatividad, que pone al descubierto nuevas agencias (agency) por parte de las mujeres, el valor simbólico del objeto y del gesto, la funcionalidad de los espacios; o nuevas miradas al rico catálogo de documentos de archivo y manuscritos de los fondos monásticos.
The contributions gathered in this volume take a fresh look at the medieval history of women, revealing the many faces of female reality during an extremely dynamic period—while individuality was on the rise, new linguistic codes (vernacular languages) and innovative literary genres were emerging, and the political situation was undergoing deep changes. The book is structured in three interrelated sections: The first is dedicated to "Historical femininity" and documents the cultural and literary activities carried out by women from the nobility. The second is about "Authorial femininity" and explores the innovative work of both prominent and lesser-known female writers. The last section deals with "Textual femininity" and analyses the female protagonists of lyric poetry and narrative literature. As a whole, the book shows how complex and diverse medieval discourses on and from women were.
Examining correlations between the material and the mystical, this books investigates collective writing and devotional culture in late medieval piety.