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This new volume in the AVISTA series focuses on the study of medieval limestone. As the principal building material in the Middle Ages and a prized medium for architectural sculpture, limestone played a significant role in medieval artistic manufacture. The choice of material inherently informed the final product, thus understanding the material and its uses gives insight into the medieval creative process and the production-driven choices that were made by masons and sculptors. Quality limestone was a highly sought-after commodity that was often shipped across great distances; yet in other instances, masons made do with locally available resources. Through an intensive study of medium, many...
Broadly defined, urban planning today is a process one might describe as half design and half social engineering. It considers not only the aesthetic and visual product, but also the economic, political, and social implications, as well as the environmental impact. This collection of essays explores the question of whether this sort of multifaceted planning took place in the Middle Ages, and how it manifested itself outside of the monastic realm. Bringing together the monastic historian and archaeologist, with scholars of art and architecture, this volume expands our comprehension of how those in roles of authority saw the planning process and implemented their plans to structure a particular outcome. The examination of architectural complexes, literary sources, commercial legers, and political records highlights the multiple avenues for viewing the growing awareness of the social potential of an urban environment.
Examines the iconographic inventions in Magdalene imagery and the contextual factors that shaped her representation in visual art from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church’s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional exper...
This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.
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.
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment. This second volume, Social Encounters with the Book, delves into the physical interaction with books in various social settings, including education, courtly assemblies, and confraternal gatherings. Looking at acts such as pointing, scratching, and ‘wet-touching’, the author zooms in on smudges and abrasions on medieval manuscripts as testimonials of r...
The ubiquity of references to dogs in medieval and early modern texts and images must at some level reflect their actual presence in those worlds, yet scholarly consideration of this material is rare and scattered across diverse sources. This volume addresses that gap, bringing together fifteen essays that examine the appearance, meaning, and significance of dogs in painting, sculpture, manuscripts, literature, and legal records of the period, reaching beyond Europe to include cultural material from medieval Japan and Islam. While primarily art historical in focus, the authors approach the subject from a range of disciplines and with varying methodology that ultimately reveals as much about dogs as about the societies in which they lived. Contributors are Kathleen Ashley, Jane Carroll, Emily Cockayne, John Block Friedman, Karen M. Gerhart, Laura D. Gelfand, Craig A. Gibson, Walter S. Gibson, Nathan Hofer, Jane C. Long, Judith W. Mann, Sophie Oosterwijk, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Donna L. Sadler, Alexa Sand, and Janet Snyder.
This book charts the past, present, and future of studies on medieval technology, art, and craft practices. Inspired by Villard’s enigmatic portfolio of artistic and engineering drawings, this collection explores the multiple facets of medieval building represented in this manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 19093). The book’s eighteen essays and two introductions showcase traditional and emergent methods for the study of medieval craft, demonstrating how these diverse approaches collectively amplify our understanding about how medieval people built, engineered, and represented their world. Contributions range from the analysis of words and images in Villard’s portfolio, to the close analysis of masonry, technological marvels, and gothic architecture, pointing the way toward new avenues for future scholarship to explore. Contributors are: Mickey Abel, Carl F. Barnes Jr., Robert Bork, George Brooks, Michael T. Davis, Amy Gillette, Erik Gustafson, Maile S. Hutterer, John James, William Sayers, Ellen Shortell, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Richard Alfred Sundt, Sarah Thompson, Steven A. Walton, Maggie M. Williams, Kathleen Wilson Ruffo, and Nancy Wu.
The touchstones of Gothic monumental art in France - the abbey church of Saint-Denis and the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Bourges - form the core of this collection dedicated to the memory of Anne Prache. The essays reflect the impact of Prache’s career, both as a scholar of wide-ranging interests and as a builder of bridges between the French and American academic communities. Thus the authors include scholars in France and the United States, both academics and museum professionals, while the thematic matrix of the book, divided into architecture, stained glass, and sculpture, reflects the multiple media explored by Prache during her long career. The essays employ a varied range of ...