This book explores how the Virgin Mary's life is told in hymns, sermons, icons, art, and other media in the Byzantine Empire before AD 1204. A group of international specialists examines material and textual evidence from both Byzantine and Muslim-ruled territories that was intended for a variety of settings and audiences and seeks to explain why Byzantine artisans and writers chose to tell stories about Mary, the Mother of God, in such different ways. Sometimes the variation reflected the theological or narrative purposes of story-tellers; sometimes it expressed their personal spiritual preoccupations. Above all, the variety of aspects that this holy figure assumed in Byzantium reveals her paradoxical theological position as meeting-place and mediator between the divine and created realms. Narrative, whether 'historical', theological, or purely literary, thus played a fundamental role in the development of the Marian cult from Late Antiquity onward.

For many, perhaps most, the title "Early Celtic Art" summons up images of Early Christian stone crosses in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall; of Glendalough, lona or Tintagel; of the Ardagh Chalice or the Monymusk Reliquary; of the great illuminated gospels of Durrow or Lindisfame. But as Stuart Piggott notes, the consummate works of art produced under the aegis of the early churches in Britain or Ireland, in regions Celtic by tradition or language, have an ancestry behind them only partly Celtic.

One strain in an eclectic style was borrowed from the ornament of the northern Germanic world, the classical Mediterranean, and even the Eastern churches. Early Celtic art, originating in the fifth century b.c. in Central Europe, was already seven or eight centuries old when it was last traced in the pagan, prehistoric world, and the transmission of some of its modes and motifs over a further span of centuries into the Christian Middle Ages was an even later phenomenon. This volume presents the art of the prehistoric Celtic peoples, the first great contribution of the barbarians to European arts.

It is an art produced in circumstances that the classical world and contemporary societiesunhesitatingly recognize as uncivilized. Its appearance, it has been said by N. K. Sandars in "Prehistoric Art in Europe" "is perhaps one of the oddest and most unlikely things to have come out of a barbarian continent. Its peculiar refinement, delicacy, and equilibrium are not altogether what one would expect of men who, though courageous and not without honor even in the records of their enemies, were also savage, cruel and often disgusting; for the archaeological refuse, as well as the reports of Classical antiquity, agree in this verdict."

This book comprises the first major exhibition of "Early Celtic Art" from its origins and beginnings to its aftermath, and was assembled by Stuart Piggott who taught later European prehistory to Honors students in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, where he held the Abercromy Chair. He retired from the Chair in 1977, and in 1983 he received the gold medal of the Society of Antiquaries of London, as well as the Grahame Clark medal of the British Academy in 1992. Through his knowledge of the subject, he has made accessible an obscure but fascinating period of European culture.

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources - including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs - Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

Ambiguous Women in Medieval Art brings together the work of seven researchers who, coming from different perspectives, and in some cases different disciplines, approach the question of ambiguity in relation to different case-studies where the represented women do not follow the ever-present dichotomy exemplified by Eve and Mary. In doing so, they demonstrate the complexities of a topic that is as contemporary as it is ancient. Through them, we can get valuable insights on the understanding and experience of gender in the past and the ways in which these experiences have shaped our own understanding of this topic.

Now published in paperback, this fully-illustrated book explores the concept of the monster in the Middle Ages, examining its philosophical and theological roots and analysing its symbolic function in medieval literature and art. Fascinating and comprehensive, this study of the grotesque in medieval aesthetic expression successfully brings together medieval research and modern criticism.

For several years now, sigillography as an independent subject in the field of Byzantine studies, has received increasing attention from both Byzantine studies and related disciplines, because it is the only area still able to provide plenty of yet undiscovered material for research and study. The articles deal with all aspects of Byzantine sigillography: presentation of new finds, discussion of new methods, questions of the political and ecclesiastical administration of Byzantinum, prosopography, historical geography, and art historical and iconographical problems. In addition, the volumes contain a loosely arranged list of Byzantine seals, which have been published in essays and auction catalogues, thus enabling those from more obscure publications to be located and identified. Volume 9, currently in preparation, mainly contains lectures from the 8th International Symposium on Byzantine Sigillography held in October 2003, in Berlin. Besides the iconography of seals, much emphasis was placed on questions of Byzantine administration. Further, selected collections are presented, as well as a large number of new finds and new acquisitions.

Late Byzantium Reconsidered offers a unique collection of essays analysing the artistic achievements of Mediterranean centres linked to the Byzantine Empire between 1261, when the Palaiologan dynasty re-conquered Constantinople, and the decades after 1453, when the Ottomans took the city, marking the end of the Empire. These centuries were characterised by the rising of socio-political elites, in regions such as Crete, Italy, Laconia, Serbia, and Trebizond, that, while sharing cultural and artistic values influenced by the Byzantine Empire, were also developing innovative and original visual and cultural standards. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework offered by this volume aims to challenge established ideas concerning the late Byzantine period such as decline, renewal, and innovation. By examining specific case studies of cultural production from within and outside Byzantium, the chapters in this volume highlight the intrinsic innovative nature of the socio-cultural identities active in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean vis-a-vis the rhetorical assumption of the cultural contraction of the Byzantine Empire.

This book explores the ways in which medieval Christians sought to memorialize the deceased: with tombs, cenotaphs, altars and other furnishings connected to a real or symbolic burial site. Reverent memorial for the dead was the inspiration for the production of a significant category of artworks during the Middle Ages - artworks aimed as much at the laity as at the clergy, and intended to maintain, symbolically, the presence of the dead. Memoria, the term that describes the formal, liturgical memory of the dead, also includes artworks intended to house and honour the deceased. A dozen essays analyze strategies for commemoration from the 4th - 15th century: the means by which human memory could be activated or manipulated through the interaction between monuments, their setting, and the visitor. Building upon from the growing body of literature on memory in the Middle Ages, the collection focuses on the tomb monument and its context as a complex to define what is to be remembered, to fix memory, and to facilitate recollection. The papers were originally presented at the 1994 meetings of the College Art Association, the International Congresses of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the University of Leeds, England, in 1995.

Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of the image from what it purports to represent; abstraction as a vehicle for signification; and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.

Justinian's triumphal column was the tallest free-standing column of the pre-modern world and was crowned with arguably the largest metal equestrian sculpture created anywhere in the world before 1699. The Byzantine empire's bronze horseman towered over the heart of Constantinople, assumed new identities, spawned conflicting narratives, and acquired widespread international acclaim. Because all traces of Justinian's column were erased from the urban fabric of Istanbul in the sixteenth century, scholars have undervalued its astonishing agency and remarkable longevity. Its impact in visual and verbal culture was arguably among the most extensive of any Mediterranean monument. This book analyzes Byzantine, Islamic, Slavic, Crusader, and Renaissance historical accounts, medieval pilgrimages, geographic, apocalyptic and apocryphal narratives, vernacular poetry, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Italian, French, Latin, and Ottoman illustrated manuscripts, Florentine wedding chests, Venetian paintings, and Russian icons to provide an engrossing and pioneering biography of a contested medieval monument during the millennium of its life.

Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium seeks to reveal Christian understanding of the body and sacred space in the medieval Mediterranean. Case studies examine encounters with the holy through the perspective of the human body and sensory dimensions of sacred space, and discuss the dynamics of perception when experiencing what was constructed, represented, and understood as sacred. The comparative analysis investigates viewers' recognitions of the sacred in specific locations or segments of space with an emphasis on the experiential and conceptual relationships between sacred spaces and human bodies. This volume thus reassesses the empowering aspects of space, time, and human agency in religious contexts. By focusing on investigations of human endeavors towards experiential and visual expressions that shape perceptions of holiness, this study ultimately aims to present a better understanding of the corporeality of sacred art and architecture. The research points to how early Christians and Byzantines teleologically viewed the divine source of the sacred in terms of its ability to bring together - but never fully dissolve - the distinctions between the human and divine realms. The revealed mechanisms of iconic perception and noetic contemplation have the potential to shape knowledge of the meanings of the sacred as well as to improve our understanding of the liminality of the profane and the sacred.

The phenomenon of iconoclasm, expressed through hostile actions towards images, has occurred in many different cultures throughout history. The destruction and mutilation of images is often motivated by a blend of political and religious ideas and beliefs, and the distinction between various kinds of 'iconoclasms' is not absolute. In order to explore further the long and varied history of iconoclasm the contributors to this volume consider iconoclastic reactions to various types of objects, both in the very recent and distant past. The majority focus on historical periods but also on history as a backdrop for image troubles of our own day. Development over time is a central question in the volume, and cross-cultural influences are also taken into consideration. This broad approach provides a useful comparative perspective both on earlier controversies over images and relevant issues today. In the multimedia era increased awareness of the possible consequences of the use of images is of utmost importance. 'Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity' approaches some of the problems related to the display of particular kinds of images in conflicted societies and the power to decide on the use of visual means of expression. It provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the phenomenon of iconoclasm. Of interest to a wide group of scholars the contributors draw upon various sources and disciplines, including art history, cultural history, religion and archaeology, as well as making use of recent research from within social and political sciences and contemporary events. Whilst the texts are addressed primarily to those researching the Western world, the volume contains material which will also be of interest to students of the Middle East.

Villard's Legacy is in memory of the celebrated iconoclastic historian, Jean Gimpel, and represents a fundamental contribution to the new AVISTA series with Ashgate Publishing. AVISTA was the brainchild of Gimpel, a genius at making the right people meet to advance knowledge through a confluence of ideas drawn equally from the practical and scholarly domains. Sixteen papers and a tribute to Gimpel underscore this confluence of technology, science and art within medieval culture. Appropriately, six papers offer new interpretations on aspects of Villard de Honnecourt's portfolio, which Gimpel rightly recognized and promoted as a unique and precious record of pre-modern technology and culture. This thirteenth-century manuscript is now known to a wider public as the earliest testimony left by a master builder in Gothic Europe. Of particular significance, for the first time in eight centuries, a Compagnon du Devoir, initiated in the same oral tradition as Villard, opens the door to interpreting these remarkable drawings. Three papers address previously ignored aspects in the construction of French and English Gothic churches, from the engineering of aerodynamic spires, to the elastic materials of vault webbing, to the social conventions of formal design. Three other contributors treat essential elements of a broader technological culture, such as the horse harness and the minting of coins, as well as the applicability of medieval technology to the modern world, in particular third world countries, a project pioneered by Gimpel. Four papers conclude the volume by treating the sciences of measure and their cultural expression in medieval Europe, embracing both the concepts of space and time, geometry as a mathematical discipline, and the graphic expression of scientific data. These interdisciplinary studies are comprehensive in chronological and geographic range, extending from the 8th to 15th centuries, from Ireland across Europe.

This collection of fifteen papers ranges from the author's initial interest in the Tapestry as a source of information on early medieval dress, through to her startling recognition of the embroidery's sophisticated narrative structure. Developing the work of previous authors who had identified graphic models for some of the images, she argues that not just the images themselves but the contexts from which they were drawn should be taken in to account in 'reading' the messages of the Tapestry. In further investigating the minds and hands behind this, the largest non-architectural artefact surviving from the Middle Ages, she ranges over the seams, the embroidery stitches, the language and artistry of the inscription, the potential significance of borders and the gestures of the figures in the main register, always scrutinising detail informatively. She identifies an over-riding conception and house style in the Tapestry, but also sees different hands at work in both needlecraft and graphics. Most intriguingly, she recognises an sub-contractor with a Roman source and a clownish wit. The author is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at The University of Manchester, UK, a specialist in Old English poetry, Anglo-Saxon material culture and medieval dress and textiles.

A collection of original essays, Saints, Sinners, and Sisters showcases the diverse questions currently being asked by gender scholars dealing with French, Netherlandish and German art from the medieval and early modern periods. Moving beyond the reclamation of personalities and oeuvres of 'lost' female artists, the contributors pose questions about gender and sex within specific historical contexts, addressing such issues as intended audience, use of the object, and patronage. These avenues of inquiry intersect with larger cultural questions concerning societal control of women. The book's three sections, 'Saints,' 'Sinners,' and 'Sisters, Wives, Poets' are each preceded by a concise introductory essay, detailing themes and offering reflective comparisons of theses and information. In 'Saints,' contributors look at women who were positive exemplar used by society to uphold standards. In the second section, the essays focus on the power of women's sexuality. The third section expands beyond the customary dichotomous division of the first two to examine women in diverse roles not widely studied as positions of women in those times. This final section expands our definitions of women's responsibilities and realigns them historically; it argues that women, and thus gender, need to be understood within a much broader historical context and beyond simplistic approaches sometimes superimposed by present-day readers on past times. This volume answers an acute need for research on the art of Northern Europe prior to the 20th century, and highlights the possibilities of new directions in the field. The effect of the new scholarship presented here is to broaden the discursive field, allowing fluidity of disciplinary boundaries, resulting in a volume that is illuminating to historians of more than art alone.

Museum science, museum analysis, museum history, and museum theory all of these composite designations have come into our parlance in recent years. Above all, this expanding terminology underscores the growing scholarly interest in museums. In this new scholarship, a recurring assertion is that as an institution, the museum has largely functioned as a venue for the formation of specifically national identities. This volume, by contrast, highlights the museum as a product of transnational processes of exchange, focusing on the period from ca. 1750 to 1940."

This is a study of early Christian (first three centuries C. E.) attitudes toward art. The traditional view is that the early Christians produced no art because they were opposed in principle to visual images. When Christian art finally does appear, it has been considered a popular development and a decline from earlier, more austere spiritual values. Corby Finney here refutes these traditional understandings, through a close examination of the archaeological and literary evidence in its cultural and social context. He finds that it was primarily the Christian belief in the invisibility of God that inhibited the production of images, rather than opposition to images as such. A contributory factor, he believes was the relative invisibility of the Christians themselves within Roman society. Christina art "came out" chiefly when the Christian acquired a legal status and the capacity to own property and to build (and hence to decorate) places of worship. Before this, says Finney, very little differentiated the Christians from society at large, and certainly not outward signs. When they did use decorated material objects (seals and lamps) they drew on symbols already in use. Offering an important corrective to prevailing views about early Christianity, this study will be of great importance not only to scholars and students of Christian theology and history, but to art historians as well.

"The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come....The Bright Ages is a rare thing-a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading."-Slate "Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating." -The Boston Globe A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality-a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word "medieval" conjures images of the "Dark Ages"-centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante-inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy-writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today. The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world "lit only by fire" but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics. The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert.

In Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: allotting the scarlet and the purple, Catherine Gines Taylor traces the way early Christians assimilated the symbolism of spinning into images of the Annunciation. Taylor offers an art historical and interdisciplinary look at the earliest images of Mary spinning, underscoring the iconographic model of idealized matronage consistent with lay piety and the cult of Mary. The personal and domestic nature of this motif is evidence toward popular Mariological devotion that preceded the exclusive, semi-divine presentation of the Theotokos, and stands in contrast with traditional ascetic models for Mary.

This is a collection of eighteen papers presented at a conference that was held at the Hatfield Campus of the University of Hertfordshire with 122 members and guests from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Germany and Norway were present. The papers are on the research on various aspects of the art and architecture of the abbey, at St Albans and provides an ideal forum for bringing together many aspects of the abbey's history.

The myriad ways in which colour and light have been adapted and applied in the art, architecture, and material culture of past societies is the focus of this interdisciplinary volume. Light and colour's iconographic, economic, and socio-cultural implications are considered by established and emerging scholars including art historians, archaeologists, and conservators, who address the variety of human experience of these sensory phenomena. In today's world it is the norm for humans to be surrounded by strong, artificial colours, and even to see colour as perhaps an inessential or surface property of the objects around us. Similarly, electric lighting has provided the power and ability to illuminate and manipulate environments in increasingly unprecedented ways. In the context of such a saturated experience, it becomes difficult to identify what is universal, and what is culturally specific about the human experience of light and colour. Failing to do so, however, hinders the capacity to approach how they were experienced by people of centuries past. By means of case studies spanning a broad historical and geographical context and covering such diverse themes as architecture, cave art, the invention of metallurgy, and medieval manuscript illumination, the contributors to this volume provide an up-to-date discussion of these themes from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective. The papers range in scope from the meaning of colour in European prehistoric art to the technical art of the glazed tiles of the Shah mosque in Isfahan. Their aim is to explore a multifarious range of evidence and to evaluate and illuminate what is a truly enigmatic topic in the history of art and visual culture.

A fresh approach to the construction of "Anglo-Saxon England" and its depiction in art and writing. This book explores the ways in which early medieval England was envisioned as an ideal, a placeless, and a conflicted geography in works of art and literature from the eighth to the eleventh century and in their modern scholarly and popular afterlives. It suggests that what came to be called "Anglo-Saxon England" has always been an imaginary place, an empty space into which ideas of what England was, or should have been, or should be, have been inserted from the arrival of peoples from the Continent in the fifth and sixth centuries to the arrival of the self-named "alt-right" in the twenty-first. It argues that the political and ideological violence that was a part of the origins of England as a place and the English as a people has never been fully acknowledged; instead, the island was reimagined as a chosen land home to a chosen people, the gens Anglorum. Unacknowledged violence, however, continued to haunt English history and culture. Through her examination here of the writings of Bede and King Alfred, the Franks Casket and the illuminated Wonders of the East, and the texts collected together to form the Beowulf manuscript, the author shows how this continues to haunt "Anglo-Saxon Studies" as a discipline and Anglo-Saxonism as an ideology, from the antiquarian studies of the sixteenth century through to the nationalistic and racist violence of today.

Iconoclasm was the name given to the stance of that portion of Eastern Christianity that rejected worshipping God through images (eikones) representing Christ, the Virgin or the saints and was the official doctrine of the Byzantine Empire for most of the period between 726 and 843. It was a period marked by violent passions on either side. This is the first comprehensive account of the extant contemporary texts relating to this phenomenon and their impact on society, politics and identity. By examining the literary circles emerging both during the time of persecution and immediately after the restoration of icons in 843, the volume casts new light on the striking (re)construction of Byzantine society, whose iconophile identity was biasedly redefined by the political parties led by Theodoros Stoudites, Gregorios Dekapolites and Empress Theodora or the patriarchs Methodios, Ignatios and Photios. It thereby offers an innovative paradigm for approaching Byzantine literature.

The medieval bestiary was a contribution to didactic religious literature, addressing concerns central to all walks of Christian and secular life. These essays analyse the bestiary from both literary and art history perspectives, exploring issues including kinship, romance, sex, death, and the afterlife.

An examination of women as mothers in medieval French sculpture. What can medieval sculptural representations of women tell us about medieval women's experiences of motherhood? Presumably the work of male sculptors, working for clerical patrons, these sculptures are unlikely to have been shaped by women's maternal experiences during their production. Once produced, however, their beholders would have included women who were mothers and potential mothers, thus opening a space between the sculptures' intended meanings and other meanings liable to be produced by these women as they brought their own interests and concerns to these works of art. Building on theories of reception and response, this book focuses on interactions between women asbeholders and a range of sculptures made in France in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, aiming to provide insight into women's experiences of motherhood; particular sculptures considered include the Annunciation and Visitation from Reims cathedral, the femme-aux-serpents from Moissac, the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendome, the Eve from Autun, and a number of French Gothic Virgin and Child sculptures. Marian Bleeke is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University.