In this pioneering study, the first of its kind, Galit Noga-Banai analyses silver reliquaries decorated with Christian figurative themes. She offers a clearer and more detailed picture of the beginnings of the cult of relics, which were an essential asset to the Church in its establishment of pilgrimage centres and local hagiographic heritage sites, first in Italy and later in other places around Europe and North Africa. At the same time, Noga-Banai highlights the identity of the objects as portable art, treating the reliquaries as visual historical testimonies. The book is illustrated with nearly 100 finely reproduced drawings and photographs.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Alhambra Palace Tiles

Buildings and their surrounding spaces play a role in formulating the collective identity of an urban population. The history of architecture, and urban history, can be studied through cityscape paintings and other artwork. The character and greatness of a city, perhaps lost to modern historians, can be recognized. In this text, four key issues are discussed in the study of change in architectural imagery and urban identity: the Roman artists' role in 14th-century painting in Tuscany, the Tuscan-Byzantinian relationship from the mid- to late 13th century, ""naturalistic"" representation of medieval painting, and the meaning behind the stylistic changes that coincided with the bubonic plague in the 14th century. Surveying the architectural imagery in narrative paintings, the text focuses primarily on Rome, Assisi, Siena and Florence from circa 1250 to circa 1390. The book details the relationship between art and cityscape, as well as analyzes historical artistic periods, via painted portraiture of architecture. Also included are 115 photographs, illustrations and maps.

The Cleveland Museum of Art's medieval table fountain, c. 1320-40, is the only version of its kind to have survived in its complete form from the Middle Ages. A superb example of French Gothic goldsmithing, it is an exquisite metalwork structure and a unique example of courtly taste and princely fashion, which was designed not for any religious purpose but purely as an indulgence. Its uncertain provenance has added to its charm. This focus volume reassesses this extraordinary piece in the context of other similar luxury objects, analysing specifically the fountain's history, functionality, materials, and style.

In this fascinating new book, Malcolm Vale sets out to recapture the splendour of the court culture of western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Exploring the century or so between the death of St Louis and the rise of Burgundian power in the Low Countries, he illuminates a period in the history of princes and court life previously overshadowed by that of the courts of the dukes of Burgundy. Taking in subjects as diverse as art patronage and gambling, hunting and devotional religion, Malcolm Vale rediscovers a richness and abundance of artistic, literary, and musical life. He shows how, despite the pressures of political fragmentation, unrest, and a nascent awareness of national identity, a common culture emerged in English, French, and Dutch court societies at this time. The result is a ground-breaking re-evaluation of the nature and role of the court in European history and a celebration of a forgotten age.

This is the first scholarly art historical appraisal of early Anglo-Saxon coinage. Anna Gannon examines the many coins produced during this most vibrant period of English coinage. She analyses their prototypes and explores their sources and parallels with contemporary arts, literature, and theology, setting their meaning in context.

The pressure to destroy images was not an exclusively sixteenth-century phenomenon. The late medieval period witnessed both religious and secular conflicts over images. The essays in this book, each by an outstanding scholar, consider issues of central concern - literary, political, and art-historical - that arise from image making and breaking.

Framed by evocative inscriptions, tumultuous historical events, and the ambiguities of Christian death, Romanesque tomb effigies were the first large-scale figural monuments for the departed in European art. In this book, Shirin Fozi explores these provocative markers of life and death, establishing early tomb figures as a coherent genre that hinged upon histories of failure and frustrated ambition. In sharp contrast to later recumbent funerary figures, none of the known European tomb effigies made before circa 1180 were commissioned by the people they represented, and all of the identifiable examples of these tombs were dedicated to individuals whose legacies were fraught rather than triumphant. Fozi draws on this evidence to argue that Romanesque effigies were created to address social rather than individual anxieties: they compensated for defeat by converting local losses into an expectation of eternal victory, comforting the embarrassed heirs of those whose histories were marked by misfortune and offering compensation for the disappointments of the world. Featuring numerous examples and engaging the visual, historical, and theological contexts that inform them, this groundbreaking work adds a fresh dimension to the study of monumental sculpture and the idea of the individual in the northern European Middle Ages. It will appeal to scholars of art history and medieval studies.

This beautiful illuminated manuscript, now in Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, is one of the earliest surviving examples of a unique group of Bibles containing the most extensive cycles of biblical illustrations juxtaposed with theological and allegorical interpretative images. The present moralized Bible was produced in Paris in the first half of the 13th century, and contains over 1000 exquisitely illuminated medallions accompanied by textual extracts and commentaries that act as captions to the illustrations and thus reveal, by word and image, the relevance of the Bible to contemporary life. They reflect the rapidly-changing world of the thirteenth century and highlight the many ideological problems prominent in the intellectual and political milieu of the time. It is a book that has long fascinated both historians and art-historians, since it stands out not only as one of the major artistic achievements of its time, but also as an important historical document for an understanding of medieval Europe. All illuminated pages of Codex 2554 are reproduced in full colour in this volume. In his commentary to the manuscript, Gerald Guest explains the origins of this type of Bible manuscript; he compares the work with other surviving examples, examines the style and meaning of the illuminations, poses the likely patrons and puts the creation of the moralized Bible in its intellectual and artistic context. The author has also translated all the French texts that accompany the illuminations into English.

This is a long-awaited reissue of Remnant's classic study of misericords (medieval church carvings) in the United Kingdom. First published in 1969, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain provides a complete listing of misericords from parish churches throughout the UK. The book also features an informative chapter on the iconography of misericords from M. D. Anderson (Lady Trenchard Cox), well known for a number of authoritative books on medieval carving and mythology. The 48 illustrations cover both some of the better known misericords throughout the country, and a number of carvings of outstanding interest from smaller churches.

In the Middle Ages, liturgies, books, song, architecture and poetry were performed as collaborative activities in which performers and audience together realized their work anew. In this book, essays by leading scholars analyse how the medieval arts invited and delighted in collaborative performances designed to persuade. The essays cast fresh light on subjects ranging from pilgrim processions within Chartres Cathedral, to polyphonic song, and the 'rhetoric of silence' perfected by the Cistercians. Rhetoric is defined broadly in this book to encompass its relationship to its sister arts of music, architecture, and painting, all of which use materials and media in addition to words, sometimes altogether without words. Contributors have concentrated on those aspects of formal rhetoric that are performative in nature, the sound, gesture and facial expressions of persuasive speech in action. Delivery (performance) is shown to be at the heart of rhetoric, that aspect of it which is indeed beyond words.

A single, monumental mappa mundi (world map), made around 1300 for Hereford Cathedral, survives intact from the Middle Ages. As Marcia Kupfer reveals in her arresting new study, this celebrated testament to medieval learning has long been profoundly misunderstood. Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are typically dismissed as the product of careless execution. Kupfer argues that they should rightly be seen as part of the map's encoded commentary on the nature of vision itself. Optical conceits and perspectival games formed part of the map's language of vision, were central to its commission, and shaped its display, formal design, and allegorical fabric. These discoveries compel a sweeping revision of the artwork's intellectual and art-historical genealogy, as well as its function and aesthetic significance, shedding new light on the impact of scientific discourses in late medieval art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

First translation of two vivid accounts of French thirteenth-century tournaments, rich in detail and an impassioned defence of tournaments and their importance. The Romance of Le Hem and The Tournament at Chauvency are eyewitness accounts of the famous tournaments held in 1278 at Le Hem on the banks of the Somme in north-eastern France, and in 1285 at Chauvency in Lorraine. Written within weeks of the events they describe, they record in vivid detail not only the jousts and the melees but also the entertainments and dramatic interludes which preceded, followed and embellished these festivals of martial sport. As Sarrasin makes clear, theatre as well as jousting, and jousting in the context of enacted stories, were central to what took place at Le Hem, involving elaborate role-play by participants as figures from Arthurian romance. And few medieval accounts of events have such thrilling immediacy as Jacques Bretel's record of Chauvency. He sat in a prime place, on the fourth step of the stand, and the reader sees and hears the action as if sitting at his shoulder - and eavesdrops on conversations, too. He gives remarkable insights into the surprising role played by song, and into how the whole event was perceived and understood. These intriguing works are invaluable source material for scholars not only of medieval chivalry and tournaments but also of festivities and performance.

The art of predicting earthly events from the movements of stars and planets has always been a source of fascination. Medieval astrologers, though sometimes feared to be magicians in league with demons, were usually revered scholars whose ideas and practices were widely respected. Politics, medicine, weather forecasting, cosmology and alchemy were all influenced by astrological concepts. Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts explores the dazzling complexity of western medieval astrology and its place in society, as revealed by a wealth of illustrated manuscripts from the British Library's rich medieval collection.

Old St Peter's Basilica in Rome stood for over eleven centuries until it was demolished to make room for today's church on the same Vatican site. Its last eyewitness, Maffeo Vegio, explained to the Roman hierarchy how revival of the papacy, whose prestige after the exile to Avignon had been diminished, was inseparable from a renewed awareness of the primacy of Peter's Church. To make his case, Vegio wrote a history founded on credible written and visual evidence. The text guides us through the building's true story in its material reality, undistorted by medieval guides. This was its living memory and a visualization of the continuity of Roman history into modern times. This volume makes available the first complete English translation of Vegio's text. Accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the Basilica as it appeared in Vegio's day.

Medieval Europe inherited from antiquity a rich and varied tradition of thought about the aetates hominum. Scholars divided human life into three, four, six, or seven ages, and so related it to larger orders of nature and history in which similar patterns were to be found. Thus, the seven ages correspond to and are governed by the seven planets. These ideas flowed through the Middle Ages in many channels: sermons and Bible commentaries, moral and political treatises, encyclopaedias and lexicons, medical and astrological handbooks, didactic and courtly poems, tapestries, wall-paintings, and stained-glass windows. Professor Burrow's account of this material, using mainly but not exclusively English medieval sources, includes a consideration of some of the ways in which such ideas of natural order entered into the medieval writer's assessment of human behaviour. The book ends by showing how medieval writers commonly recognize and endorse the natural processes by which ordinary folk pass from the joys and folly of youth to the sorrows and wisdom of old age. `I cannot believe that it will ever be superseded... it is the very strong but perfectly clear distillate of a great amount of labour and thought.' London Review of Books `short, pointed, witty, tightly packed, richly illustrated, inspired and illuminating.' Essays in Criticism `If we regret anything as we read this excellent book, we regret that it is not longer.' Christina von Nolcken, Review of English Studies `There is much to praise in the book; Burrow is learned and imaginative, writes lucidly, and... has illuminating things to say... J. A. Burrow is one of the best living critics of medieval English literature, and this book is a rich and informative literary history of an important topic.' Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Byzantine imperial imagery is commonly perceived as a static system. In contrast to this common portrayal, this book draws attention to its openness and responsiveness to other artistic traditions. Through a close examination of significant objects and monuments created over a 350-year period, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, Alicia Walker shows how the visual articulation of Byzantine imperial power not only maintained a visual vocabulary inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also innovated on these artistic precedents by incorporating styles and forms from contemporary foreign cultures, specifically the Sasanian, Chinese, and Islamic worlds. In addition to art and architecture, this book explores historical accounts and literary works as well as records of ceremonial practices, thereby demonstrating how texts, ritual, and images operated as integrated agents of imperial power. Walker offers new ways to think about cross-cultural interaction in the Middle Ages and explores the diverse ways in which imperial images employed foreign elements in order to express particularly Byzantine meanings.

Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths' workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe's literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.