Il Colloquio Internazionale tra dottorandi e dottori di ricerca (RACTA) si pone come obiettivo fornire una panoramica completa degli studi riguardanti l'archeologia tardoantica e cristiana, la storia dell'arte, la storia e la letteratura paleocristiana condotti da giovani studiosi provenienti da tutto il mondo. RACTA vuole essere anche un momento di condivisione di idee e di confronto con ricercatori e specialisti di diverse discipline che possono aggiungere valore alle singole ricerche. La varieta dei temi affrontati dai 23 relatori di questa seconda edizione e trattata secondo un approccio metodologico interdisciplinare, a conferma delle infinite relazioni possibili tra le diverse discipline archeologiche, storiche, storico-artistiche e letterarie e a rafforzare l'orientamento multidisciplinare dato al Colloquio sin dalla sua prima edizione.

A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics-involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion-to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.

The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth is among the most celebrated loca sancta in the Holy Land, a sacred destination of both Eastern and Western pilgrims for millennia. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the modern edifice, this anthology is the first to offer a comprehensive study of the church, comprising the historical stages of its construction from the Byzantine era, through Crusader and Franciscan campaigns, and into the present day; the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the reception of modern elements of its architecture; and studies of its decorative elements including stained-glass windows, bronze doors, and votive panels from all over the world. These various analyses take into consideration the complex challenges facing Christian art in a multicultural world.

In a major departure from previous scholarship, this volume argues that the illustrations in the famous and widely influential Utrecht Psalter manuscript were inspired by a late antique Hebrew version of Psalms, rather than a Latin, Christian version of the text. Produced during the early ninth century in a workshop near Reims, France, the Utrecht Psalter is illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings in a lively style reminiscent of Hellenistic art. The motifs are largely literal renditions of words and phrases found in the book of Psalms. However, more than three dozen motifs cannot be explained by either the Latin text that accompanies the imagery or the commentaries of the church fathers. Through a close reading of the Hebrew Psalms, Pamela Berger demonstrates that these motifs can be explained only by the Hebrew text, the Jewish commentary, or Jewish art. Drawing comparisons between the “Hellenistic� style of the Psalter images and the style of late antique Galilean mosaics and using evidence from recent archaeological discoveries, Berger argues that the model for those Psalter illustrations dependent on the Hebrew text was produced in the Galilee. Pioneering and highly persuasive, this book resolves outstanding issues surrounding the origins of one of the most extensively studied illuminated manuscripts. It will be mandatory reading for many historians of medieval art and literature and for those interested in the Hebrew text of the book of Psalms.

In colorful detail, Calvin Lane explores the dynamic intersection between reform movements and everyday Christian practice from ca. 1000 to ca. 1800. Lowering the artificial boundaries between “the Middle Ages,� “the Reformation,� and “the Enlightenment,� Lane brings to life a series of reform programs each of which developed new sensibilities about what it meant to live the Christian life. Along this tour, Lane discusses music, art, pilgrimage, relics, architecture, heresy, martyrdom, patterns of personal prayer, changes in marriage and family life, connections between church bodies and governing authorities, and certainly worship. The thread that he finds running from the Benedictine revival in the eleventh century to the pietistic movements of the eighteenth is a passionate desire to return to a primitive era of Christianity, a time of imagined apostolic authenticity, even purity. In accessible language, he introduces readers to Cistercians and Calvinists, Franciscans and Jesuits, Lutherans and Jansenists, Moravians and Methodists to name but a few of the many reform movements studied in this book. Although Lane highlights their diversity, he argues that each movement rooted its characteristic practice – their spirituality – in an imaginative recovery of the apostolic life.

Medieval Toledo is famous as a center of Arabic learning and as a home to sizable Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities. Yet its cathedral—one of the largest, richest, and best preserved in all of Europe—is little known outside Spain. In Toledo Cathedral, Tom Nickson provides the first in-depth analysis of the cathedral’s art and architecture. Focusing on the early thirteenth to the late fourteenth centuries, he examines over two hundred years of change and consolidation, tracing the growth of the cathedral in the city as well as the evolution of sacred places within the cathedral itself. He goes on to consider this substantial monument in terms of its location in Toledo, Spain’s most cosmopolitan city in the medieval period. Nickson also addresses the importance and symbolic significance of Toledo’s cathedral to the city and the art and architecture of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, showing how it fits in with broader narratives of change in the arts, culture, and ideology of the late medieval period in Spain and in Mediterranean Europe as a whole.

This important book [...] is a helpful guide to thinking with things and teaching with things. Each entry challenges the reader to approach objects as historical actors that can speak to the changes and continuities of life in the late antique and early medieval world. ― Early Medieval Europe Fifty Early Medieval Things introduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects—artifacts, structures, and archaeological features—created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era. Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Fifty Early Medieval Things demonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable.

Gewalt und Krieg sind heute wie auch in der Vormoderne keine ausschliesslich mannliche Domane, sondern Raume der Manner und Frauen gleichermassen. In Zeiten kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen werden Geschlechterrollen ausgebildet, konforme und abweichende Verhaltensweisen ausprobiert und Konzepte von Mannlichkeit und Weiblichkeit entwickelt. Erstmals fur die Epoche des Mittelalters (7.-16. Jahrhundert) werden daraus resultierende Fragestellungen im interdisziplinaren und kulturubergreifenden Vergleich untersucht. Die Beitrage eroertern Geschlechterbeziehungen auf Darstellungs- und Handlungsebene und beschreiben Interaktionsformen in Kontexten von Gewalt und Krieg. UEber den europaischen Raum mit seinen zahlreichen Fehden und Heerzugen hinaus werden auch die Kreuzzuge in den Blick genommen.

Dante's Commedia intensively influenced the concept of the afterlife for people in Italy. But how did artists react to Dante's imaginary world of images in their visual constructions of the Last Judgment? Based on cycles of wall paintings by artists from Giotto to Signorelli, the author shows how the Commedia altered the traditional picture theme of Judgment Day for the first time. Dante's landscape of the afterlife enabled painters to visualize new pictorial spaces that did not necessarily have a direct connection to the text, but make reference to it nevertheless. The consideration of this complex pictorial program that is undertaken in this book in turn opens up new ways of understanding the reception and interpretation of the Commedia, so that text and image enter into a productive dialogue.