In 1993 and 1994, The Centre for Christianity and the Arts at the Institute of Church History, University of Copenhagen, arranged symposia with liturgy and the arts in the Middle Ages as the uniting theme. Scholars, with different professional backgrounds and from different European countries, as well as from the USA, presented papers of which 11 are collected and published in this book.

Each volume includes all the necessary materials for the comprehensive study of a work of art: An illustration section showing the complete work of art, details, preliminary studies, and iconographic sources; An introductory essay by the editor; Documents and literary sources; Critical essays from the art-historical literature.

These two volumes collect and update Professor Stones's papers on Arthurian manuscript illustration, one of her continuing passions. These essays explore aspects of the iconography of the romances of Chretien de Troyes in French verse, the lengthy Lancelot-Grail romance in French prose, and other versions of the chivalrous exploits of King Arthur's knights - the best-sellers of the Middle Ages. Illustrated copies of these romances survive in huge numbers from the early thirteenth century through the beginnings of print, and were read for their text and their pictures throughout the French-speaking world. Of special interest is the cultural context in which these popular works were made and disseminated, by scribes and artists whose work encompassed all kinds of books, for patrons whose collecting was wide-ranging, including secular books alongside works of liturgical and devotional interest.

This pioneering study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224-642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule: elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. Matthew Canepa explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and the Iranian world under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. He analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only co-existed, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.

Over the centuries, European debate about the nature and status of images of God and sacred figures has often upset the established order and shaken societies to their core. Out of this debate, an identifiable doctrine has emerged of the image in general and of the divine image in particular. This fascinating work concentrates on these historical arguments, from the period of Late Antiquity up to the great and classic defenses of images by St. John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. Icon extends beyond the immediate concerns of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, history, and art, to engage them all.

Per Jonas Nordhagen's work on the frescoes of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome is of fundamental importance to the study of early medieval art in Italy. This volume brings together for the first time Professor Nordhagen's work on medieval Roman mosaics and fresco painting. The book begins with a section on Mosaics and Techniques, covering the mosaic techniques in use during this period in Rome. The subsequent section, on S. Maria Antiqua, includes the author's papers on the fresco decoration of this church, one of the most important monuments of early medieval art in Italy. There follows a selection of papers on iconography, derived from a study of the subjects treated in the mosaic and fresco cycles of this period. Four subsequent articles deal with various themes involved in studying the art of the early medieval period in Rome, and its links with the art of the British Isles. The author has added supplementary notes to correct mistakes in the earlier articles, and to draw attention to subsequent research on the monuments.

A revelatory study exploring wood’s many material, ecological, and symbolic meanings in the religious art of medieval Germany In late medieval Germany, wood was a material laden with significance. It was an important part of the local environment and economy, as well as an object of religious devotion in and of itself.  Gregory C. Bryda examines the multiple meanings of wood and greenery within religious art—as a material, as a feature of agrarian life, and as a symbol of the cross, whose wood has resonances with other iconographies in the liturgy. Bryda discusses how influential artists such as Matthias Grünewald, known for the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the renowned sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider exploited wood’s multivalent nature to connect spiritual themes to the lived environment outside church walls. Exploring the complex visual and material culture of the period, this lavishly illustrated volume features works ranging from monumental altarpieces to portable pictures and offers a fresh understanding of how wood in art functioned to unlock the mysteries of faith and the natural world in both liturgy and everyday life.

Framing the Church takes a nontraditional approach to the study of the hallmark of French Gothic architecture: the buttress. In a series of case studies spanning approximately five hundred years and incorporating some of Gothic France’s most significant monuments, Maile S. Hutterer examines the aesthetics, social processes, and iconography of flying buttresses and buttress piers to explain how they supported the church both symbolically and structurally. Surrounding all or part of a building with periodically spaced massive piers, the buttressing frame defines an edge that simultaneously maintains permeability, creating an intermediary space around the structure. Making extensive use of archival sources, Hutterer argues that the areas between the buttresses distinguished the consecrated, sacred ground of the church interior from its unconsecrated, nonsacred surroundings, a division that was of increasing concern to theologians in the High Middle Ages. She traces how, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, artists and patrons increasingly associated buttressing frames with sacred places through the incorporation of sculptural programs related to theology, processions, and protection. In this way, buttressing frames mediated the interaction between visitor and building and participated in the liturgical and ritual purpose of the church’s structure. Original and persuasive, this book illuminates the buttresses’ social and religious meaning for medieval viewers by introducing architectural iconography to a form that is primarily understood in terms of its structural utility. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of medieval architecture and medieval French history.

This focused volume presents a deep exploration and new interpretations of the winter paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569). By applying new methodological approaches and interdisciplinary research to these masterpieces of Flemish Renaissance art, including Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) and The Census at Bethlehem (1566), both at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the book offers an enhanced understanding of the painter's relationship to his time and the extent to which his winter landscapes were meant to reflect real-life situations. After tracing how these paintings have been understood over time, the essays propose new insights into such issues as whether Bruegel depicts the plight of the local populace during winter and whether The Census at Bethlehem challenges or reaffirms central power structures. Abundantly illustrated, Bruegel's Winter Scenes is both a thorough examination and a celebration of these widely admired images. Distributed for Mercatorfonds.

Art and architecture are mirrors of a society. They reflect the state of its values, especially in times of crisis or transition. Upon this premise Paul Zanker builds an interpretation of Augustan art as a visual language that both expressed and furthered the transformation of Roman society during the rule of Augustus Caesar. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus illustrates how the establishment of monarchy under Augustus Caesar led to the creation of a new system of visual imagery that reflects the consciousness of this transitional age.

This handsomely illustrated volume explores the medieval Deccani temple complexes at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Pattadakal, with careful attention to their makers. The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance. In Shiva's Waterfront Temples, Subhashini Kaligotla situates these buildings in the cosmopolitan milieu of Deccan India and considers how their makers and awestruck visitors would have seen them in their day. Kaligotla reconstructs how architects and builders approached the sites, including their use of ornamentation, responsiveness to courtly values such as pleasure and play, and ingenious juxtaposition of the first millennium's Nagara and Dravida aesthetics, a blend largely unique to Deccan plateau architecture. With over 130 color illustrations, this original book elucidates the Deccan's special place in the lexicon of medieval South Asian architecture.

For the people of Byzantium, their architectural works, frescoes, mosaics, ivories, chalices, bejewelled gospel covers and qlany other opulent works of art were the material proof of their greatness and power over the Mediterranean states. The vast range of these riches is illustrated in this complete account of Byzantine art from the reign of Justinian to the fall of Constantinople. David Talbot Rice, one of the greatest authorities on Byzantine art, travelled as far afield as the rock churches of Cappadocia and Cilicia, the tufa monuments of Armenia and Georgia, and the thirteenth-century ceramic factories of Bulgaria, now buried in the alluvial mud of the Danube. His book is a masterly survey of an art of magnificence and power that belonged to a great and sophisticated society.

This refreshing new look at Medieval art conveys a very real sense of the impact of art on everyday life in Europe from 1000 to 1500. It examines the importance of art in the expression and spread of knowledge and ideas, including notions of the heroism and justice of war, and the dominant view of Christianity.

Between 1170 and 1190 in Alsace, Abbess Herrad compiled for her canonesses an elaborate manuscript, the Hortus deliciarum, which combined resplendent images with quotations from more than fifty texts to portray a history of the Christian church across time and through eternity. Destroyed in a bombing during the 1870 siege of Strasbourg, Herrad’s lavishly illuminated manuscript was one of the earliest works created by a woman expressly for other women, the nuns training at the Hohenbourg abbey. In this close study of the art and history of the Hortus deliciarum, Danielle Joyner shows how the book reflected twelfth-century concerns, such as emphasizing a historical interpretation of the Bible and reconciling scientific and theological accounts of the cosmos. She analyzes the images, texts, ideas, and processes at work in the manuscript and offers insights into how it configured a history of the Church in the temporal world as a guide to achieving eternal salvation. By tracing the flexibility and efficacy of the multiple visions employed in the manuscript, Joyner explores how the Hortus deliciarum crafted a deeper understanding of the integral role of time in medieval constructions of history, the cosmos, and humanity’s place within them. Scholars and students of art history, medieval and early modern studies, religion, gender, and the history of the book will find Joyner’s work especially valuable, compelling, and provoking.

A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist, Verbum dei, deo natum, within its broader cultural context. Written and illuminated at the Dominican nunnery of Paradies bei Soest in Westfalia as part of a set of liturgical books that are among the most elaborate of their kind from the entire Middle Ages, the richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ's "beloved disciple" in 14th-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism. In addition to an introduction on art and liturgy in the Middle Ages, the interdisciplinary collection of essays includes contributions by musicologists, philologists and art historians.

After initial ambivalence about distinctive garb for its ministers, early Christianity developed both liturgical garments and visible markers of clerical status outside church. From the ninth century, moreover, new converts to the faith beyond the Alps developed a highly ornate style of liturgical attire; church vestments were made of precious silks and decorated with embroidered and woven ornament, often incorporating gold and jewels. Making use of surviving medieval textiles and garments; mosaics, frescoes, and manuscript illuminations; canon law; liturgical sources; literary works; hagiography; theological tracts; chronicles, letters, inventories of ecclesiastical treasuries, and wills, Maureen C. Miller in Clothing the Clergy traces the ways in which clerical garb changed over the Middle Ages.

Miller s in-depth study of the material culture of church vestments not only goes into detail about craft, artistry, and textiles but also contributes in groundbreaking ways to our understanding of the religious, social, and political meanings of clothing, past and present. As a language of power, clerical clothing was used extensively by eleventh-century reformers to mark hierarchies, to cultivate female patrons, and to make radical new claims for the status of the clergy. The medieval clerical culture of clothing had enduring significance: its cultivation continued within Catholicism and even some Protestant denominations and it influenced the visual communication of respectability and power in the modern Western world. Clothing the Clergy features seventy-nine illustrations, including forty color photographs that put the rich variety of church vestments on display."

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book."

In "Miserere Mei, "Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. "Miserere Mei "explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance, but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagementacross the many polarities that are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture."Miserere Mei "features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find "Miserere Mei" particularly instructive and compelling. "Seldom have I read a first book of such subtlety and sustained by such learning, particularly welcome for the way it so easily and gracefully crosses the artificial barriers we raise between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This is an original and often touching study of biblical materials that have seen a surge of interest. Those interested in the Psalms, in art history, in David, in translation, to say nothing of early modern sexuality, should rush to read it." --Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College and Columbia University

The provincial town of Ravenna in Northern Italy is famous for its Early Christian cultural heritage: churches and chapels, decorated with mosaics, which seem to have survived in their original state. However, these religious buildings, with famous examples like San Vitale, Sant'Apollinare in Classe and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, underwent many changes in the course of fifteen centuries of continuous use. This study takes the transformations of the monuments of Ravenna as a starting point to explore the city's attitude towards its religious cultural heritage throughout the centuries. Together with the local historiographical sources, dating from Medieval and the Early Modern times, they provide a picture of the manner in which Ravenna experienced, appropriated and imagined its past. The findings are elaborated in seven chapters, addressing respectively the cult of saints; the relationship with Rome and with Constantinople; the alleged controversy between Orthodoxy and Arianism; the post-Tridentine period; the lost monuments and the restorations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. By considering Early Christian Ravenna from the context of cultural memory, involving both material and written sources, new insights are yielded on a frequently researched subject.

This volume examines the painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced in nine important court cities of Italy during the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The six essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, examine the development of patronage as well as the production of art in Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini. They explore the interaction of artists and their civic and/or courtly patrons within the context of prevailing cultural, political, and religious circumstances. Although each chapter represents a separate study of a particular geographical locale, many common themes emerge, including the nature of artistic practice; the concept of the court artist; the politics of local and foreign styles; the role of corporate and individual patronage and production; the circulation of artists and images in Northern Italy and beyond; the function of art in constructing individual and group identity; and the relationships among science, theology, and the visual arts, particularly in the sixteenth century. A multifaceted consideration of the art created for princes, prelates, confraternities, and civic authorities - works displayed in public squares, private palaces, churches, and town halls - Northern Court Cities of Italy provides a rich supplement to traditional accounts of the artistic heritage of the Italian Renaissance, which have traditionally focused on the Florentine, Venetian, and Roman traditions. The book includes both 35 color plates and 221 black and white illustrations.

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.

Modern scholarship, particularly historical studies, has long acknowledged the importance of the past to medieval conceptions of the present. This volume brings art history and music into dialogue with historical studies. The essays draw out the strategies shared by these fields in the realm of historical representation. How was the creative representation of past practices--in illuminated manuscripts, monumental sculpture, and architecture, as well as in musical notation, motet composition, and performance--understood as both a historical and historicizing act? What kinds of relationships did composers, patrons, chroniclers, and musicians entertain with their predecessors? Historical studies have shown how chroniclers and annalists rewrote tradition while self-consciously writing themselves into it; the essays in this volume explore such strategies in art and music.

The contributors are Jaume Aurell, Jeffrey A. Bowman, Susan Boynton, Ardis Butterfield, Margot Fassler, Patrick J. Geary, Lindy Grant, James Grier, Cynthia Hahn, Joan A. Holladay, Laurent Morelle, Lawrence Nees, Susan Reynolds, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, and Christine B. Verzar.

Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts is a highly readable and well-illustrated guide to manuscript study for students and fledgling researchers in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.Bringing together invaluable advice and information from a group of eminent scholars, it aims to develop in the reader an informed and realistic approach to the mechanisms for accessing and handling manuscripts in what may be limited time. In addition to an exploration of the various manuscript resources available in libraries and their research potential, the book appraises recent developments in electronic resources, making it a beneficial aid for teachers as well as individual researchers working away from the location of manuscripts.The book includes a clear and comprehensive guide to palaeography and codicology. Chapters on Old English prose, Old English poetry and Anglo-Latin texts introduce readers to the whole range of written material extant in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Manuscript art is uniquely presented in the context of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as a whole, moving beyond traditional approaches, while the chapter 'Reading between (and beyond) the lines' demonstrates some of the fascinating detail of glosses and marginalia, and reveals how the life of the manuscript continued beyond the writing of its main text.