Spirited Prospect: A Portable History of Western Art from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era is a lively, scholarly survey of the great artists, works, and movements that make up the history of Western art. Within the text, important questions are addressed: What is art, and who is an artist? What is the West, and what is the Canon? Is the Western Canon closed or exclusionary? Why is it more important than ever for individuals to engage and understand it? Readers are escorted on a concise, chronological tour of Western visual culture, beginning with the first art produced before written history. They learn about the great ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Italy; the advent of Christianity and its manifestations in Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art; and the fragmentation of old traditions and the proliferation of new artistic choices that characterize the Enlightenment and the Modern Era. The revised second edition features improved formatting, juxtaposition, sizing, and spacing of images throughout. Spirited Prospect is an ideal textbook for introductory courses in the history of art, as well as courses in studio art and Western civilization at all levels.

A World Perspective of Art History: Ancient Art History from the First Artists to the 14th Century - Volume One provides students with a worldwide, integrated introduction to art. The book features a distinct emphasis on women, minorities, and civilizations around the world using a coordinated time sequence and comparing art in multiple cultures simultaneously. Students discover art and culture from a global perspective and are encouraged to connect their own cultures with key learnings. The material is presented in historical time sequences based on the rise and fall of various civilizations and how they created art and architecture during that time. Students are introduced to the early art of around 50,000 BCE and encouraged to consider why these original artists created their works. Additional units progress chronologically and show how art evolved in step with developed settlements. The book introduces great structures erected during the Bronze Age and demonstrates how the Iron Age influenced the art of ancient Greece. Students read about trade, the rise of empires, the dawn of deities, and how each of these historical developments profoundly impacted the type of art created during each time period. The final unit focuses on the end of ancient civilizations. Featuring a uniquely inclusive approach, A World Perspective of Art History is an ideal resource for courses in art history and art appreciation.

Medieval Jewelry and Burial Assemblages in Croatia analyzes the Croatian archaeological heritage from the 8th to the 15th century, consisting mostly of jewelry (earrings) findings from cemeteries. Stratigraphy is used to establish horizons and phases of material culture, as well as the structure of the burial chambers. All in comparison with materials from neighboring regions of Europe.

This book is dedicated to an outstanding architectural monument of medieval Armenia - the church of the Holy Cross, built in the tenth century on the island of Alt'amar on Lake Van, and a UNESCO world heritage site. This jewel of architecture has been researched mainly from an art historical perspective. The current multi-author volume offers diverse studies aimed at placing the construction of the church in its proper historical, political, religious, and spiritual context. It explores the intellectual climate in the Kingdom of Vaspurakan during the reign of its founder, King Gagik Arcruni, the Kingdom's relations with Byzantium and the Abbasids, analyzes local historiography, biblical exegesis, hagiography, veneration of the True Cross, and royal ideology. Novel interpretations of architectural features and sculptural decorations close the volume. Le livre est consacre a l'un des plus importants monuments architecturaux de l'Armenie medievale, l'eglise de la Sainte-Croix construite au Xe siecle sur l'ile d'Alt'amar sur le lac de Van. Elle est inscrite sur la liste du patrimoine mondial de l'UNESCO. Ce joyau de l'architecture armenienne a ete etudie principalement dans la perspective de l'histoire de l'art. Le present volume multi-auteurs propose une diversite d'approches qui placent la construction de cette eglise dans le contexte historique, politique, religieux et spirituel. Il etudie l'ambiance intellectuelle du Royaume du Vaspurakan durant le regne de son fondateur, le roi Gagik Arcruni, les relations du Royaume avec Byzance et les Abbassides, il analyse l'historiographie locale, l'exegese biblique, l'hagiographie, le culte de la Vraie Croix et l'ideologie royale. De nouvelles interpretations des particularites architecturales et des decors sculptes achevent le volume. Contributors are Krikor Beledian, Jean-Claude Cheynet, Patrick Donabedian, Bernard Flusin, Tim Greenwood, Gohar Grigoryan, Armen Kazaryan, Davit Kertmenjyan, Sergio La Porta, Jean-Pierre Mahe, Zaroui Pogossian, Robert Thomson (), Alison Vacca, Edda Vardanyan.

This volume proposes a renewed way of framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women. Today's standard division of artist from patron is not seen in medieval inscriptions-on paintings, metalwork, embroideries, or buildings-where the most common verb is 'made' (fecit). At times this denotes the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Here twenty-four scholars examine secular and religious art from across medieval Europe to demonstrate that a range of studies is of interest not just for a particular time and place but because, from this range, overall conclusions can be drawn for the question of medieval art history as a whole. Contributors are Mickey Abel, Glaire D. Anderson, Jane L. Carroll, Nicola Coldstream, Maria Elena Diez Jorge, Jaroslav Folda, Alexandra Gajewski, Loveday Lewes Gee, Melissa R. Katz, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Pierre Alain Mariaux, Therese Martin, Eileen McKiernan Gonzalez, Rachel Moss, Jenifer Ni Ghradaigh, Felipe Pereda, Annie Renoux, Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Stefanie Seeberg, Miriam Shadis, Ellen Shortell, Loretta Vandi, and Nancy L. Wicker.

A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR

'A triumph' Guardian

'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook

'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.

In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process.

Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

The artistic and literary maze of Latin-occupied Greece cannot be analysed by a conventional approach. Follow the author and the historical protagonists of his tales in a journey through a fragmentary shape-shifting corpus, from the medieval translations of Aristotle to pornographic animal tales carved on church columns. The book explains how art and literature were intertwined, how they evolved from the times of Nicetas Choniates to those of Isabella of Lusignan, and under what influences. It is based on the assumption that history is a form of literature, as they both share an "arbitrary distribution of emphasis" (Isaiah Berlin).

Robert Couzin's Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art is the first in-depth study of handedness, position, and direction in the visual culture of Europe and Byzantium from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Heretofore largely unnoticed or ignored, the pre-eminence of the right and lapses or intentional departures from that norm in medieval imagery are relevant to such major themes as iconography, visuality, reception, narrative, form, gender, production, and patronage. The author's investigation of right and left in visual culture is informed by modern experimental research on laterality and contextualized within prevailing theological doctrines and socio-cultural practices. Illustrations in the text are complemented by hundreds more made available on Brill's Arkyves platform here. See inside the book.

This volume approaches the problem of the canonical center by looking at art and architecture on the borders of the medieval world, from China to Armenia, Sweden, and Spain. Seven contributors engage three distinct yet related problems: margins, frontiers, and cross-cultural encounters. While not displaying a unified methodology or privileging specific theoretical constructs, the essays emphasize how strategies of representation articulated ownership and identity within contested arenas. What is contested is both medieval (the material evidence itself) and modern (the scholarly traditions in which the evidence has or has not been embedded). An introduction by the editors places the essays within historiographic and pedagogical frameworks. Contributors: J. Caskey, K. Kogman-Appel, C. Maranci, J. Purtle, C. Robinson, N. Wicker and E.S.Wolper.

In Material Culture and Queenship in 14th-century France: The Testament of Blanche of Navarre (1331-1398) Marguerite Keane considers the object collection of the long-lived fourteenth-century French queen Blanche of Navarre, the wife of Philip VI (d. 1350). This queen's ownership of works of art (books, jewelry, reliquaries, and textiles, among others) and her perceptions of these objects is well -documented because she wrote detailed testaments in 1396 and 1398 in which she described her possessions and who she wished to receive them. Keane connects the patronage of Blanche of Navarre to her interest in her status and reputation as a dowager queen, as well as bringing to life the material, adornment, and devotional interests of a medieval queen and her household.

In the early 1800's, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects. Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea-road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.

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.

This collection examines gender and Otherness as tools to understand medieval and early modern art as products of their social environments. The essays, uniting up-and-coming and established scholars, explore both iconographic and stylistic similarities deployed to construct gender identity. The text analyzes a vast array of medieval artworks, including Dieric Bouts's Justice of Otto III, Albrecht Durer's Feast of the Rose Garland, Rembrandt van Rijn's Naked Woman Seated on a Mound, and Renaissance-era transi tombs of French women to illuminate medieval and early modern ideas about gender identity, poverty, religion, honor, virtue, sexuality, and motherhood, among others.

Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe examines key aspects related to the reception of Ibero-Islamic architecture in medieval Iberia and 19th-century Europe. It challenges prevalent readings of architecture and interiors whose creation was the result of cultural encounters. As Mudejar and neo-Moorish architecture are closely connected to the Islamic world, concepts of identity, nationalism, religious and ethnic belonging, as well as Orientalism and Islamoscepticism significantly shaped the way in which they have been perceived over time. This volume offers art historical and socio-cultural analysis of selected case studies from Spain to Russia and opens the door to a better understanding of interconnected cultural and artistic phenomena. Contributors are (in order of appearance) Francine Giese, Ariane Varela Braga, Michael A. Conrad, Katrin Kaufmann, Sarah Keller, Elena Paulino Montero, Luis Araus Ballesteros, Ekaterina Savinova, Christian Schweizer, Alejandro Jimenez Hernandez and Laura Alvarez Acosta.

The willingness to betray one's country, one's people, one's family-to commit treason and foreswear loyalty to one entity by giving it to another-is a difficult concept for many people to comprehend. Yet, societies have grappled with treason for centuries; the motivations, implications, and consequences are rarely clear cut and are often subjective. Set against the framework of modern political concerns, Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame considers the various forms of treachery in a variety of sources, including literature, historical chronicles, and material culture creating a complex portrait of the development of this high crime. Larissa Tracy artfully brings together younger critics as well as seasoned scholars in a compelling and topical conversation on treason. Contributors are Frank Battaglia, Dianne Berg, Tina Marie Boyer, Albrecht Classen, Sam Claussen, Freddy C. Dominguez, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Ana Grinberg, Iain A. MacInnes, Inna Matyushina, Sally Shockro, Susan Small, Peter Sposato, Sarah J. Sprouse, Daniel Thomas, and Larissa Tracy.

In Kids Those Days, Lahney Preston-Matto and Mary Valante have organized a collection of interdisciplinary research into childhood throughout the Middle Ages. Contributors to the volume investigate childhood from Greece to the "Celtic-Fringe," looking at how children lived, suffered, thrived, or died young. Scholars from myriad disciplines, from art and archaeology to history and literature, offer essays on abandonment and abuse, fosterage and guardianship, criminal behavior and child-rearing, child bishops and sainthood, disabilities and miracles, and a wide variety of other subjects related to medieval children. The volume focuses especially on children in the realms of religion, law, and vulnerabilities. Contributors are Paul A. Broyles, Sarah Croix, Gavin Fort, Sophia Germanidou, Danielle Griego, Maire Johnson, Daniel T. Kline, Jenni Kuuliala, Lahney Preston-Matto, Melissa Raine, Eve Salisbury, Ruth Salter, Bridgette Slavin, and Mary A. Valante.

New insights into key texts and interpretive problems in the history of England and Europe between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. This volume of the Haskins Society Journal demonstrates the Society's continued interest in a broad range of geographical contexts and methodological approaches to medieval history. Chapters include a much-needed reassessment of AElfthryth and her place in the society and governance of tenth-century England, as well as a comprehensive survey of the conceptualization of excommunication in post-Carolingian Europe to c.1200. Further essays explore aspects of the Norman world of southern Italy, including the dynamics of political coalitions and kinship networks, ethnic identity, and material culture. The Journal continues to highlight close analyses of key primary sources,with a study of Angevin kingship in the writings of Hugh of Lincoln and Adam of Eynsham, and an examination of Ralph of Niger's Old Testament exegesis and criticism of crusading in the late twelfth century. A ground-breaking newstudy assesses the utility of colonialism as a valid model for understanding the extraction of sacred resources and relics from the crusader lands. The volume closes with a crucial reconsideration of the agency and power of medieval French peasants as attested in medieval cartularies, opening new approaches for further research into this critical and complex social group.

Between the 12th and 14th centuries images of the suffering Christ proliferated in England, appearing in sermons, drama, church decorations, and spiritual treatises. Some scholars see these as signs of a new emphasis on Jesus's humanity, while other see renewed emphasis on a terrifying God of vengeance. Ellen Ross argues that these images served as a vivid narrative of God's mercy made tangible in Jesus Christ.

Ross provides a broad survey of pictures and texts concerning saints, from the Early Christian through the late Gothic period. Both Western and Byzantine material is included. Beginning with the earliest pictures of and stories about saints, the book traces the evolution of hagiographic imagery primarily in manuscript contexts. Because of its cross-disciplinary nature, it will be of interest to audiences interested in Early Christian, Byzantine, and Western medieval culture: religion, society, politics, and art. No other book to date is organized similarly in providing detailed descriptions for the identification of medieval manuscripts with hagiographic texts and illustrations.

This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework of this volume provides a holistic view of the visual culture of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, as well as notions of cross-cultural contact, while putting on the global map of art history the eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe.