The extraordinary array of images included in this volume reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each section is organized chronologically, and every object is accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and cultural significance within the wider context in which the object was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and consider the significance of the objects and the history that they reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.

The Bayeux Tapestry has long been recognized as one of the most problematical historical documents of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. More than a reinterpretation of the historical evidence, Suzanne Lewis's study explores the visual and textual strategies that have made the Bayeux Tapestry's narrative such a powerful experience for audiences over the centuries. The Rhetoric of Power focuses on how the Tapestry tells its story and how it shapes the responses of reader-viewers. This involves a detailed analysis of the way the visual narrative draws on diverse literary genres to establish the cultural resonance of the story it tells. The material is organized into self-contained yet cross-referencing episodes that not only portray the events of the Conquest but locate those events within the ideological codes of Norman feudalism. Lewis's analysis conveys how the whole 232-foot tapestry would have operated as a complex cultural 'fiction' comparable to modern cinema.

Originally published in 2001, this book examines the Venetian colonies of the Eastern Mediterranean and how their built environments express the close cultural ties with both Venice and Byzantium. Using the island of Crete and its capital city, Candia (modern Herakleion), as a case study, Maria Georgopoulou exposes the dynamic relationship that existed between colonizer and colony. She studies the military, administrative, and ecclesiastical monuments set up by the Venetian colonists which served as bold statements of control over the local Greek population and the Jewish communities who were ethnically, religiously, and linguistically distinct from them. Georgopoulou demonstrates how the Venetian colonists manipulated Crete's past history in order to support and legitimate colonial rule, particularly through the appropriation of older Byzantine traditions in civic and religious ceremonies.

Westminster Abbey contains the only surviving medieval Cosmatesque mosaics outside Italy. They comprise: the ‘Great Pavement’ in the sanctuary; the pavement around the shrine of Edward the Confessor; the saint’s tomb and shrine; Henry III’s tomb; the tomb of a royal child, and some other pieces. Surprisingly, the mosaics have never before received detailed recording and analysis, either individually or as an assemblage. This two-volume publication presents a holistic study of this outstanding group of monuments in their historical architectural and archaeological context. The shrine of St Edward is a remarkable survival, having been dismantled at the Dissolution and re-erected (incorrectly) in 1557 under Queen Mary. Large areas of missing mosaic were replaced with plaster on to which mosaic designs were carefully painted. This 16th-century fictive mosaic is unique in Britain. Conservation of the sanctuary pavement was accompanied by full archaeological recording with every piece of mosaic decoration drawn and coloured by David Neal, phase plans have been prepared, and stone-by-stone examination undertaken, petrologically identifying and recording the locations of all the materials present. It has revealed that both the pavements and tombs include a range of exotic stone types. The Cosmati study has shed fresh light on every aspect of the unique series of monuments in Westminster Abbey; this work will fill a major lacuna in our knowledge of 13th-century English art of the first rank, and will command international interest.

An important trade centre in the Medieval Mediterranean, Amalfi and the surrounding region of southern Italy sustained strong art production and patronage from the eleventh through to the thirteenth centuries. Merchant patrons realised a wide variety of religious and residential complexes that were evocative of Byzantine, Islamic, Western, and local traditions. With the rise of the Angevin kingdom, a demise of this eclectic art tradition took place and by the fourteenth century, Amalfitan painting and sculpture reflected compromises between local and Neapolitan styles, demonstrating the erosion of its autonomy. Originally published in 2004, this book evaluates the Amalfitan art production in terms of moral, economic, and social structures, including investment strategies, anxieties about wealth and salvation, and southern Italy's diverse religious communities. Historiographical analyses and postcolonial models of interpretation offer further insight into Amalfitan art and its ever-shifting relationship to the visual cultures of sovereign authorities in southern Italy.

Nicola Pisano was a much admired thirteenth-century Italian sculptor and architect, often considered to be the founder of modern sculpture. Within this 1938 text, G. H. and E. R. Crichton begin by giving a biographical background of Pisano, before looking at those early sculptors whose works may have inspired him. In the book's second part, the Crichtons write in detail about the sculptures of Pisano, describing the pulpits at Pisa and Siena as well as the Fountain at Perugia. The Crichtons also discuss those pieces often accredited to Pisano which seem unlikely to be his. Finally, they share their conclusions on Pisano's influence on Italian sculpture. These fascinating accounts of Pisano's life and works are supplemented by numerous illustrative plates. This book will appeal to scholars of art and sculpture in general, as well as of Pisano and thirteenth-century sculpture more specifically.

In the past, the question of the formal and functional context of sculpture and nunneries around the year 1300 has been predominantly confined to the Alemannic nunneries. This text focuses on Nordic sculpture. The medieval grounds of the Luneberg nunnery and their fittings represent an unusual legacy, deriving from the heyday of women's mysticism and the expansion of the system of territorial sovereignty.

In the Middle Ages, religious crusaders took up arms, prayed, bade farewell to their families, and marched off to fight in holy wars. These Christian soldiers also created accounts of their lives in lyric poetry, putting words to the experience of personal sacrifice and the pious struggle associated with holy war. The crusaders affirmed their commitment to fighting to claim a distant land while revealing their feelings as they left behind their loved ones, homes, and earthly duties. Their poems and related visual works offer us insight into the crusaders' lives and values at the boundaries of earthly and spiritual duties, body and soul, holy devotion and courtly love. In The Subject of Crusade, Marisa Galvez offers a nuanced view of holy war and crusade poetry, reading these lyric works within a wider conversation with religion and culture. Arguing for an interdisciplinary treatment of crusade lyric, she shows how such poems are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon. Placing them in conversation with chronicles, knightly handbooks, artworks, and confessional and pastoral texts, she identifies a particular "crusade idiom" that emerged out of the conflict between pious and earthly duties. Galvez fashions an expanded understanding of the creative works made by crusaders to reveal their experiences, desires, ideologies, and reasons for taking up the cross.

Im Zuge der kaiserlichen Toleranzedikte und der "Bekehrung" Kaiser Konstantins konnte das Christentum seit dem 4. Jahrhundert starker in die OEffentlichkeit treten und seine Kultbauten und Versammlungsorte nach seinen Bedurfnissen gestalten und ausschmucken. Die prachtigen Mosaikfussboeden der spatantiken Kirchen an der oberen Adria sind grossartige Zeugnisse der fruhchristlichen Archaologie und Kultur. Der Verfasser untersucht diese Pavimente mit ihren Inschriften, den sogenannten Offerenteninschriften: Sie geben Auskunft uber die Namen der Stifter und deren Beitrag zum jeweiligen Bodenmosaik. Im ersten Teil des Bandes bietet der Autor einen historischen UEberblick. Es zeigt sich, dass die Wurzeln des auffalligen wie ratselhaften Brauches, Fussboeden als Bild- und Schriftmedium zu nutzen, bis ins heidnische Altertum zuruckreichen. Im Untersuchungsgebiet Histria et Venetia war der musivische (eingelegte) Bodenschmuck schon sehr stark verbreitet, bevor er in die kirchlichen Gebaude rund um das Mittelmeer seinen Einzug hielt. Der zweite Teil der Arbeit behandelt die kunst- und auch religionsgeschichtlichen Besonderheiten der adriatischen Offerenteninschriften: Sie erlauben Ruckschlusse sowohl auf die spatantike Kirchenorganisation wie auch auf die liturgischen Brauche und Heilsvorstellungen der Glaubigen.

The Shaping of Art History examines art history's formation in the German academy in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Wilhelm Voege and Adolph Goldschmidt, two influential scholars of medieval art, Kathryn Brush analyses their methods and particularly those scholarly projects that were critical to the development of their approaches. Her work combines intellectual and institutional history with the study of artistic monuments and biography. It considers how the study of the pioneering scholarship in the field of medieval art is critical to an understanding of the formulation of art historical method as a whole.

This 1988 volume, collected here are the principal essays of Elizabeth Salter published between 1966 and her death in 1980, together with three chapters of a book on the literary culture of England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on which she was working in the last years of her life, and a version of her brilliant lectures on the theme of the Annuciation to the Shepherds in literature, drama and art given during those years. Elizabeth Salter is recognised as one of the most distinguished medieval scholars of her generation, particularly noted for her work on Langland and Chaucer, and on the relationship of literature and the visual arts. The strength and consistency of her views, the persistent and urgent nature of her preoccupations, and the depth of scholarship and skill of presentation, all emerge more clearly than ever in this volume.

Carved and decorated stone-work is a rare survival from the period before the Norman Conquest. In Nottinghamshire it survives as large crosses and as small fragments - to be found in churches, in public spaces and in museum collections. This is the first book to provide an authoritative listing, description and illustration of all examples of this type of decorated stone sculpture in Nottinghamshire. Each example is illustrated in a substantial catalogue containing high quality photographs, maps and interpretative drawings. In the introductory chapters the authors explore the geological and historical background of the sculptures and provide an overview of the types of style and ornament. The new information revealed by the systematic study of these major survivals of Anglo-Saxon art and archaeology demonstrates the major contribution that this category of material can make to an obscure and under-investigated period in Midlands history. Nottinghamshire emerges with a distinctive identity in the pre-conquest period, having strong connections both with the Mercian state to its south and with the Northumbrians to the north.

Graffiti ('drawings or writings scratched on a wall or other surface') are to be found incised on the walls and pillars of innumerable cathedrals and churches in Great Britain. Most were done between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries; many are valuable as examples of medieval art; and some are important for their preservation of particular styles of epigraphy. In this work, Mrs Pritchard has studied the inscriptions and drawings in a large number of churches, mostly within a radius of sixty miles of Cambridge. These graffiti are far from mere scratchings performed by unskilled hands; they are highly imaginative, boldly executed drawings, combining freedom of line with occasional fussiness of detail, and inscriptions whose clarity and precision of lettering equal in execution the contemporary manuscript. Many were subsequently covered by medieval wall paintings; others have been partly defaced by cleaning and restoration of the original stone. Mrs Pritchard illuminates a neglected corner of medieval art; and her skilful rubbings (over two hundred of them illustrate this book) preserve these curious relics of medieval artistry against the erosion of time and restoration.

This book explores the complex interrelationship between texts and drawings in the late tenth or early eleventh-century Junius II manuscript, the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript. The book, which contains a plate section of sixty-one illustrations, focuses on the way in which the drawings both illustrate the text and translate it into a new visual language. Poems and illustrations work to create a carefully crafted and unified manuscript, but both also use formulaic language, iconography and compositions to construct a web of intertextual and intervisual references that open the poems to readings far more diverse than those of the biblical books on which they are based. Together poems and drawings create a new and unique version of biblical history, and suggest ways in which biblical history relates to Anglo-Saxon history and the manuscript's Anglo-Saxon audience - a process which has been extended by the manuscript's many editors to include contemporary history and the contemporary reader.

A comprehensive study of domestic buildings in London from about 1200 to the Great Fire in 1666. John Schofield describes houses and such related buildings as almshouses, taverns, inns, shops and livery company halls, drawing on evidence from surviving buildings, archaeological excavations, documents, panoramas, drawn surveys and plans, contemporary descriptions, and later engravings and photographs. Schofield presents an overview of the topography of the medieval city, reconstructing its streets, defences, many religious houses and fine civic buildings. He then provides details about the mediaeval and Tudor London house: its plan, individual rooms and spaces and their functions, the roofs, floors and windows, the materials of construction and decoration, and the internal fittings and furniture. Throughout the text he discusses what this evidence tells us about the special restrictions or pleasures of living in the capital; how certain innovations of plan and construction first occurred in London before spreading to other towns; and how notions of privacy developed. The text is illustrated and accompanied by a selective gazetteer of 201 sites in the City of London and its immediate

The Carolingian 'Renaissance' of the late eighth and ninth centuries, in what is now France, western Germany and northern Italy, transformed medieval European culture. At the same time it engendered a need to ensure that clergy, monks and laity embraced orthodox Christian doctrine. This book offers a fresh perspective on the period by examining transformations in a major current of thought as revealed through literature and artistic imagery: the doctrine of the Passion and the crucified Christ. The evidence of a range of literary sources is surveyed - liturgical texts, poetry, hagiography, letters, homilies, exegetical and moral tractates - but special attention is given to writings from the discussions and debates concerning artistic images, Adoptionism, predestination and the Eucharist.

The Haggadot commissioned by wealthy patrons in the Middle Ages are among the most beautifully decorated Hebrew manuscripts, and The `Brother' Haggadah - so-called because of its close relationship to The Rylands Haggadah in the collection of the John Rylands Library, Manchester - is one of the finest of these to have survived. Created by Sephardi - or southern - artists and scribes in Catalonia in the second quarter of the 14th century, it sets out the liturgy and sequence of the Passover Seder, a ritual feast by which Jewish families give thanks for the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus. This finely produced facsimile edition begins with an introduction by medieval scholar Professor Marc Michael Epstein, who sets out the background to the Passover and provides an analysis of the manuscript's iconographic scheme. Following are essays on the provenance of The `Brother' Haggadah by Ilana Tahan, head of the Hebrew and Christian collections at the British Library, and on the Shaltiel family, former owners of the manuscript, by Hebrew scholar Eliezer Laine. The book also contains a translation of the poems and commentary in the manuscript by the late Raphael Lowe, former Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew at University College London, and a translation of the Haggadah liturgy.

From its foundation in the fourth century to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth, the city of Constantinople boasted a collection of antiquities unrivalled by any city of the medieval world. The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople reconstructs the collection from the time that the city was founded by Constantine the Great through the sixth-century reign of the emperor Justinian. Drawing on medieval literary sources and, to a lesser extent, graphic and archaeological material, it identifies and describes the antiquities that were known to have stood in the city's public spaces. Individual displays of statues are analysed as well as examined in conjunction with one another against the city's topographical setting, in an effort to understand how ancient sculpture was used to create a distinct historical identity for Constantinople.

Sir Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades (1951-4) remains widely read and influential to this day but represents only a part of his wide-ranging, erudite and immensely readable literary activity. His early work focused on Byzantium in the tenth century (The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus) and the history of the first Bulgarian empire. Later he wrote with authority on ecclesiastical relations between the eastern and western churches (The Eastern Schism), more generally on Byzantine culture (Byzantine Style and Civilization), with forays into medieval diplomacy (The Sicilian Vespers) and British colonial society (The White Rajahs). With a diplomatic past which informed his studies, he was the doyen of Byzantine studies in Britain. This volume of essays on topics relevant to Sir Steven's interests, long planned in his honour by British Byzantinists of all generations, includes a memoir of his life and a full bibliography of his work.

How West African gold and trade across the Sahara were central to the medieval world The Sahara Desert was a thriving crossroads of exchange for West Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in the medieval period. Fueling this exchange was West African gold, prized for its purity and used for minting currencies and adorning luxury objects such as jewelry, textiles, and religious objects. Caravans made the arduous journey by camel southward across the Sahara carrying goods for trade-glass vessels and beads, glazed ceramics, copper, books, and foodstuffs, including salt, which was obtained in the middle of the desert. Northward, the journey brought not only gold but also ivory, animal hides and leatherwork, spices, and captives from West Africa forced into slavery. Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time draws on the latest archaeological discoveries and art historical research to construct a compelling look at medieval trans-Saharan exchange and its legacy. Contributors from diverse disciplines present case studies that form a rich portrayal of a distant time. Topics include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa's forest region. The volume also reflects on Morocco's Gnawa material culture, associated with descendants of West African slaves, and movements of people across the Sahara today. Featuring a wealth of color images, this fascinating book demonstrates how the rootedness of place, culture, and tradition is closely tied to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. These "fragments in time" offer irrefutable evidence of the key role that Africa played in medieval history and promote a new understanding of the past and the present. Published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University Exhibition Schedule Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University January 26-July 21, 2019 Aga Khan Museum, Toronto September 21, 2019-February 23, 2020 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC April 8-November 29, 2020

Between the third and sixth centuries, the ancient gods, goddesses, and heroes who had populated the imagination of humankind for a millennium were replaced by a new imagery of Christ and his saints. Thomas Mathews explores the many different, often surprising, artistic images and religious interpretations of Christ during this period. He challenges the accepted theory of the "Emperor Mystique," which, interpreting Christ as king, derives the vocabulary of Christian art from the propagandistic imagery of the Roman emperor. This revised edition contains a new preface by the author and a new chapter on the origin and development of icons in private domestic cult.