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.

Studies and editions of Anglo-Saxon apocryphal materials, filling a gap in literature available on the boundaries between apocryphal and orthodox in the period. Apocrypha and apocryphal traditions in Anglo-Saxon England have been often referred to but little studied. This collection fills a gap in the study of pre-Conquest England by considering what were the boundaries between apocryphaland orthodox in the period and what uses the Anglo-Saxons made of apocryphal materials. The contributors include some of the most well-known and respected scholars in the field. The introduction - written by Frederick M. Biggs, one of the principal editors of Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture - expertly situates the essays within the field of apocrypha studies. The essays themselves cover a broad range of topics: both vernacular and Latin texts, those available in Anglo-Saxon England and those actually written there, and the uses of apocrypha in art as well as literature. Additionally, the book includes a number of completely new editions of apocryphal texts which were previously unpublished or difficult to access. By presenting these new texts along with the accompanying range of essays, the collection aims to retrieve these apocryphal traditions from the margins of scholarship and restore tothem some of the importance they held for the Anglo-Saxons. Contributors: DANIEL ANLEZARK, FREDERICK M. BIGGS, ELIZABETH COATSWORTH, THOMAS N. HALL, JOYCE HILL, CATHERINE KARKOV, PATRIZIA LENDINARA, AIDEEN O'LEARY, CHARLES D. WRIGHT.

Significant Anglo-Saxon papers, with postscripts, illustrate advances in knowledge of life and culture of pre-Conquest England. Thomas Northcote Toller, of the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, is one of the most influential but least known Anglo-Saxon scholars of the early twentieth century. The Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at Manchester, where Toller was the first professor of English Language, has an annual Toller lecture, delivered by an expert in the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies; this volume offers a selection from these lectures, brought together for the firsttime, and with supplementary material added by the authors to bring them up to date. They are complemented by the 2002 Toller Lecture, Peter Baker's study of Toller, commissioned specially for this book; and by new examinations ofToller's life and work, and his influence on the development of Old English lexicography. The volume is therefore both an epitome of the best scholarship in Anglo-Saxon studies of the last decade and a half, and a guide for the modern reader through the major advances in our knowledge of the life and culture of pre-Conquest England. , Contributors: RICHARD BAILEY, PETER BAKER, DABNEY ANDERSON BANKERT, JANET BATELY, GEORGE BROWN, ROBERTA FRANK, HELMUT GNEUSS, JOYCE HILL, DAVID A. HINTON, MICHAEL LAPIDGE, AUDREY MEANEY, KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE, JOANA PROUD, ALEXANDER RUMBLE.

The Book of Kells, dating from about 800, is a brilliantly decorated manuscript of the four Gospels. This new official guide, by the former Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College Library, Dublin, provides fascinating insights into the Book of Kells, revealing the astounding detail and richness of one of the greatest works of medieval art. The illustrations in the guide include reproductions of complete pages, and details that allow one to marvel at the intricacy of the decoration. The Book of Kells is explored through its historical background; its structure; its decorative elements, including the richness of its symbols and themes; the scribes and artists who worked on the manuscript; and the tools and pigments used in its creation.

In this beautifully written book, Georges Duby, one of France's greatest medieval historians, returns to one of the central themes of his work - the relationship between art and society. He traces the evolution of artistic forms from the fifth to the fifteenth century in parallel with the structural development of society, in order to create a better understanding of both.

Duby traces shifts in the centres of artistic production and changes in the nature and status of those who promoted works of art and those who produced them. At the same time, he emphasizes the crucial continuities that still gave the art of medieval Europe a basic unity, despite the emergence of national characteristics. Duby also reminds us that the way we approach these artistic forms today differs greatly from how they were first viewed. For us, they are works of art from which we expect and derive aesthetic pleasure; but for those who commissioned them or made them, their value was primarily functional - gifts offered to God, communications with the other world, or affirmations of power - and this remained the case throughout the Middle Ages.

This book will be of interest to students and academics in medieval history and history of art.

Death and rebirth was of vital importance to early Christians in late antiquity. In late antiquity, death was all encompassing. Mortality rates were high, plague and disease in urban areas struck at will, and one lived on the knife's edge regarding one's health. Religion filled a crucial role in this environment, offering an option for those who sought cure and comfort. Following death, the inhumed were memorialized, providing solace to family members through sculpture, painting, and epigraphy. This book offers a sustained interdisciplinary treatment of death and rebirth, a theme that early Christians (and scholars) found important. By analysing the theme of death and rebirth through various lenses, the contributors deepen our understanding of the early Christian funerary and liturgical practices as well as their engagement with other groups in the Empire.

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.

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.

The poetry of the late Roman world has a fascinating history. Sometimes an object of derision, sometimes an object of admiration, it has found numerous detractors and defenders among classicists and Latin literary critics. This volume explores the scholarly approaches to late Latin poetry that have developed over the last 40 years, and it seeks especially to develop, complement and challenge the seminal concept of the ‘Jeweled Style’ proposed by Michael Roberts in 1989. While Roberts’s monograph has long been a vade mecum within the world of late antique literary studies, a critical reassessment of its validity as a concept is overdue. This volume invites established and emerging scholars from different research traditions to return to the influential conclusions put forward by Roberts. It asks them to examine the continued relevance of The Jeweled Style and to suggest new ways to engage it. In a joint effort, the nineteen chapters of this volume define and map the jeweled style, extending it to new genres, geographic regions, time periods and methodologies. Each contribution seeks to provide insightful analysis that integrates the last 30 years of scholarship while pursuing ambitious applications of the jeweled style within and beyond the world of late antiquity.

Radical Traditionalism: The Influence of Walter Kaegi in Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies brings together scholars from fields and disciplines as diverse as medieval history, Byzantine history, Roman art history, and early Islamic studies. These scholars were students of Walter Kaegi, whose work influenced them greatly. This collection offers thoughtful essays examining political culture, source criticism and institutional continuity and discontinuity in a variety of areas, as well as illustrates how one scholar's influence can reach across disciplinary boundaries to shape the argumentative structures and methods of both students and scholars. Any reader interested in the formation of disciplinary "schools" and how the broad application of a coherent approach to sources both literary and material will find this book an innovative approach to the Festschrift genre.

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.

Richly-illustrated consideration of the meaning of the carvings of non-human beings, from centaurs to eagles, found in ecclesiastical settings. Representations of monsters and the monstrous are common in medieval art and architecture, from the grotesques in the borders of illuminated manuscripts to the symbol of the "green man", widespread in churches and cathedrals. These mysterious depictions are frequently interpreted as embodying or mitigating the fears symptomatic of a "dark age". This book, however, considers an alternative scenario: in what ways did monsters in twelfth-century sculpture help audiences envision, perhaps even achieve, various ambitions? Using examples of Romanesque sculpture from across Europe, with a focus on France and northern Portugal, the author suggests that medieval representations of monsterscould service ideals, whether intellectual, political, religious, and social, even as they could simultaneously articulate fears; he argues that their material presence energizes works of art in paradoxical, even contradictory ways. In this way, Romanesque monsters resist containment within modern interpretive categories and offer testimony to the density and nuance of the medieval imagination. KIRK AMBROSE is Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Boulder.

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects. -- .

Illuminated manuscripts are among the most beautiful, precious and mysterious works of Western art. Before the printing press was invented, books were produced by hand and their illustration using brightly coloured pigments and gold embellishments was a labour of love and an act of piety in itself. The results are stunning. The works emanating from the scriptoria of monasteries were mainly religious texts, including illuminated bibles, psalters, and works for private devotion known as books of hours. Illuminated Manuscripts describes the origin and history of illumination in the Middle Ages, covering the artists and their techniques, and the patrons who commissioned them. It explains the subject matter found in medieval works, such as saints and Bible stories and the use of ornamental flourishes, and is illustrated with many fine examples of the genre including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

How and why does vernacular art become foreign? What does 'Greek manner' mean in regions far beyond the Mediterranean? What stories do images need? How do narratives shape pictures? The study addresses these questions in Byzantine paintings from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, contextualized with evidence from Poland, Serbia, Russia, and Italy. The research follows developments in artistic practices and the reception of these images, as well as distinguishing between the Greek manner - based on visual qualities - and the style favoured by the devout, sustained by cults and altered through stories. Following the reception of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine art in Lithuania and Poland from the late fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Maniera Greca in Europe's Catholic East argues that tradition is repetitive order achieved through reduction and oblivion, and concludes that the sole persistent understanding of the Greek image has been stereotyped as the icon of the Mother of God.

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume-running from the medieval to the Early Modern period-focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.

This book analyses the global influence of the Byzantine Empire, which will appeal to all those interested in Byzantine History / This book expands upon the theme of 'Byzantium and its neighbours', by looking into the cultural and geographical influence of Byzantium / This book will appeal to all those interested in Byzantine Culture and the Byzantine economy.

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome, which were commissioned by a series of popes between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Through a synchronic approach that challenges current conceptions about how works of art interact with historical time, Erik Thuno proposes that the apse mosaics produce an inter-visual network that collapses their chronological succession in time into a continuous present in which the faithful join the saints in the one living body of the Church of Rome. Throughout, this book situates the apse mosaics within the broader context of viewership, the cult of relics, epigraphic tradition, and church ritual while engaging topics concerned with intercession, materiality, repetition and vision.

This book is the first major study to comprehensively analyse the art and architecture of the archdiocese of Bari and Canosa during the Byzantine period and the upheaval of the Norman conquest. The book places Bari and Canosa in a Mediterranean context, arguing that international connections with the eastern Mediterranean were a continuous thread that shaped art and architecture throughout the Byzantine and Norman eras. Clare Vernon has examined a wide variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, epigraphy and luxury portable objects, as well as patronage, to illustrate how cross-cultural encounters, the first crusade, slavery and continuities and disruptions in the relationship with Constantinople, shaped the visual culture of the archdiocese. From Byzantine to Norman Italy will appeal to students and scholars of Byzantine art, the medieval Mediterranean and the Italo-Norman world.

Analysis of a group of images of kingship and queenship from Anglo-Saxon England explores the implications of their focus on books, authorship and learning. Between the reign of Alfred in the late ninth century and the arrival of the Normans in 1066, a unique set of images of kingship and queenship was developed in Anglo-Saxon England, images of leadership that centred on books, authorship and learning rather than thrones, sword and sceptres. Focusing on the cultural and historical contexts in which these images were produced, this book explores the reasons for their development, and their meaning and functionwithin both England and early medieval Europe. It explains how and why they differ from their Byzantine and Continental counterparts, and what they reveal about Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards history and gender, as well as the qualities that were thought to constitute a good ruler. It is argued that this series of portraits, never before studied as a corpus, creates a visual genealogy equivalent to the textual genealogies and regnal lists that are so mucha feature of late Anglo-Saxon culture. As such they are an important part of the way in which the kings and queens of early medieval England created both their history and their kingdom. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professorof Art History at the University of Leeds.

This is the first full-length, English-language study of eleventh-century figural sculpture produced in Dalmatia and Croatia. Challenging the dependency on stylistic analysis in previous scholarship, Magdalena Skoblar contextualises the visual presence of these relief carvings in their local communities, focusing on five critical sites. Alongside an examination of architectural setting and iconography, this book also investigates archaeological and textual evidence to establish the historical situation within which these sculptures were produced and received. Croatia and Dalmatia in the eleventh century were a borderland between Byzantium and the Latin west where the balance of power was constantly changing. These sculptures speak of the fragmented and hybrid nature of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean as a whole, where well-connected trade routes and porous boundaries informed artistic production. Moreover, in contrast to elsewhere in Europe where contemporary figural sculpture was spurred on by monastic communities, this book argues that the patronage of such artworks in Dalmatia and Croatia was driven by members of the local secular elites. For the first time, these sculptures are being introduced to Anglophone scholarship, and this book contributes to a fuller understanding of the profound changes in medieval attitudes towards sculpture after the year 1000.

From faithful apostle and seductress to feminist icon, Mary Magdalene's many complex roles in Christian history have fascinated us for 2000 years. Illustrated in full colour, this visual history reveals how images and presentations have created a Mary who is often far different from the real woman, the first witness of the Resurrection in the gospels, or even from her appearances in the works of the Church Fathers. Beginning with the earliest sources, uncover who the real Mary was, and what she meant in her own time, before embarking on a fast-paced tour of Magdalene's depictions in great works of art, forgotten masterpieces and contemporary visual culture. Considering relics, statuary, paintings, sculpture and recent works for stage and screen, discover how Mary Magdalene has been seen across time as a witness, a sinner, a penitent, a contemplative, a preacher and a patroness. Above all her complex roles, Mary has emerged as a powerful feminist icon, the closest person to Jesus himself, with a visual history as rich and varied as the roles she has fulfilled in numerous contexts of faith and worship for two millennia.