When we sing lines in which a fifteenth-century musician uses ethereal polyphony to complain mundanely about money or hoarseness, more than half a millennium melts away. Equally intriguing are moments in which we experience solmization puns. These familiar worries and surprising jests break down temporal distances, humanizing the lives and endeavors of our musical forebears. Yet many instances of self-reference occur within otherwise serious pieces. Are these simply in-jokes, or are there more meaningful messages we risk neglecting if we dismiss them as comic relief? Music historian Jane D. Hatter takes seriously the pervasiveness of these features. Divided into two sections, this study considers pieces with self-referential features in the texts separately from discussions of pieces based on musical self-referential elements. Examining connections between self-referential repertoire from the years 1450-1530 and similar self-referential creations for painters' guilds, reveals musicians' agency in forming the first communities of early modern composers.

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.

The story of the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry is arguably the most widely-known in the entire panoply of English history, and over the last 200 years there have been hundreds of books portraying the Tapestry and seeking to analyse its meanings. Yet, there is one aspect of the embroidery that has been virtually ignored or dismissed as unimportant by historians - the details in the margins. Yet the fables shown in the margins are not just part of a decorative ribbon, neither are they discontinuous, but in fact follow-on in sequence. When this is understood, it becomes clear that they must relate in some way to the action shown on the body of the Tapestry. After careful examination, it has become clear that the purpose of these images is to amplify, elaborate or explain the main story. In this ground-breaking study, Arthur Wright reveals for the first time the significance of the images in the margins. This has meant that it is possible to see the 'whole' story as never before, enabling a more complete picture of the Bayeux Tapestry to be constructed. This, in turn, has led to the author re-examining many of the scenes in the main body of the work, showing that a number of the basic assumptions, so often taught as facts, have been based on nothing more than reasoned conjecture. It might be thought that after so much has been written about the Bayeux Tapestry there was nothing more to be said, but Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry shows us just how much there is still to be learnt.

Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books - like today's museums - preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures and everyone's place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. 'Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts' is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume's multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas - an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring over 160 colour illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante-together these artists created some of the most glorious treasures of the Vatican, viewed daily by thousands of tourists. But how many visitors understand the way these artworks reflect the passions, dreams, and struggles of the popes who commissioned them? For anyone making an artistic pilgrimage to the High Renaissance splendors of the Vatican, George L. Hersey's book is the ideal guide. Before starting the tour of individual works, Hersey describes how the treacherously shifting political and religious alliances of sixteenth-century Italy, France, and Spain played themselves out in the Eternal City. He offers vivid accounts of the lives and personalities of four popes, each a great patron of art and architecture: Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III. He also tells of the complicated rebuilding and expanding of St. Peter's, a project in which Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo all took part. Having set the historical scene, Hersey then explores the Vatican's magnificent Renaissance art and architecture. In separate chapters, organized spatially, he leads the reader through the Cortile del Belvedere and Vatican Museums, with their impressive holdings of statuary and paintings; the richly decorated Stanze and Logge of Raphael; and Michelangelo's Last Judgment and newly cleaned Sistine Chapel ceiling. A fascinating final chapter entitled "The Tragedy of the Tomb" recounts the vicissitudes of Michelangelo's projected funeral monument to Julius II. Hersey is never content to simply identify the subject of a painting or sculpture. He gives us the story behind the works, telling us what their particular themes signified at the time for the artist, the papacy, and the Church. He also indicates how the art was received by contemporaries and viewed by later generations. Generously illustrated and complete with a useful chronology, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter's and the Vatican is a valuable reference for any traveler to Rome or lover of Italian art who has yearned for a single-volume work more informative and stimulating than ordinary guidebooks. At the same time, Hersey's many anecdotes and intriguing comparisons with works outside the Vatican will provide new insights even for specialists.

Exploring issues of artist patronage, luxury craftsmanship, holy men and women, the decorated word, monasteries, secular courts, and the expressive and didactic roles of artistic creation, Lawrence Nees presents early Christian art within the late Roman tradition and the arts of the newly established kingdoms of northern Europe not as opposites, but as different aspects of a larger historical situation. This approach reveals the onset of an exciting new visual relationship between the church and the populace throughout medieval Europe, restoring a previously marginalized subject to a central status in our artistic and cultural heritage.

This new publication constitutes Part Two of the multi-volume Cambridge Illuminations Research Project cataloguing all western illuminated manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges. It covers manuscripts produced in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, ranging from the early Gospels of St Augustine made in sixth-century Rome, through the carefully designed patristic texts from twelfth-century Tuscany and Lombardy, the great law books of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bologna, the opulent Books of Hours, elegant Humanistic volumes and enormous Choir Books of the fifteenth century, and finally to the richly decorated and densely ornamented books of sixteenth-century Spain. In addition to the famous treasures, these catalogues include a considerable number of previously unpublished cuttings, among them new attributions to leading artists and exciting discoveries, all of which offer a stimulating source for further research. Every manuscript catalogued is also illustrated, frequently with several images, all reproduced in full colour. Entries for Italian manuscripts are arranged chronologically in the period up to 1200, while manuscripts produced after 1200 are catalogued by region of origin and within that division again by sequence of date. Manuscripts that cannot at present be allocated to a particular region are grouped in a special section, and Spanish books are again catalogued in chronological order.

Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline? Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this book defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the field’s political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In this volume, scholars of art, history, and literature address the entanglements, past and present, among the academic discipline of Byzantine Studies and the practice and legacies of European colonialism. Starting with the premise that Byzantium and the field of Byzantine studies are simultaneously colonial and colonized, the chapters address topics ranging from the material basis of philological scholarship and its uses in modern politics to the colonial plunder of art and its consequences for curatorial practice in the present. The book concludes with a bibliography that serves as a foundation for a coherent and systematic critical historiography. Bringing together insights from scholars working in different disciplines, regions, and institutions, Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? urges practitioners to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, imperialist, and white supremacist history. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Andrea Myers Achi, Nathanael Aschenbrenner, Bahattin Bayram, Averil Cameron, Stephanie R. Caruso, Şebnem Dönbekci, Hugh G. Jeffery, Anthony Kaldellis, Matthew Kinloch, Nicholas S. M. Matheou, Maria Mavroudi, Zeynep Olgun, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Jake Ransohoff, Alexandra Vukovich, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, and Arielle Winnik.

Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths' workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe's literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

An enlightening, accessible guide to understanding and appreciating European art from the Middle Ages How to Read Medieval Art introduces the art of the European Middle Ages through 50 notable examples from the Metropolitan Museum's collection, which is one of the most comprehensive in the world. This handsomely illustrated volume includes multi-panel altarpieces, stained glass windows, wooden sculpture, as well as manuscript illuminations, and features iconic masterworks such as the Merode Altarpiece, Unicorn Tapestries, and The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry. Formal explorations of individual works, chosen to exemplify key ideas crucial to understanding medieval art, are accompanied by relevant information about the context in which they were created, conveying the works' visual nuances but also their broader symbolic meaning. Superb color illustrations further reveal the visual and conceptual richness of medieval art, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the history and iconography of this pivotal era. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Distributed by Yale University Press

The ways of war in the Middle Ages never cease to fascinate. There is a glamour associated with knights in shining armour, colourful tournaments and heroic deeds which appeals to the modern imagination. Because medieval warfare had its colourful side it is easy to overlook the face that war was a very serious business in an age when brute force was the recognised way of settling a quarrel, and conflict formed a normal way of life at every level of society. This book illustrates the art of war with dozens of medieval images from books and manuscripts, and reveals a wealth of social and military background on heraldry, armour, knights and chivalry, castles, sieges, and the arrival of gunpowder. This new edition is completely revised with a selection of new illustrations from the British Library's medieval manuscripts.

Street corners, guild halls, government offices, and confraternity centers contained paintings that made the city of Florence a visual jewel at precisely the time of its emergence as an international cultural leader. This book considers the paintings that were made specifically for consideration by lay viewers, as well as the way they could have been interpreted by audiences who approached them with specific perspectives. Their belief in the power of images, their understanding of the persuasiveness of pictures, and their acceptance of the utterly vital role that art could play as a propagator of civic, corporate, and individual identity made lay viewers keenly aware of the paintings in their midst. Those pictures affirmed the piety of the people for whom they were made in an age of social and political upheaval, as the city experimented with an imperfect form of republicanism that often failed to adhere to its declared aspirations.

In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, "Pilgrimage and Pogrom" reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation. Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, "Pilgrimage and Pogrom" is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.

This collection of papers, first delivered at the BAA's annual conference in 2002, celebrates medieval Rochester, including both cathedral and castle, an outstanding pair of surviving monuments to the power of contemporary church and state. The contributions demonstrate the great interest of these understudied buildings, their furnishings, and historical and archaeological contexts: from the rich documentary evidence for the Anglo-Saxon town to the substantial surviving fabric of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Shrines, monuments, woodwork and seals are all fully covered, as well as the medieval monks themselves. There is also a piece on Archbishop Courtenay's foundation of the nearby collegiate church at Maidstone, Kent.

At the height of the Victorian period, a passion for the Gothic style swept England and spread far beyond. Gothic architecture, associated with the social and cultural ideals of the Middle Ages, was seen as a means of remaking the modern world. In this lucid exposition, Chris Brooks unravels the layers of meaning that Gothic held for its many reinventors, from the political uses of Gothic history in the seventeenth century to Barry and Pugin's Houses of Parliament in the mid-nineteenth. Yet the Gothic revival is not just manifest in buildings continually recreated; it has taken the form of poetry and fiction, of painting and sculpture, of movies and video games, of Gothic music and Gothic punk. This is the first book to deal comprehensively with the whole scope of the Gothic Revival.

John Fitchen systematically treats the process of erecting the great edifices of the Gothic era. He explains the building equipment and falsework needed, the actual operations undertaken, and the sequence of these operations as specifically as they can be deduced today. Since there are no contemporary accounts of the techniques used by medieval builders, Fitchen's study brilliantly pieces together clues from manuscript illuminations, from pictorial representations, and from the fabrics of the building themselves.
"Anyone who has caught the fascination of Gothic Churches (and once caught, has almost necessarily got it in the blood) will find this book enthralling. . . . Clearly written and beautifully illustrated." --A. D. R. Caroe, "Annual Review, " Central Council for the Care of Churches
"Fitchen's study is a tribute to the extraordinary creative and engineering skills of successive generations of mediaeval builders. . . . This study enables us to appreciate more fully the technical expertise and improvements which enabled the creative spirit of the day to find such splendid embodiment." --James Lingwood, "Oxford Art Journal"
"Fitchen, in what can only be defined as an architectural detective story, fully explores the problems confronting the medieval vault erectors and uncovers their solution. . . . This is a book that no serious student of architecture will want to miss." --"Progressive Architecture"

In this new edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein offers a panoramic view of the medieval world. Volume I ranges from northeastern North America to Kievan Rus', while never losing sight of the main contours of the period c.300 to c.1150. The lively and informative narrative covers the major developments, political and religious movements, people, saints and sinners, economic and cultural changes, ideals, fears, and fantasies of the period in Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. A comprehensive new map program, updated for the global reach of this edition, offers a way to visualize the era's enormous political, economic, and religious changes. Line drawings make clear archaeological finds and architectural structures. All of the maps, genealogies, and figures in the book, as well as practice questions and suggested answers, are available at utphistorymatters.com.

In this new edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein offers a panoramic view of the medieval world. Volume II ranges from England to China and from West Africa to the Baltic, while never losing sight of the main contours of the period c.900 to c.1500. The lively and informative narrative covers the major developments, political and religious movements, people, saints and sinners, economic and cultural changes, ideals, fears, and fantasies of the period in Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. A comprehensive new map program, updated for the global reach of this edition, offers a way to visualize the era's enormous political, economic, and religious changes. Line drawings make clear archaeological finds and architectural structures. All of the maps, genealogies, and figures in the book, as well as practice questions and suggested answers, are available at utphistorymatters.com.

A Short Medieval Reader contains the essential primary sources for exploring the Middle Ages in depth. Designed to both complement the sixth edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages and be used on its own, this book provides comprehensive readings ranging from Iceland to Egypt and from England to Iraq. Each source is clearly dated, and its original language is specified to remind students of the extraordinary diversity that existed in the Middle Ages. Introductions to each source supply the necessary context and are followed by questions to guide the reader. Annotations and explanations are provided. A Short Medieval Reader offers a feast for inquiring minds, priced for a student's budget.