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."

In Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy, Nino Zchomelidse examines the complex and dynamic roles played by the monumental ambo, the Easter candlestick, and the liturgical scroll in southern Italy and Sicily from the second half of the tenth century, when the first such liturgical scrolls emerged, until the first decades of the fourteenth century, when the last monumental Easter candlestick was made. Through the use of these objects, the interior of the church was transformed into the place of the story of salvation, making the events of the Bible manifest. By linking rites and setting, liturgical furnishings could be used to stage a variety of biblical events, in accordance with specific feast days. Examining the interaction of liturgical performance and the ecclesiastical stage, this book explores the creation, function, and evolution of church furnishings and manuscripts.

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."

No serious art-historical library should be without it. [The publisher] is to be congratulated for taking on this epic venture. BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. The fifty years between 1130 and 1180 produced some of the most original and evocative capitals of the middle ages - a period that was largely responsible for the evolution of the Gothic style. But despite the fact that many are hard to examine in situ and are often too dark to observe closely, they have rarely been published before. These volumes will therefore be widely welcomed. The 7,600 illustrations they contain cover, in large and exquisite detail,nearly every capital; they include the multitude of works in the great cathedrals and abbeys of the time, including Chartres, Laon, Noyon, Paris, Saint-Denis, Senlis and Sens. The staggering range of individual creativity shows aculture able to reinvent itself in a rare and exciting way. The publication of the fourth and fifth volumes in the sequence completes the photographic archive of foliate carving from the Paris Basin during the formative two centuries in which architecture and the techniques of building were transformed. They are also the foundation for subsequent volumes which will establish a chronology for Early Gothic architecture and sculpture, as well as technological developments in rib vaults and construction methods. Dr JOHN JAMES is a world authority on medieval architecture, and author of over sixty books and articles.

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.

A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear in presenting a new way of understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: as rhetorical constructs.
"Plotting Gothic" begins by positioning the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of plots, or stories intended for visitors, then extends that concept to the relationship between a building, its audience, and the many interlocutors involved in that relationship, such as builders, scholars, tour guides, and resident clergy. What were the rhetorical commonplaces that such interlocutors used to interpret the Gothic when it was new? Drawing on building records and personal recollections of architects and churchmen, Murray traces common analogies between rhetoric and architectural space that date back to late antiquity, then shows how those links were translated into wood, stone, and space under specific local conditions. The resulting book offers an invigorating new way to understand some of the most lasting achievements of the medieval era.

Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion's Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term "Romanesque" was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types-including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture-Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion's Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.

The author is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History emerita at New York University, Institute of Fine Arts , and a leading authority on English medieval manuscript illumination. This volume brings together twenty-eight of Professor Sandler's studies, focusing on illustrated manuscripts produced in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly on the illuminated psalters. They are arranged under four headings, 'Marginalia and Word Imagery,' 'Devotional, Visionary and Self-Images,' 'Illustrated Encyclopedias and Scholarly Texts,' and 'Studies of Individual Manuscripts, Artists and Themes.' The marginal illustrations in the psalters are a topic of particular interest, and there are a number of iconographic studies derived from this material. A second section features essays that look at the effect of manuscript imagery on its viewing, reading, and meditating audience. The third section deals with the illustrated encyclopedias of the period, particularly the Omne bonum , a fourteenth-century manuscript compiled and written by James le Palmer, a scribe in the London Exchequer. A final section deals with a number of manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in particular East Anglian works such as the Peterborough and Ramsey Psalters.

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 James is an Australian architect and medieval historian. Since 1969, he has been searching for the origins of the Gothic style, beginning with a five-year study of Chartres cathedral. At that time there were no coherent techniques for analysing the detailed construction history of existing stone structures. This he created. He expanded his research to include all the early Gothic churches in the Paris region with a three-year survey of over 3500 buildings. His most important discovery has been that all churches of this period were constructed in many short campaigns by mobile building teams, and that major innovation was more likely to occur in the smaller buildings than in the larger. This volume makes available 42 of the authors studies on the development of Gothic architecture in France.

Verse inscriptions in stone appeared in abundance on the facades of Romanesque churches in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Marking the place where medieval worshippers were transported from secular to sacred space, portal verse inscriptions provide important, and often overlooked, insights into the dynamic function of the portals and their art. The Allegory of the Church is the first full-length study of Romanesque verse inscriptions in the context of church portals and portal sculpture, and is the product of a twenty-year study. Calvin B. Kendall demonstrates how these inscriptions served to express the role of the church building as a concrete allegory of Christ and the Church. Describing them in detail, he traces the history and nature of the changes in allegorical interpretation of the inscriptions until, as medieval assumptions about language and rhetoric changed, they were finally abandoned by Gothic artists. An exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship, The Allegory of the Church includes a detailed catalogue of Romanesque verse inscriptions.

This easily accessible volume, which grew out of a series of lectures presented at the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, aims to provide a coherent introduction to Byzantine culture with a focus on the interconnected realms of art and religion. The eight participants have revised their lectures into chapters on Byzantine history, theology, icons and icon theory, church architecture, monumental painting, silver church furnishings, illustrated liturgical books, and pilgrimage. In addition to presenting current research on this range of topics, the chapters each contribute original scholarship from authors who are recognized experts in their respective fields.

The Introduction, by Linda Safran, deals with views and definitions of Byzantium over the course of its long history and considers why that civilization deserves our attention today. It underscores the essential unifying role of the Orthodox religion in a vast and fluid empire and clarifies how the experiential aspects of that religion--churches, liturgy, church arts and imagery, religious travel--open a window into Byzantine culture. Throughout the book, the past is made vivid by considering what Byzantine believers heard and said and did, as well as what they saw.

The book's chapters are cross-referenced and are complemented both by endnotes that cite primary and secondary sources and by "Suggestions for Further Reading" that include English and foreign-language references. There is no comparable art history text that combines this high-caliber range of current scholarship with more than 250 illustrations, including 16 pages of color plates, to introduce Byzantine culture to a broad readership.

Contributors are Joseph Alchermes, Susan A. Boyd, Anna Kartsonis, Henry Maguire, Robert Ousterhout, Eric D. Perl, Nancy Patterson sevčenko, and Gary Vikan.

This collection looks beyond the literary, religious, and philosophical aspects of Chaucer’s texts to a new mode of interdisciplinary scholarship: one that celebrates the richness of Chaucer’s visual poetics. The twelve illustrated essays make connections between Chaucer’s texts and various forms of visual data, both medieval and modern. Basing their approach on contemporary understandings of interplay between text and image, the contributors examine a wealth of visual material, from medieval art and iconographical signs to interpretations of Chaucer rendered by contemporary artists. The result uncovers interdisciplinary potential that deepens and informs our understanding of Chaucer’s poetry in an age in which digitization makes available a wealth of facsimiles and other visual resources. A learned assessment of imagery and Chaucer’s work that opens exciting new paths of scholarship, Chaucer: Visual Approaches will be welcomed by scholars of literature, art history, and medieval and early modern studies. The contributors are Jessica Brantley, Joyce Coleman, Carolyn P. Collette, Alexandra Cook, Susanna Fein, Maidie Hilmo, Laura Kendrick, Ashby Kinch, David Raybin, Martha Rust, Sarah Stanbury, and Kathryn R. Vulić.

This volume makes available Professor Jolivet-Levy's papers on the art of Byzantine Cappadocia published over the last twenty years. They deal mainly with wall-paintings, a field in which the author has specialized. In its richness and "diversity, the archaeological documentation preserved in Cappadocia provides important evidence for the society and religious life of the Byzantine province (subsequently, from the end of the 11th century, part of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum). Although often little known to art historians, these monuments are of great importance for the history of Byzantine art, in particular for the period of the ninth and tenth centuries. French text.

A comprehensive and timely exploration of the key role Jerusalem played in shaping the art and culture of the Middle Ages Medieval Jerusalem was a vibrant international center and home to multiple cultures, faiths, and languages. Harmonious and dissonant influences from Persian, Turkish, Greek, Syrian, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Indian, and European traditions invested Jerusalem with a key role in shaping the art of the Middle Ages. Through compelling essays by international and interdisciplinary experts and detailed discussions of more than 200 works of art, this beautiful, authoritative volume breaks new ground in exploring the relationship between the historical and the archetypal city of Jerusalem, uncovering the ways in which the aesthetic achievements it inspired enhanced and enlivened the medieval world. Patrons and artists from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions alike focused their attention on the Holy City, endowing and enriching its sacred buildings and creating luxury goods for its residents. This artistic fertility was particularly in evidence between the 11th and the 14th centuries, notwithstanding often devastating circumstances-from the earthquake of 1033 to the fierce battles of the Crusades. Dazzling illustrations featuring new photography complement this unprecedented, panoptic story of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (09/26/16-01/08/17)

This is the first of two volumes that contains all of Professor Kitzinger's major essays on the art of Late Antiquity, accompanied by a new preface and a comprehensive index. The volume is divided into two sections; the first on Late Antique art includes: The story of Joseph on a Coptic textile; Notes on Coptic sculpture; Studies on late antique and Byzantine floor mosaics, including examples in Antioch and Bethlehem; The Cleveland marbles; Christian imagery and many more. The second section on Byzantine art includes: The Hellenistic heritage in Byzantine art; Byzantium and the West in the second half of the 12th century; The role of miniature painting in mural decoration; Artistic patronage in early Byzantium, and others.

The Easter Sepulchre is the English form of a monument known throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages as the sepulchrum domini, the tomb of the Lord, the monument associated specifically with the commemorative Easter rites. The Easter Sepulchre stood in the place of Christ's tomb in Jerusalem, recreated in hundreds of churches in England for Holy Week and Easter each year. This volume discusses this important monument that stands at the intersection of several important aspects of medieval culture: its study impinges upon the fields of drama, liturgy, art history, and social history. The study is organized so as to trace individual threads - the representations of the Holy Sepulchre in art, the development of the commemorative Easter rites, and the form and iconography of the Easter Sepulchre - before describing the pattern that results when they are interwoven. This volume is of critical interest to those studying this monument, and sheds light on the intersections of medieval English developments in art, liturgy, drama, and popular religion.

Early-medieval Irish fine metalwork is generally agreed to be one of the high points of achievement in European decorative arts. In the corpus of finds from the 7th to the 10th centuries are many masterpieces of the goldsmith's art some are personal ornaments, many are objects made for the service of the Church. The corpus of metalwork has been greatly expanded in recent years by new finds and by re-examination of older discoveries and major international exhibitions have won a new understanding of the significance of this material. A series of papers by Michael Ryan recording many new finds and analysing their significance are republished in this volume. Dr. Ryan, formerly Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, is Director of the Chester Beatty Library and Honorary Professor in the Department of Art History, Trinity College, Dublin.

This selection of seventeen papers by Professor Anthony Cutler falls into three broad groups, all including topics with which the author has been concerned for many years. Chapters III-VIII are concerned primarily with Byzantine subjects, and with their historiography. The last of this group also probes Italian relations with Byzantium which, in one manner or another, is also the theme of the next four papers. Chapters XIII-XVI are devoted to Scandinavia without, however, abandoning the focus on interconnections between 'works of art' and the societies that they represented. Over the course of thirty years, the author has reverted frequently to the broad theme of the relation between artefacts and the cultures from which they emerged, prompted to respond to the art historian's characteristic lack of concern with the reasons for (as against the 'sources' of) the objects that he or she studies. These papers are linked by Professor "Cutler's general impatience with an attitude set out long ago by Henry Adams: 'We can admire a cathedral without comprehending the force of the Cross that produced it'.

This is a systematic publication of the approximately 20 Byzantine churches with wall-paintings which have survived destruction in the province of Rethymnon, Crete. They date from ca. 1000 A.D. to the fifteenth century. Most were decorated during the Palaeologan era, when the island was occupied by the Venetians (1211-1669 A.D). These monuments are little known to the scholarly world. The style and iconographic programme of each church is investigated, as well as the iconography of the scenes. Special attention is paid to rare and unique iconographic subjects, e.g., a full cycle of the Akathistos and a cycle of the Life of St. John the Evangelist. Certain themes prompt an examination of the degree of western influence on iconography and style. The wall-paintings of Rethymnon significantly enrich our knowledge of Byzantine art, especially that of the late Palaeologan era. Alongside local artists, who worked in a provincial style, we find painters who applied the styles that were in vogue in the great Byzantine artistic centres of Macedonia, Mistra and Constantinople itself. This can be explained by the immigration of artists from the major centres. A few are known to us by name. This publication is the first of four volumes on the churches in the nomos of Rethymnon, which will include the provinces of Mylopotamos, Amari and Agios Basileios. There are over 400 plates, many in colour.

The central theme of the articles reproduced in these two volumes is the role of the visual arts and architecture in the cultural interaction between medieval societies, Christian and Muslim, in the eastern Mediterranean. Visual forms of production and communication amongst Christian communities themselves, and between Christian and Muslim, are discussed within their specific social and political contexts. Placing the emphasis on areas which passed between Christian and Muslim raises questions of the formation of identities as well as the relationship of the periphery to the centre. Focusing on the areas of Egypt, Syria and Palestine in relation to Byzantium, Islam, and the West provides a framework for consideration of particular issues, especially the identity of particular communities. The core of the work considers the period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, when these areas were at the centre of eastern Mediterranean politics, and seeks to interpret little known evidence in the light of political and cultural circumstances with an interdisciplinary approach as its starting point. Vol. I features papers on the legacy of Byzantine art, and the medieval Christian art of Egypt. Vol. II covers the Christian art of Medieval Syria, and the art of the Crusader states.

The initial section here covers the monuments of the important Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene, and includes Edessa (Urfa), the capital of a Crusader state, where there are also significant Islamic buildings. The final section, on the Hatay, focuses on the city of Antioch, with Seleucid, Roman and Byzantine remains, and the castles of the Crusader period in its vicinity. The neo-Hittite site of Karatepe and the Georgian and Syrian monasteries in the Hatay region are also dealt with. A comprehensive bibliography and index to all four volumes comes at the end.

This volume bring together John Beckwith's papers on medieval and Byzantine art. They focus on those subjects which the author made his own, Coptic and Byzantine "textiles, Western European and Constantinopolitan ivory carving, and Byzantine metalwork. A final section includes a number of studies on cultural diffusion, from Islam and Byzantium to Western Europe, in the early Middle Ages.

This book by Professor Spatharakis is a study of the origin and development of a new iconographic type within the late Byzantine period, that of the left-handed Evangelist. Although mainly confined to manuscript illumination, it also takes account of the surviving depictions of the Evangelists in mosaic and fresco on the walls of the churches built during this period. The author examines the appearance of this new type of Evangelist portrait at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and how it came to be sufficiently influential to replace the tenth-century models used by the artists of this period. He investigates how long this new fashion lasted, and the subsequent influence of the left-handed Evangelist in later Byzantine art. This leads on to the question of whether the artists were content to follow older models, or were actively participating in the creation of fresh groupings. The isolation of the archetype, the contemporary parallels, and the subsequent influence of the group of Evangelist portraits examined in this study is based not only on iconographic similarities but on a detailed examination of the individual types. This work makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Palaeologan iconography, and the working methods of the artists who were responsible for its creation.