"This book makes a strong case that memorials are embedded in local visual and historical traditions. While its comprehensive and detailed references make it a must-read for specialists, it will appeal not only to the many specialists working on memory and memorials, but also to general audiences interested in questions of visual culture and memorialization. Beautifully and engagingly written and illustrated." (Professor Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara) This study offers an unconventional reading of modern and postmodern German memorials from a medievalist perspective. Beginning with a memorial for German soldiers in El Alamein and continuing with memorials for victims of the Nazis in Germany, the book challenges the visual differences between modern and medieval art and transforms the interactions between the two into six productive conversations. The examples discussed move from Christian themes or visual practice directly connected to medieval art in the surrounding local urban landscape, to secular or abstract projects that seem disconnected from premodern forms and formats. The wide variety of techniques, materials, iconography, layouts, and styles demonstrates that medievalism is a method of observation, one that can underscore the links between several works of art, offer a broader context, add layers of meaning, and explore relationships with nearby visual and social environments, physical and mental landscapes, conflicts and memories. The medieval association may also contribute to a project's potential to arouse empathy and to stand the test of time and distance from the events it is meant to recall. The book's medieval prism will afford the reader greater insight into these works of art and a better understanding of their contribution to modern and contemporary memory culture in Germany.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, This volume continues the theme of its predecessor, addressing how the Middle Ages have been invoked to score political points, particularly with reference to the rise of populism fueled by recent recessions and a pandemic. The nine essays in the first portion of the volume directly address political medievalism in Tariq Ali's 2005 novel on Mideast instability, A Sultan in Palermo; attempts by twentieth-century Czech politicians to anchor their causes in the fifteenth-century Czech hero Petr Chelcicky; far-right deployment of Robin Hood memes to slander Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama; the ways Rory Mullarkey's 2017 play Saint George and the Dragon comments onEnglish national identity relative to Brexit; how national stereotypes have come into play amid cross-channel reporting on Brexit; nationalism in the medievalizing German monument to their fallen at the 1942 Battle of El Alamein;the English-speaking world's reception of Anthony Munday's 1589 book on conduct, Palmendos; nationalism in the self-characterization of two contemporary British Pagan movements; and how various communities in the television series Game of Thrones comment on medieval and/or contemporary nations. Nor are politics entirely absent from the final four articles in the volume, as they examine attempts to promote such particular agendas as toxic masculinity in Game of Thrones; misogyno-feminism there and in the George R.R. Martin book series on which the television program is based, A Song of Ice and Fire; the potential for audience self-realization amid the tension between the individual and the collective in The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley's 2018 adaptation of Beowulf; and ideal individual and collective behavior as modeled in the Ringling Brothers' 1912-13 spectacles about Joan of Arc.

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.

Sacred Stimulus offers a thorough exploration of Jerusalem's role in the formation and formulation of Christian art in Rome during the fourth and fifth centuries. The visual vocabulary discussed by Galit Noga-Banai gives an alternative access point to the mnemonic efforts conceived while Rome converted to Christianity: not in comparison to pagan art in Rome, not as reflecting the struggle with the emergence of New Rome in the East (Constantinople), but rather as visual expressions of the confrontation with earthly Jerusalem and its holy places. After all, Jerusalem is where the formative events of Christianity occurred and were memorialized. Sacred Stimulus argues that, already in the second half of the fourth century, Rome constructed its own set of holy sites and foundational myths, while expropriating for its own use some of Jerusalem's sacred relics, legends, and sites. Relying upon well-known and central works of art, including mosaic decoration, sarcophagi, wall paintings, portable art, and architecture, Noga-Banai exposes the omnipresence of Jerusalem and its position in the genesis of Christian art in Rome. Noga-Banai's consideration of earthly Jerusalem as a conception that Rome used, or had to take into account, in constructing its own new Christian ideological and cultural topography of the past, sheds light on connections and analogies that have not necessarily been preserved in the written evidence, and offers solutions to long-standing questions regarding specific motifs and scenes.