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Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages

Author: Bonnie Effros

Number of pages: 296

Clothing, jewelry, animal remains, ceramics, coins, and weaponry are among the artifacts that have been discovered in graves in Gaul dating from the fifth to eighth century. Those who have unearthed them, from the middle ages to the present, have speculated widely on their meaning. This authoritative book makes a major contribution to the study of death and burial in late antique and early medieval society with its long overdue systematic discussion of this mortuary evidence. Tracing the history of Merovingian archaeology within its cultural and intellectual context for the first time, Effros exposes biases and prejudices that have colored previous interpretations of these burial sites and assesses what contemporary archaeology can tell us about the Frankish kingdoms. Working at the intersection of history and archaeology, and drawing from anthropology and art history, Effros emphasizes in particular the effects of historical events and intellectual movements on French and German antiquarian and archaeological studies of these grave goods. Her discussion traces the evolution of concepts of nationhood, race, and culture and shows how these concepts helped shape an understanding of...

Material Culture and Women's Religious Experience in Antiquity

Author: Mark D. Ellison , Catherine Gines Taylor , Carolyn Osiek

Number of pages: 362

This collection of eleven new essays presents fresh, illuminating research by scholars who comparatively examine material, visual, and literary evidence to recover women's religious experiences, perspectives, and activities in antiquity--perspectives often missing or underrepresented in the literary record.

Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress

Author: D. Koslin , Janet Snyder

Number of pages: 270

In this wide-ranging study of costume history contributors explore fashion, textiles, and the representation of clothing in the middle ages. Essays combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism and explore materials from England, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. The collection focuses on multiple aspects of textiles and dress - their making, meaning, and representation - and explores the impact of international trade and other forms of cultural exchange.

Chaucer and Array

Author: Laura Fulkerson Hodges

Number of pages: 232

An analysis of the ways in which Chaucer uses details of costume, clothing and fabric, enhancing our understanding of and shedding fresh insights into his work.

Afterlives

Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola

Number of pages: 384

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000. Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across...

From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms

Author: Thomas F. X. Noble

Number of pages: 402

How, when and why did the Middle Ages begin? This reader gathers together a prestigious collection of revisionist thinking on questions of key research in medieval studies.

Heaven's Purge

Author: Isabel Moreira

Number of pages: 320

The doctrine of purgatory - the state after death in which Christians undergo punishment by God for unforgiven sins - raises many questions. What is purgatory like? Who experiences it? Does purgatory purify souls, or punish them, or both? How painful is it? Heaven's Purge explores the first posing of these questions in Christianity's early history, from the first century to the eighth: an era in which the notion that sinful Christians might improve their lot after death was contentious, or even heretical. Isabel Moreira discusses a wide range of influences at play in purgatory's early formation, including ideas about punishment and correction in the Roman world, slavery, the value of medical purges at the shrines of saints, and the authority of visions of the afterlife for informing Christians of the hereafter. She also challenges the deeply ingrained supposition that belief in purgatory was a symptom of barbarized Christianity, and assesses the extent to which Irish and Germanic views of society, and the sources associated with them - penitentials and legal tariffs - played a role in purgatory's formation. Special attention is given to the writings of the last patristic author of ...

Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul

Author: B. Effros

Number of pages: 174

Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul exposes the manner in which feasting and fasting, in other words, ritualized actions not performed solely for the purpose of nourishment, were central to social interaction in Gaul both prior and subsequent to Christianization of the mixed population of Franks and Gallo-Romans. In exploring these issues using a multidisciplinary methodology, Effros suggests that scholars may assess historical manifestations of the use of food and drink to create and reinforce the social hierarchy. Effros addresses the tensions between monastic and lay communities and focuses on patronage through food and drink as a source of informal power, a subject too often overlooked in favour of institutional structures more familiar to twentieth-century historians.

Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World

Author: Valerie L. Garver

Number of pages: 336

Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society. Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material, which she uses to construct a more complex and nuanced impression of aristocratic women than we've seen before. She looks at the importance of female beauty and adornment; the family and the construction of identities and collective memory; education and moral exemplarity; wealth, hospitality and domestic management; textile work, and the lifecycle of elite Carolingian women. Her interdisciplinary approach makes deft use of canons of church councils, chronicles, charters, polyptychs,...

A Companion to Boniface

Author: Michel Aaij , Shannon Godlove

Number of pages: 580

A survey of the life, historical and political impacts, and textual sources associated with the early medieval English missionary and church reformer Boniface, who was active in the eighth century in what is today Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Death in Jewish Life

Author: Stefan C. Reif , Andreas Lehnardt , Avriel Bar-Levav

Number of pages: 398

Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors

Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard

Number of pages: 384

Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages. Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to ...

Uncovering the Germanic Past

Author: Bonnie Effros

Number of pages: 427

This volume suggests how the slow genesis of Merovingian archaeology in France challenged the prevailing views of the population's exclusively Gallic ancestry. A history of the first century of the discipline, Effros' interdisciplinary study looks at the important contributions of medieval archaeological finds to modern French identity.

Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

Author: Barbara H. Rosenwein

Number of pages: 228

This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions.

The Avars

Author: Walter Pohl

Number of pages: 666

The Avars arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes in the mid-sixth century CE and dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. Fierce warriors and canny power brokers, the Avars were more influential and durable than Attila's Huns, yet have remained hidden in history. Walter Pohl's epic narrative, translated into English for the first time, restores them to their rightful place in the story of early medieval Europe. The Avars offers a comprehensive overview of their history, tracing the Avars from the construction of their steppe empire in the center of Europe; their wars and alliances with the Byzantines, Slavs, Lombards, and others; their apex as the first so-called barbarian power to besiege Constantinople (in 626); to their fall under the Frankish armies of Charlemagne and subsequent disappearance as a distinct cultural group. Pohl uncovers the secrets of their society, synthesizing the rich archaeological record recovered from more than 60,000 graves of the period, as well as accounts of the Avars by Byzantine and other chroniclers. In recovering the story of the fascinating encounter between Eurasian nomads who established an empire in the...

Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam

Author: Mary Thurlkill

Number of pages: 212

Medieval scholars and cultural historians have recently turned their attention to the question of “smells” and what olfactory sensations reveal about society in general and holiness in particular. Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam contributes to that conversation, explaining how early Christians and Muslims linked the “sweet smell of sanctity” with ideals of the body and sexuality; created boundaries and sacred space; and imagined their emerging communal identity. Most importantly, scent—itself transgressive and difficult to control—signaled transition and transformation between categories of meaning. Christian and Islamic authors distinguished their own fragrant ethical and theological ideals against the stench of oppositional heresy and moral depravity. Orthodox Christians ridiculed their ‘stinking’ Arian neighbors, and Muslims denounced the ‘reeking’ corruption of Umayyad and Abbasid decadence. Through the mouths of saints and prophets, patriarchal authors labeled perfumed women as existential threats to vulnerable men and consigned them to enclosed, private space for their protection as well as society’s. At the same time, theologians praised...

The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity

Author: Éric Rebillard

Number of pages: 240

In this provocative book Éric Rebillard challenges many long-held assumptions about early Christian burial customs. For decades scholars of early Christianity have argued that the Church owned and operated burial grounds for Christians as early as the third century. Through a careful reading of primary sources including legal codes, theological works, epigraphical inscriptions, and sermons, Rebillard shows that there is little evidence to suggest that Christians occupied exclusive or isolated burial grounds in this early period. In fact, as late as the fourth and fifth centuries the Church did not impose on the faithful specific rituals for laying the dead to rest. In the preparation of Christians for burial, it was usually next of kin and not representatives of the Church who were responsible for what form of rite would be celebrated, and evidence from inscriptions and tombstones shows that for the most part Christians didn't separate themselves from non-Christians when burying their dead. According to Rebillard it would not be until the early Middle Ages that the Church gained control over burial practices and that "Christian cemeteries" became common. In this translation of...

Where are the Dead?

Author: Peter Moore

Number of pages: 244

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually ’work’ in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

Women and Gender in Medieval Europe

Author: Margaret C. Schaus

Number of pages: 984

From women's medicine and the writings of Christine de Pizan to the lives of market and tradeswomen and the idealization of virginity, gender and social status dictated all aspects of women's lives during the middle ages. A cross-disciplinary resource, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE, i.e., from the fall of the Roman Empire to the discovery of the Americas. Moving beyond biographies of famous noble women of the middles ages, the scope of this important reference work is vast and provides a comprehensive understanding of medieval women's lives and experiences. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Entries that range from 250 words to 4,500 words in length thoroughly explore topics in the following areas: · Art and Architecture · Countries, Realms, and Regions · Daily Life · Documentary Sources · Economics · Education and Learning · Gender and Sexuality · Historiography · Law · Literature · Medicine and Science · Music and Dance · Persons · Philosophy · Politics · Political Figures ·...

Perception and Action in Medieval Europe

Author: Harald Kleinschmidt

Number of pages: 198

"Study of the changing nature of the perception of an action and the action itself, and how thought-processes altered radically in the Middle Ages"--Provided by publisher.

A Companion to Late Antiquity

Author: Philip Rousseau

Number of pages: 736

An accessible and authoritative overview capturing the vitality anddiversity of scholarship that exists on the transformative timeperiod known as late antiquity. Provides an essential overview of current scholarship on lateantiquity – from between the accession of Diocletian in AD284 and the end of Roman rule in the Mediterranean Comprises 39 essays from some of the world's foremost scholarsof the era Presents this once-neglected period as an age of powerfultransformation that shaped the modern world Emphasizes the central importance of religion and itsconnection with economic, social, and political life Winner of the 2009 Single Volume Reference/Humanities &Social Sciences PROSE award granted by the Association of AmericanPublishers

Archaeology, history and biosciences

Author: Susanne Brather-Walter

Number of pages: 218

New scientific methods offer new insights in the past. Promising opportunities for archaeology and historiography are confronted with the challenges of interdisciplinary cooperation between the sciences and the humanities. This volume presents contributions by European researchers, arranged in four sections: fundamental questions of archaeology and biosciences, migrations, transformations, and social structures.

Medieval Fabrications

Author: E. Burns

Number of pages: 279

The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages. At one end of the spectrum, questions of dress call up feminist theoretical investigations into the body and subjectivity, while broadening those inquiries to include theories of masculinity and queer identity as well. At the other extreme, the production and distribution of textiles carries us into the domain of economic history and the study of material commodities, trade and cultural patterns of exchange within western Europe and between east and west. Contributors to this volume represent a broad array of disciplines currently involved in rethinking medieval culture in terms of the material world.

Routledge Revivals: Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2006)

Author: Margaret Schaus

Number of pages: 944

First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

Artifacts from Medieval Europe

Author: James B. Tschen-Emmons

Number of pages: 321

Using artifacts as primary sources, this book enables students to comprehensively assess and analyze historic evidence in the context of the medieval period. • Provides a single-volume resource for using medieval artifacts to better understand the long-ago past • Supplies images of artifacts with detailed descriptions, explanations of significance, and a list of sources for more information, which help students learn how to effectively analyze primary sources • Presents a virtual window into many different aspects of medieval society and life, including particular activities or roles—such as farming, weaving, fashion, or being a mason or a knight • Includes sidebars within selected entries that explain key terms and concepts and supply excerpts from contemporary sources

All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World [2 volumes]

Author: Ruth A Johnston

Number of pages: 790

This insightful survey of the "things" of medieval Europe allows modern readers to understand what they looked like, what they were made of, how they were created, and how they were used. • Provides information on a comprehensive range of topics from agriculture to zoos, and also includes books, castles, minstrels, clothing and universities • Provides bibliographic lists of suggested reading following each entry, with a full bibliography at the end • Appropriate for both high school and lower-level undergraduate students

Romanesque Tomb Effigies

Author: Shirin Fozi

Number of pages: 264

Framed by evocative inscriptions, tumultuous historical events, and the ambiguities of Christian death, Romanesque tomb effigies were the first large-scale figural monuments for the departed in European art. In this book, Shirin Fozi explores these provocative markers of life and death, establishing early tomb figures as a coherent genre that hinged upon histories of failure and frustrated ambition. In sharp contrast to later recumbent funerary figures, none of the known European tomb effigies made before circa 1180 were commissioned by the people they represented, and all of the identifiable examples of these tombs were dedicated to individuals whose legacies were fraught rather than triumphant. Fozi draws on this evidence to argue that Romanesque effigies were created to address social rather than individual anxieties: they compensated for defeat by converting local losses into an expectation of eternal victory, comforting the embarrassed heirs of those whose histories were marked by misfortune and offering compensation for the disappointments of the world. Featuring numerous examples and engaging the visual, historical, and theological contexts that inform them, this...

Queens, Consorts, Concubines: Gregory of Tours and Women of the Merovingian Elite

Author: E. T Dailey

Number of pages: 220

Queens, Consorts, Concubines offers an analysis of Gregory of Tours on issues including widowhood, marriage, sanctity, and political agency, offering a reinterpretation of elite women in Gaul (e.g. Brunhild, Fredegund, Radegund), related subjects (e.g. Merovingian marital policy), and Late Antiquity generally.

2002

Author: Massimo Mastrogregori

Number of pages: 439

Annually published since 1930, the International bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. The works are arranged systematically according to period, region or historical discipline, and within this classification alphabetically. The bibliography contains a geographical index and indexes of persons and authors.

Ulwencreutz's The Royal Families in Europe V

Author: Lars Ulwencreutz

Number of pages: 486

Ulwencreutz's Royal Families in Europe V - A brief history of the ruling houses during the last 2000 years. From the house of La Tour d'Auvergne to the house of Zahringen.

Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus

Author: Alexander O'Hara

Number of pages: 320

Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author, but also an historical figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa in the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish exile Columbanus, soon after his death in 615. He became the archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, travelled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of immunity, and served as a missionary priest on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom. He spent the rest of his life in Merovingian Gaul as abbot of the double monastic community of Marchiennes-Hamage, where he wrote his Life of Columbanus, one of the most influential works of early medieval hagiography. This book, the first major study devoted to Jonas of Bobbio, his corpus of three saints' Lives, and the Columbanian familia, explores the development of the Columbanian monastic network and its relationship to its founder. The Life of Columbanus was written following a period of crisis within the Columbanian familia and it was in response to this crisis that the Bobbio community in Lombard Italy commissioned Jonas...

A Companion to Gregory of Tours

Author: Alexander C. Murray

Number of pages: 686

Gregory, bishop of Tours (573-594), wrote history, hagiography, and ecclesiastical instruction. A Companion to Gregory of Tours brings together twelve scholars who provide an expert guide to interpreting his works, his period, and his legacy in religious and historical studies.

The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World

Author: Bonnie Effros , Isabel Moreira

Number of pages: 1056

The Merovingian era is one of the best studied yet least well known periods of European history. From the fifth to the eighth centuries, the inhabitants of Gaul (what now comprises France, southern Belgium, Luxembourg, Rhineland Germany, and part of modern Switzerland), a mix of Gallo-Roman inhabitants and Germanic arrivals under the political control of the Merovingian dynasty, sought to preserve, use, and reimagine the political, cultural, and religious power of ancient Rome while simultaneously forging the beginnings of what would become medieval European culture. The forty-six essays included in this volume highlight why the Merovingian era is at the heart of historical debates about what happened to Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The essays demonstrate that the inhabitants of the Merovingian kingdoms in these centuries created a culture that was the product of these traditions and achieved a balance between the world they inherited and the imaginative solutions they bequeathed to Europe. The Handbook highlights new perspectives and scientific approaches that shape our changing view of this extraordinary era by showing that Merovingian Gaul was situated at...

ANTIQUITY

Author: Martin Carver

Antiquity

Includes section "Reviews."

Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology

Author: Bonnie Effros , Guolong Lai

Number of pages: 400

This volume addresses the entanglement between archaeology, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and war. Popular sentiment in the West has tended to embrace the adventure rather than ponder the legacy of archaeological explorers; allegations by imperial powers of "discovering" archaeological sites or "saving" world heritage from neglect or destruction have often provided the pretext for expanding political influence. Consequently, citizens have often fallen victim to the imperial war machine, seeing their lands confiscated, their artifacts looted, and the ancient remains in their midst commercialized. Spanning the globe with case studies from East Asia, Siberia, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Africa, sixteen contributions written by archaeologists, art historians, and historians from four continents offer unusual breadth and depth in the assessment of various claims to patrimonial heritage, contextualized by the imperial and colonial ventures of the last two centuries and their postcolonial legacy.

Pagans and Christians in the Late Roman Empire

Author: Marianne Saghy , Edward M. Schoolman

Number of pages: 382

Do the terms ?pagan? and ?Christian,? ?transition from paganism to Christianity? still hold as explanatory devices to apply to the political, religious and cultural transformation experienced Empire-wise? Revisiting ?pagans? and ?Christians? in Late Antiquity has been a fertile site of scholarship in recent years: the paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between ?pagans? and ?Christians? replaced the old ?conflict model? with a subtler, complex approach and triggered the upsurge of new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion. This collection of essays, inscribes itself into the revisionist discussion of pagan-Christian relations over a broad territory and time-span, the Roman Empire from the fourth to the eighth century. A set of papers argues that if ?paganism? had never been fully extirpated or denied by the multiethnic educated elite that managed the Roman Empire, ?Christianity? came to be presented by the same elite as providing a way for a wider group of people to combine true philosophy and right religion. The speed with which this happened is just as remarkable as the long persistence of paganism...

Bishops and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul

Author: Gregory I. Halfond

Number of pages: 220

Following the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, local Christian leaders were confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize and administer their regional churches. As Gregory Halfond shows, the bishops of post-Roman Gaul oversaw a transformation in the relationship between church and state. He shows that by constituting themselves as a corporate body, the Gallic episcopate was able to wield significant political influence on local, regional, and kingdom-wide scales. Gallo-Frankish bishops were conscious of their corporate membership in an exclusive order, the rights and responsibilities of which were consistently being redefined and subsequently expressed through liturgy, dress, physical space, preaching, and association with cults of sanctity. But as Halfond demonstrates, individual bishops, motivated by the promise of royal patronage to provide various forms of service to the court, often struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to balance their competing loyalties. However, even the resulting conflicts between individual bishops did not, he shows, fundamentally undermine the Gallo-Frankish episcopate's corporate identity or integrity. Ultimately, Halfond provides a far...

Abstraction in Medieval Art

Author: Elina Gertsman

Number of pages: 384

Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of image from what it purports to represent, abstraction as a vehicle for signification, and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.