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In Illuminating in Micrography, Dalia-Ruth Halperin analyzes the Catalan Micrography Mahzor, a fourteenth-century Barcelonan manuscript in Israel's National Library. Decorated with micrography, the Jewish scribal art typical of Bible manuscripts, this mahzor, which includes a rich full-page panel micrography cycle, is unique. Along with the codicological and paleographical analysis, essential for understanding the scribe's thought and working processes, the author's meticulous reading of the mic...

In the 1470s, one of the most innovative artists working in Bruges illuminated a Book of Hours for Jean Carpentin, lord of Gravile and prominent citizen of Normandy. Known as the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book after one of his other masterpieces, this artist and members of his workshop enriched the pages of Carpentin’s manuscript with miniatures, historiated initials and boldly colored borders in which human figures, monsters and monkeys are framed by twisting branches of acanthus.

This is a study of visual and textual images of the mythical creature tengu from the late Heian (897-1185) to the late Kamakura (1185-1333) periods. Popularly depicted as half-bird, half-human creatures with beaks or long noses, wings, and human bodies, tengu today are commonly seen as guardian spirits associated with the mountain ascetics known as yamabushi. In the medieval period, however, the character of tengu most often had a darker, more malevolent aspect. Haruko Wakabashi focuses in this...

A collection of twenty-two commissioned papers discuss the construction, architecture and building plan of 13th-century castles in Europe. An initial four essays discuss the historical context of castle-building beginning in the post-Roman years. These are followed by a series of case studies, mostly from Germany, including castles in Nuernberg, Pappenheim, Vienenburg, Muenzenburg and Oppenheim. Contributors also discuss 13th-century castles in Sweden, France and Lichtenstein and the influence o...

More than a generation before the invention of Gutenberg’s celebrated press, the new technology of image printing emerged. In this book, a distinguished group of scholars treats the earliest manifestations of printing in all aspects: technical experimentation, the complex relation of printed books to printed images, individual and institutional patronage, new iconographies, religious propaganda, and the wide variety of private and public ways in which printed images were first employed.   The...

Der Rahmen ist in der Kunstgeschichte mittlerweile mehr als die Einfassung eines Bildwerks: Ins Zentrum des Interesses ist gerückt, dass rahmende Strukturen Wahrnehmung steuern, Kommunikationsstrukturen etablieren und damit auch konzeptuelle frames erzeugen. Ausgehend von diesem Verständnis des Rahmens als multifunktionales Element, versammelt der Band Fallstudien aus Architektur, Malerei und Skulptur, die das funktionale, ästhetische und reflexive Potential von Rahmungen erörtern. Die einzelne...

The essays collected in this book were delivered at the XLII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in London in 2009 to accompany the exhibition Byzantium 330-1453, at the Royal Academy. The exhibition was one of the most ambitious and complex exhibitions ever mounted at the Royal Academy, as well as one of the most popular, and the overall aim of the book is to reflect on the exhibition of Byzantine art, both as an academic and popular exercise, and through the choice and discussion of in...

This volume continues the series' tradition of bringing together work on clothing and textiles from across Europe. It has a strong focus on gold: subjects include sixth-century German burials containing sumptuous jewellery and bands brocaded with gold; the textual evidence for recycling such gold borders and bands in the later Anglo-Saxon period; and a semantic classification of words relating to gold in multi-lingual medieval Britain. It also rescues significant archaeological textiles from obs...

For courses in Medieval Art. Extensively illustrated in full color throughout, this text explores the extraordinary world of Byzantium in all its grandeur and complexity—surveying Byzantine art within a broad cultural and historical context. Part of the Prentice Hall Perspectives Series co-published by Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

This book articulates a new approach to medieval aesthetic values, emphasizing the sensory and emotional basis of all medieval arts, their love of play and fine craftsmanship, of puzzles, and of strong contrasts. Written for a general educated audience as well as students and scholars in the field, it offers an understanding of medieval literature and art that is rooted in the perceptions and feelings of ordinary life, made up of play and laughter as well as serious work. Medieval stylistic valu...

Over the past fifty years, Françoise Henry has been the leading authority on the history of early Irish art. A pupil of Henri Focillon, she united two traditions of scholarship, one French and one Irish, and her understanding of the European context within which the art of early Christian Ireland developed has had a profound influence on subsequent research. These three volumes bring together the articles that Dr. Henry published on Irish art and its European links. The first volume is concer...

The title is an allusion to the description by Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, of the men of the Auvergne. Suger depicts "that old pride" in a chapter of his Deeds of Louis the Fat, which chronicles the arrival of King Louis VI in the region (1122 and 1126), to succor Eimeric I, the Bishop of Clermont, obliged to flee his episcopal town after its seizure by the Count of Auvergne. The citation provides a frame of reference for the subject of this study: the Auvergnat laity and its relations with the C...

The late Donald King (d. 1998) was the founding father of textile studies in England. His knowledge of the technology and history of textiles of all periods across many lands remains unsurpassed. An erudite and yet modest scholar, he did much to promote the academic understanding of textiles, both in this country and abroad. His role as Keeper of Textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum, allowed first-hand technical analysis of a large number of medieval and later textiles over a very wide ran...

South Wales is an area blessed with an eclectic, but largely unknown, monumental heritage, ranging from plain cross slabs to richly carved effigial monuments on canopied tomb-chests. As a group, these monuments closely reflect theturbulent history of the southern march of Wales, its close links to the West Country and its differences from the 'native Wales' of the north-west. As individuals, they offer fascinating insights into the spiritual and secular concerns of the area's culturally diverse...

How were the relations among image, imagination and cognition characterized in the period 1500 - 1800? The authors of this volume argue that in those three centuries, a thoroughgoing transformation affected the following issues: (i) what it meant to understand phenomena in the natural world (cognition); (ii) how such phenomena were visualized or pictured (images, including novel types of diagrams, structural models, maps, etc.); and (iii) what role was attributed to the faculty of the imaginatio...