The Medieval Salento

The Medieval Salento

Author: Linda Safran

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-04-18

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0812245547

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Located in the heel of the Italian boot, the Salento region was home to a diverse population between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Inhabitants spoke Latin, Greek, and various vernaculars, and their houses of worship served sizable congregations of Jews as well as Roman-rite and Orthodox Christians. Yet the Salentines of this period laid claim to a definable local identity that transcended linguistic and religious boundaries. The evidence of their collective culture is embedded in the traces they left behind: wall paintings and inscriptions, graffiti, carved ­­tombstone decorations, belt fittings from graves, and other artifacts reveal a wide range of religious, civic, and domestic practices that helped inhabitants construct and maintain personal, group, and regional identities. The Medieval Salento allows the reader to explore the visual and material culture of a people using a database of over three hundred texts and images, indexed by site. Linda Safran draws from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory to reconstruct medieval Salentine customs of naming, language, appearance, and status. She pays particular attention to Jewish and nonelite residents, whose lives in southern Italy have historically received little scholarly attention. This extraordinarily detailed visual analysis reveals how ethnic and religious identities can remain distinct even as they mingle to become a regional culture.


From Byzantine to Norman Italy

From Byzantine to Norman Italy

Author: Clare Vernon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0755635752

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first major study to comprehensively analyze the art and architecture of the archdiocese of Bari and Canosa during the Byzantine period and the upheaval of the Norman conquest. The book places Bari and Canosa in a Mediterranean context, arguing that international connections with the eastern Mediterranean were a continuous thread that shaped art and architecture throughout the Byzantine and Norman eras. Clare Vernon has examined a wide variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, epigraphy and luxury portable objects, as well as patronage, to illustrate how cross-cultural encounters, the first crusade, slavery and continuities and disruptions in the relationship with Constantinople, shaped the visual culture of the archdiocese. From Byzantine to Norman Italy will appeal to students and scholars of Byzantine art, the medieval Mediterranean and the Italo-Norman world.


The Virtual Liturgy and Ritual Artifacts in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Virtual Liturgy and Ritual Artifacts in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Author: Katharine D. Scherff

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-03

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1000841863

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examining the history of altar decorations, this study of the visual liturgy grapples with many of the previous theoretical frameworks to reveal the evolution and function of these ritual objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book uses traditional art-historical methodologies and media technology theory to reexamine ritual objects. Previous analysis has not considered the in-between nature of these objects as deliberate and virtual conduits to the divine. The liturgy, the altarpiece, the altar environment, relics, and their reliquaries are media. In a series of case studies, several objects tell a different story about culture and society in medieval Europe. In essence, they reveal that media and media technologies generate and modulate the individual and collective structure of feelings of sacredness among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, early modern studies, and architectural history.


Writing Southern Italy Before the Renaissance

Writing Southern Italy Before the Renaissance

Author: Ronald G. Musto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1351767399

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume traces the work of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno, analyzing it through current methodological and theoretical frameworks. Questioning the current consensus, the book examines how the South as a cultural "other" began evolving over the fourteenth century, and reconsiders the nineteenth-century "Southern Question" concerning the Mezzogiorno’s history, culture and people and its lingering negative image in Europe and America. It also focuses on specific histories, authors and historiographical issues, and reviews how new understandings of the Mediterranean have begun to alter our perceptions of the South in a new global context and as the basis for new historical research.


Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean

Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean

Author: Anthi Andronikou

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 1009041258

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.


The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography

The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography

Author: Colum Hourihane

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-19

Total Pages: 588

ISBN-13: 1315298368

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.


A Companion to Medieval Genoa

A Companion to Medieval Genoa

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 588

ISBN-13: 9004360611

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Companion to Medieval Genoa introduces non-specialists to recent scholarship on the vibrant and source-rich medieval history of Genoa. Focusing mostly on the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, the volume positions the city of Genoa and the Genoese within the broader history of the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Thematic contributions highlight the interdependence of local, regional, and international concerns, and serve as a helpful corrective to the traditional overemphasis of Florence and Venice in the English-language historiography of medieval Italy. The volume thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of medieval Italy—as well as a handy introduction to the riches of the Genoese archives—to undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in related fields. Contributors are Ross Balzaretti, Carrie E. Beneš, Denise Bezzina, Roberta Braccia, Luca Filangieri, George L. Gorse, Paola Guglielmotti, Thomas Kirk, Sandra Macchiavello, Merav Mack, Jeffrey Miner, Rebecca Müller, Antonio Musarra, Sandra Origone, Giovanna Petti Balbi, Valeria Polonio, Gervase Rosser, Antonella Rovere, Stefan Stantchev, and Carlo Taviani.


Emotions, Communities, and Difference in Medieval Europe

Emotions, Communities, and Difference in Medieval Europe

Author: Maureen C. Miller

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 131714452X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book of eleven essays by an international group of scholars in medieval studies honors the work of Barbara H. Rosenwein, Professor emerita of History at Loyola University Chicago. Part I, “Emotions and Communities,” comprises six essays that make use of Rosenwein’s well-known and widely influential work on the history of emotions and what Rosenwein has called “emotional communities.” These essays employ a wide variety of source material such as chronicles, monastic records, painting, music theory, and religious practice to elucidate emotional commonalities among the medieval people who experienced them. The five essays in Part II, “Communities and Difference,” explore different kinds of communities and have difference as their primary theme: difference between the poor and the unfree, between power as wielded by rulers or the clergy, between the western Mediterranean region and the rest of Europe, and between a supposedly great king and lesser ones.


Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art

Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art

Author: Robert Couzin

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9004448713

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Robert Couzin’s Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art provides the first in-depth study of handedness, position, and direction in the visual culture of Europe and Byzantium from the fourth to the fourteenth century.