After the Text
After the Text

Author: Liz James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 1000468712

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After the Text honours the work of renowned historian Margaret Mullett, who since the 1970s has transformed the study of Byzantine literature. Her work has been influential in demonstrating the strength and variety of Byzantine texts. Byzantium is renowned for its achievements in architecture and the visual arts. Byzantium is renowned for its achievements in architecture and the visual arts. Professor Mullett's perceptive studies, produced over more than 40 years, have shown that the literature of the Byzantine Empire is of equal beauty and interest, ranging, as it does, from high-style poetry and rhetoric in the classical manner through letters to demotic writings such as fables and the lives of saints. The collection of essays in this volume draws further attention to the wealth and diversity of Byzantine texts, by exploring the Greek literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in all its variety. These studies, by going, like Professor Mullett herself, beyond the texts, illustrate the value of Byzantine literature for interpreting Byzantine history and civilisation in all its richness. This book is crucial reading for scholars and students of the Byzantine world, as well as for those interested in literary studies. Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Die Mosaiken der Acheiropoietos-Basilika in Thessaloniki
Die Mosaiken der Acheiropoietos-Basilika in Thessaloniki

Author: Benjamin Fourlas

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-07-04

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 3110278553

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Obwohl der Bestand an frühbyzantinischen Wand- und Gewölbemosaiken im östlichen Mittelmeerraum sehr gering ist, waren die umfangreichen Reste des erhaltenen musivischen Dekors der Acheiropoietos-Basilika in Thessaloniki bisher noch nicht Gegenstand einer umfassenden Untersuchung. Die vorliegende Studie stellt diese überwiegend in den Arkaden und Fensterlaibungen erhaltenen Mosaiken in den Mittelpunkt. Aufbauend an die ausführliche Analyse dieses qualitätvollen Dekors werden weiterführende Fragen zu den frühbyzantinischen Mosaiken von Thessaloniki (v. a. Hagios Demetrios, Gerogios-Rotunde) bearbeitet und die bisher stark umstrittene relative Chronologie dieser Kunstgattung in dieser Metropole auf eine neue Grundlage gestellt. Ein umfangreicher Katalog vergleichbarer dekorativer Mosaiken des 5. und 6. Jhs. in Bogenlaibungen von Monumenten des gesamten Mittelmerraums, die bisher noch nicht zusammenfassend bearbeitet worden sind, dient als Basis für die Bewertung und Einordnung. Als Corpus dekorativer Mosaiken in Bogenlaibungen des 5. und 6. Jhs. ist die Arbeit von grundlegender Bedeutung.

Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond
Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9004307729

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This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and Joasaph, and Arabic epics together with their Byzantine adaptations. Original Byzantine love romances, both learned and vernacular, are discussed together with their Persian counterparts and with later adaptations of western stories. This combination of such disparate narrative material aims to highlight both the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean world. Contributors are Carolina Cupane, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Massimo Fusillo, Corinne Jouanno, Grammatiki A. Karla, Bettina Krönung, Renata Lavagnini, Ulrich Moennig, Ingela Nilsson, Claudia Ott, Oliver Overwien, Panagiotis Roilos, Julia Rubanovich, Ida Toth, Robert Volk and Kostas Yiavis.

Mosaics of Ravenna
Mosaics of Ravenna

Author: Jutta Dresken-Weiland

Publisher: Schnell & Steiner

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783795432065

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The mosaics of Ravenna are rated among the world's most important art works. Their quality and blaze of colour have intrigued believers and visitors since their making between the fifth and the seventh century. This book investigates the issue of the meaning of this imagery, its peculiarities, and the messages conveyed to the viewers through the centuries. It explores the function of the mosaics in the different buildings, and their interpretations in the relevant liturgical context by people living in late Antiquity. Several comparative examples integrate the mosaics in the frame of late Roman art. Written fluently on the basis of current state of research, the volume thus provides valuable new insight in one of the most fascinating sets of images of early Christian times. The mosaics were last subject to extensive investigation 40 years ago. Delve into the magnificence and variety of these mosaics, the colour photographs of which were made expressly for this book. They show the mosaics at close range and allow visual experiences that are impossible on site.

Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art
Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art

Author: Anna Cecilia Olovsdotter

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-12-17

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 3110546841

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It has long been an accepted assumption that the abstracted mode of visual representation that emerged in late antiquity reflected a collective shift from the outer-directed and ’material’ world-view of classical antiquity to an inner-directed, ’spiritual’ mentality informed by Christianity: the purpose of this volume is to offer a more nuanced and diverse image of the nature and meanings of abstraction and symbolism in late antique and early medieval art, beyond normative intepretation models, and from a number of different methodological and interpretative perspectives. In ten chapters, ten authors specialised in various fields of late-antique and Byzantine art explore the historiographical background of the ’spiritual’ interpretation paradigm, neuroscientific and theological dimensions of Christian visual aesthetics, meanings and motive factors behind apparently wholly abstract and aniconic compositions, symbolic motifs and schemes for visualising cosmic order and the cosmic state of Christ, and the re-use of symbolic Greco-Roman themes in Christian contexts. The result is a multi-focal image of late antique abstraction and symbolism that illuminates the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomena and of their study.

The Geography of the Hittite Empire
The Geography of the Hittite Empire

Author: John Garstang

Publisher: British Institute at Ankara

Published: 2017-10-01

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1912090864

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The imperial archives of the Hittite kings include numerous records of military adventure and achievement, of relations with a friend and foe, and of recurring periods of danger to the throne and empire. These fascinating records, however, remain for the most part unintelligible, or at least deprived of their essential value, for want of a reliable map whereby the setting and the scale of the episodes described may be appreciated. At the time of Professor Garstang’s death the first draft of this book was already complete. It has been since been thoroughly revised by Dr. O.R. Gurney, but the ideas which it embodies remain essentially those of Professor Garstang.

Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism
Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism

Author: David Hellholm

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-07-27

Total Pages: 2089

ISBN-13: 3110247534

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In the web of cultural processes of late antiquity ablution rites and initiation rites were performed in different forms and in different contexts. Such rites existed in Early Judaism and Greco-Roman cults and were also applied in early Christianity under the label “baptism”, however, not as one fixed rite uniformly performed and interpreted. Baptismal rites developed diversely corresponding to the diversity among Christian groups of which some later came to be perceived as heretical. Remains of art, architecture and texts from these contexts were discussed in two conferences gathering scholars who are excellent within their respective fields: text studies, studies of rites, archaeology, architecture, history of art, and cultural anthropology. These different fields of research have in recent years generated new knowledge that is relevant for the discussion of ablution and initiation rites and their function in late antiquity. At the same time interests of research have altered in favour of a growing cooperation across discipline borders. The present volumes are the outcome of two conferences in Rome 2008 and at Metochi (Lesbos) 2009.

Resounding Images
Resounding Images

Author: Susan Boynton

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503554372

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"This study brings together for the first time scholars of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and music to reconstruct the complex intersection between art, architecture and sound in the medieval world. Case studies explore how ambient and programmatic sound, including chant and speech, and its opposite, silence, interacted with objects and the built environment to create the multisensory experiences that characterized medieval life. While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art, architecture, and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography, the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound, space and image in the long Middle Ages."--