This book illuminates ways in which Jerusalem was represented in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, c. 700-1500. Focusing on maps and plans in manuscripts and early printed books, it also considers views and architectural replicas, and treats depictions of the Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre alongside those of the city as a whole.
This volume illuminates ways in which Jerusalem was represented in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, c. 700-1500. Focusing on maps and plans in manuscripts and early printed books, it also considers views and architectural replicas.
This book explores several fascinating medieval Christian and Islamic artworks that represent and reimagine Jerusalem’s architecture as religious and political instruments to express power, entice visitors, console the devoted, offer spiritual guidance, and convey the city’s mythical history.
In The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture specialists in various fields of art history, from Early Christian times to the present, discuss in depth a series of Western artworks, artefacts, and buildings, which question the visualization of Jerusalem.
What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written accounts of their travels, for the journey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the international literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.
The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land
This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.
This volume explores the relationship between temporality and presence in medieval artworks from the third to the sixteenth centuries. It is the first extensive treatment of the interconnections between medieval artworks' varied presences and their ever-shifting places in time. The volume begins with reflections on the study of temporality and presence in medieval and early modern art history. A second section presents case studies delving into the different ways medieval artworks once created and transformed their original viewers' experience of the present. These range from late antique Constantinople, early Islamic Jerusalem and medieval Italy, to early modern Venice and the Low Countries. A final section explores how medieval artworks remain powerful and relevant today. This section includes case studies on reconstructing presence in medieval art through embodied experience of pilgrimage, art historical research and museum education. In doing so, the volume provides a first dialog between museum educators and art historians on the presence of medieval artifacts. It includes contributions by Hans Belting, Keith Moxey, Rika Burnham and others.
The book presents and discusses a large corpus of Jewish maps of the Holy Land that were drawn by Jewish scholars from the 11th to the 20th century, and thus fills a significant lacuna both in the history of cartography and in Jewish studies. The maps depict the biblical borders of the Holy Land, the allotments of the tribes, and the forty years of wanderings in the desert. Most of these maps are in Hebrew although there are several in Yiddish, Ladino and in European languages. The book focuses on four aspects: it presents an up-to-date corpus of known maps of various types and genres; it suggests a classification of these maps according to their source, shape and content; it presents and analyses the main topics that were depicted in the maps; and it puts the maps in their historical and cultural contexts, both within the Jewish world and the sphere of European cartography of their time. The book is an innovative contribution to the fields of history of cartography and Jewish studies. It is written for both professional readers and the general public. The Hebrew edition (2014), won the Izhak Ben-Zvi Prize.
