The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author: J. H. Chajes

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 9782503583037

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All of us are exposed to graphic means of communication on a daily basis. Our life seems flooded with lists, tables, charts, diagrams, models, maps, and forms of notation. Although we now take such devices for granted, their role in the codification and transmission of knowledge evolved within historical contexts where they performed particular tasks. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, both mental and material, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemic potential of visual strategies have privileged the modern natural sciences. This volume expands the field of research by focusing on the relationship between the arts of memory and modes of graphic mediation through the sixteenth century. Chapters encompass Christian (Greek as well as Latin) production, Jewish (Hebrew) traditions, and the transfer of Arabic learning. The linked essays anthologized here consider the generative power of schemata, cartographic representation, and even the layout of text: more than merely compiling information, visual arrangements formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world.

Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age
Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 3111190609

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Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Author: Ingrid Baumgärtner

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 3110587416

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The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge. The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.

Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond
Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond

Author: Francesco Stella

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 9027247293

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The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.

Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times
Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-01

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 3111387828

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The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe
The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe

Author: Taylor McCall

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 178914681X

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A new history of the medieval illustrations that birthed modern anatomy. This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities
The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities

Author: Tania Rossetto

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 104002923X

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The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts. With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping, while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is organised into seven parts: Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans–maps relation to the posthuman dimension, from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements. Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena, unmappable terrain features, and even animal perspectives. Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with other media. Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and nonhuman entities in a digital ecology. Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination. Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and self-accounts. Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm. This innovative and expansive Handbook will appeal to those in the fields of geography, art, philosophy, media and visual studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities and cultural studies as well as industry professionals.

Lines of Thought
Lines of Thought

Author: Ayelet Even-Ezra

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 022674311X

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We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.

Between Manuscript and Print
Between Manuscript and Print

Author: Sylvia Brockstieger

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-07-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 3111242692

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A cross-cultural, comparative view on the transition from a predominant 'culture of handwriting' to a predominant 'culture of print' in the late medieval and early modern periods is provided here, combining research on Christian and Jewish European book culture with findings on East Asian manuscript and print culture. This approach highlights interactions and interdependencies instead of retracing a linear process from the manuscript book to its printed successor. While each chapter is written as a disciplinary study focused on one specific case from the respective field, the volume as a whole allows for transcultural perspectives. It thereby not only focusses on change, but also on simultaneities of manuscript and printing practices as well as on shifts in the perception of media, writing surfaces, and materials: Which values did writers, printers, and readers attribute to the handwritten and printed materials? For which types of texts was handwriting preferred or perceived as suitable? How and under which circumstances could handwritten and printed texts coexist, even within the same document, and which epistemic dynamics emerged from such textual assemblages?

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms
Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Author: Jessica Brantley

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0812298454

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In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.