Scraped, Stroked, and Bound PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Wilcox
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503545493
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection of essays makes an original contribution to medieval manuscript studies through deep engagement with the material side of book creation. The volume brings together major scholars of medieval manuscripts with leading contemporary book artists. The result is a ground-breaking collection which will be of interest both for its methodological implications and for the insights that the case studies provide. In a sequence of interconnected essays, experts in the field of literature, history, art, and manuscript studies enact readings of medieval manuscripts that incorporate extreme attention to the materiality of the object of their study. While the digital revolution has provided unparalleled visual access to medieval manuscripts, these essays are attentive to what has got left behind-not just the aura of the original, but also the engagement of the other senses, such as the feel of the binding, the heft of the volume, the smell of the parchment, or the sound of the pages. By bringing together experienced medievalist scholars with practicing book artists of today, this volume brings back an artisanal sense of the complete book to an understanding of medieval manuscripts.

Author: Simon C. Thomson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour.

Author: Teresa Berger
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814662935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book calls attention to the importance of scholarly reflection on the writing of liturgical history. The essays not only probe the impact of important shifts in historiography but also present new scholarship that promises to reconfigure some of the established images of liturgy’s past. Based on papers presented at the 2014 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference, Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s seeks to invigorate discussion of methodologies and materials in contemporary writings on liturgy’s pasts and to resource such writing at a point in time when formidable questions are being posed about the way in which historians construct the object of their inquiry.

Author: Bruce Holsinger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300260210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia "Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history."--Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era's surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of "uterine vellum," and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources--codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art--that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.

Author: Fiona Griffiths
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110563444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

Author: Mordechai Feingold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192588125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This issue of History of Universities, Volume XXXII / 1-2, contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Guest edited by Professor John Watts, this volume focuses on the history of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Corpus Christi College, Oxford was founded in 1517 to advance humanistic learning in the service of God. This collection of essays by some of the leading historians of late medieval and early modern England takes the early history of the College as a starting point to explore the intellectual, social, religious, political, and cultural trends of the era of Renaissance and Reformation. Ranging from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, and taking in the study of Greek and Hebrew; the practices of antiquarianism, charity, and divine worship; the experience of music, punishment, and the built environment; the networks that connected the college to London and the government; and the interactions of scholars with royal policy on religion, these fifteen essays and three commentaries aim to expose the multiple perspectives from which an early modern college can be viewed and understood. The relationship between 'Renaissance' and 'Reformation', and the social and cultural realities that accompanied these familiar concepts, form one central theme in the papers; the relationship between religious or educational institutions and the state form another. Corpus Christi itself emerges as less innovative than its historic reputation as the first collegium trilingue might suggest, but it becomes the gateway to a richer appreciation of the overlapping worlds of learning, religion and public life in a time of rapid change.

Author: Helen Gittos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134797672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.

Author: Patrick J. Murphy
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Montague Rhodes James authored some of the most highly regarded ghost stories of all time—classics such as “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” that have been adapted many times over for radio and television and have never gone out of print. But while James is best known as a fiction writer and storyteller, he was also a provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and a legendary and influential scholar whose pioneering work in the study of biblical texts and medieval manuscripts, art, and architecture is still relevant today. In Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Patrick J. Murphy argues that these twin careers are inextricably linked. James’s research not only informed his fiction but also reflected his anxieties about the nature of academic life and explored the delicate divide between professional, university men and erratic hobbyists or antiquaries. Murphy shows how detailed attention to the scholarly inspirations behind James’s fiction provides considerable insight into a formative moment in medieval studies, as well as into James’s methods as a master stylist of understated horror. During his life, James often claimed that his stories were mere entertainments—pleasing distractions from a life largely defined by academic discipline and restraint—and readers over the years have been content to take him at his word. This intriguing volume, however, convincingly proves otherwise.

Author: Lars Kjaer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350183709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Gift-giving played an important role in political, social and religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. This volume explores an under-examined and often-overlooked aspect of this phenomenon: the material nature of the gift. Drawing on examples from both medieval and early modern Europe, the authors from the UK and across Europe explore the craftsmanship involved in the production of gifts and the use of exotic objects and animals, from elephant bones to polar bears and 'living' holy objects, to communicate power, class and allegiance. Gifts were publicly given, displayed and worn and so the book explores the ways in which, as tangible objects, gifts could help to construct religious and social worlds. But the beauty and material richness of the gift could also provoke anxieties. Classical and Christian authorities agreed that, in gift-giving, it was supposed to be the thought that counted and consequently wealth and grandeur raised worries about greed and corruption: was a valuable ring payment for sexual services or a token of love and a promise of marriage? Over three centuries, Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600: Gifts as Objects reflects on the possibilities, practicalities and concerns raised by the material character of gifts.

Author: Christina Van Dyke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192606166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Medieval philosophy is primarily associated today with university-based disputations and the authorities cited in those disputations. In their own time, however, scholastic debates were recognized as just one part of wide-ranging philosophical and theological discussions. A Hidden Wisdom breaks new ground by drawing attention to another crucial component of these conversations: the Christian contemplative tradition. The period from 1200 to 1500, in particular, saw a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of mystical and contemplative literature in the 'Christian West', by laypeople as well as religious scholars, women as well as men. A Hidden Wisdom focuses on five topics of particular interest to both scholastics and contemplatives in this period, namely, self-knowledge, reason and its limits, love and the will, persons, and immortality and the afterlife. This focus centers the (often overlooked) contributions of medieval women and demonstrates that when we re-unite scholasticism with its contemplative counterpart, we gain not only a more accurate understanding of the scope of medieval Christian philosophy and theology but also an increased awareness of a deeply practical tradition that builds up as well as tears down, generates as well as deconstructs. The book's treatment of topics and figures is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive: a tasting menu, rather than a comprehensive study. The choice of topics offers a series of 'hooks' for philosophers to connect their own interests to issues central to medieval contemplative philosophy, while also providing medievalists in other disciplines a fresh lens through which to view these texts.