Death and rebirth was of vital importance to early Christians in late antiquity. In late antiquity, death was all encompassing. Mortality rates were high, plague and disease in urban areas struck at will, and one lived on the knife's edge regarding one's health. Religion filled a crucial role in this environment, offering an option for those who ......
Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline? Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this book defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the field's political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In this volume, scholars ......
A collection of essays by art historians on works of art, artifacts, and monuments that are no longer extant, have disappeared, or perhaps never existed outside of language. Addresses destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures.
The Image of Death in Late Medieval Bohemian Painting
This book examines the visualization of personified death. It analyzes all preserved examples of macabre iconography in late medieval Bohemian paintings in the context of period culture and devotion.
A Laboratory of Images in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries
This study focuses on four different iconographical forms that appeared in Rome during the eighth and ninth centuries. The author analyzes the experimentation and innovation of Christian iconographies and the artistic vibrancy of early medieval Rome before it became divided between East and West.
This volume assesses how current approaches to iconology and iconography break new ground in understanding the signification and reception of medieval images, both in their own time and in the modern world. Framed by critical essays that apply explicitly historiographical and sociopolitical perspectives to key moments in the evolution of the ......
Sacred Space and Civic Identity in the Late Medieval City
The concept of the medieval city is fixed in the modern imagination, conjuring visions of fortified walls, towering churches, and winding streets. In Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, Katherine M. Boivin investigates how medieval urban planning and artistic programming worked together to form dynamic environments, demonstrating the agency of objects, ......
Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200
Studies Romanesque effigies as a distinctive form of medieval sculpture, emphasizing the early twelfth century as a time of rapid change in the art, culture, and politics of northern Europe.
Christian Art, Identity, and Community in Late Antique Italy
Building the Body of Christ argues that monumental Christian art and architecture played a crucial role in the formation of new religious identities in late antique Italy. Bishops and their supporters employed the visual arts to articulate and encourage specific beliefs, practices, and values that shaped the emerging institutional church.
