Making The Medieval Relevant

Author : Chris Jones
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110546310
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making the Medieval Relevant written by Chris Jones and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When scholars discuss the medieval past, the temptation is to become immersed there, to deepen our appreciation of the nuances of the medieval sources through debate about their meaning. But the past informs the present in a myriad of ways and medievalists can, and should, use their research to address the concerns and interests of contemporary society. This volume presents a number of carefully commissioned essays that demonstrate the fertility and originality of recent work in Medieval Studies. Above all, they have been selected for relevance. Most contributors are in the earlier stages of their careers and their approaches clearly reflect how interdisciplinary methodologies applied to Medieval Studies have potential repercussions and value far beyond the boundaries of the Middles Ages. These chapters are powerful demonstrations of the value of medieval research to our own times, both in terms of providing answers to some of the specific questions facing humanity today and in terms of much broader considerations. Taken together, the research presented here also provides readers with confidence in the fact that Medieval Studies cannot be neglected without a great loss to the understanding of what it means to be human.

Author : Chris Jones
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making the Medieval Relevant written by Chris Jones and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Kathryn M. Rudy
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1783742364
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Piety in Pieces written by Kathryn M. Rudy and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval manuscripts resisted obsolescence. Made by highly specialised craftspeople (scribes, illuminators, book binders) with labour-intensive processes using exclusive and sometimes exotic materials (parchment made from dozens or hundreds of skins, inks and paints made from prized minerals, animals and plants), books were expensive and built to last. They usually outlived their owners. Rather than discard them when they were superseded, book owners found ways to update, amend and upcycle books or book parts. These activities accelerated in the fifteenth century. Most manuscripts made before 1390 were bespoke and made for a particular client, but those made after 1390 (especially books of hours) were increasingly made for an open market, in which the producer was not in direct contact with the buyer. Increased efficiency led to more generic products, which owners were motivated to personalise. It also led to more blank parchment in the book, for example, the backs of inserted miniatures and the blanks ends of textual components. Book buyers of the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century still held onto the old connotations of manuscripts—that they were custom-made luxury items—even when the production had become impersonal. Owners consequently purchased books made for an open market and then personalised them, filling in the blank spaces, and even adding more components later. This would give them an affordable product, but one that still smacked of luxury and met their individual needs. They kept older books in circulation by amending them, attached items to generic books to make them more relevant and valuable, and added new prayers with escalating indulgences as the culture of salvation shifted. Rudy considers ways in which book owners adjusted the contents of their books from the simplest (add a marginal note, sew in a curtain) to the most complex (take the book apart, embellish the components with painted decoration, add more quires of parchment). By making sometimes extreme adjustments, book owners kept their books fashionable and emotionally relevant. This study explores the intersection of codicology and human desire. Rudy shows how increased modularisation of book making led to more standardisation but also to more opportunities for personalisation. She asks: What properties did parchment manuscripts have that printed books lacked? What are the interrelationships among technology, efficiency, skill loss and standardisation?

Author : Matthew Gabriele
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062980912
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bright Ages written by Matthew Gabriele and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come….The Bright Ages is a rare thing—a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading.”—Slate "Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating." —The Boston Globe A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality—a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word “medieval” conjures images of the “Dark Ages”—centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante—inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy—writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today. The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world “lit only by fire” but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics. The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert.

Author : Melanie Holcomb
Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN 13 : 1588393186
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pen and Parchment written by Melanie Holcomb and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2009 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the techniques, uses, and aesthetics of medieval drawings; and reproduces work from more than fifty manuscripts produced between the ninth and early fourteenth century.

Author : John S. Lee
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1783273178
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Medieval Clothier written by John S. Lee and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear and accessibly written guide to the medieval cloth-making trade in England.

Author : Katherine Smith
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1843838672
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture written by Katherine Smith and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An extremely interesting and important book... makes an important contribution to the history of medieval monastic spirituality in a formative period, whilst also fitting into wider debates on the origins, development and impact of ideas on crusading and holy war." Dr William Purkis, University of Birmingham Monastic culture has generally been seen as set apart from the medieval battlefield, as "those who prayed" were set apart from "those who fought". However, in this first study of the place of war within medieval monastic culture, the author shows the limitations of this division. Through a wide reading of Latin sermons, letters, and hagiography, she identifies a monastic language of war that presented the monk as the archetypal "soldier of Christ" and his life of prayer as a continuous combat with the devil: indeed, monks' claims to supremacy on the spiritual battlefield grew even louder as Church leaders extended the title of "soldier of Christ" to lay knights and crusaders. So, while medieval monasteries have traditionally been portrayed as peaceful sanctuaries in a violent world, here the author demonstrates that monastic identity was negotiated through real and imaginary encounters with war, and that the concept of spiritual warfare informed virtually every aspect of life in the cloister. It thus breaks new ground in the history of European attitudes toward warfare and warriors in the age of the papal reform movement and the early crusades. Katherine Allen Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of Puget Sound.

Author : Jack Tannous
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691179093
Total Pages : 664 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Making of the Medieval Middle East written by Jack Tannous and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Author : Orietta Da Rold
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108896790
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Paper in Medieval England written by Orietta Da Rold and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orietta Da Rold provides a detailed analysis of the coming of paper to medieval England, and its influence on the literary and non-literary culture of the period. Looking beyond book production, Da Rold maps out the uses of paper and explains the success of this technology in medieval culture, considering how people interacted with it and how it affected their lives. Offering a nuanced understanding of how affordance influenced societal choices, Paper in Medieval England draws on a multilingual array of sources to investigate how paper circulated, was written upon, and was deployed by people across medieval society, from kings to merchants, to bishops, to clerks and to poets, contributing to an understanding of how medieval paper changed communication and shaped modernity.

Author : G. A. Loud
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1903153700
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Making of Medieval History written by G. A. Loud and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the discipline of medieval history and its practictioners, from the late eighteenth century onwards