CARMEN Visual and Material Cultures – serie

This is the first ever book in English solely devoted to one of the most important reliquary shrines of the Mosan Rhineland, the Heribert Shrine. Carolyn M. Carty investigates how liturgy, history, politics, and geography all converge to influence the creation and the message of a work of art in the aftermath of the Investiture Controversy between the Church and the Holy Roman Empire. She argues that the Heribert Shrine's images and inscriptions support the supremacy of the Church over the State with consequent implications for the shrine's intended viewers.

This volume challenges popular assumptions and academic pieties​ regarding religion and identity on the Iberian​ Peninsula during the Middle​ Ages. Its studies of individual works of art and architecture uncoil complex​ histories from this religiously plural peninsula, intertwining social, cultural,​ and political identities across seven centuries. Chronicling relationships​ between religious groups that were neither idyllic nor irreconcilable, these​ works of art reveal instead expressions of religious separateness balanced​ within ambivalent and dynamic shared visual identities.

Alfred the Great's early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them?This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.

The essays in this volume focus on rings as small objects that have touched upon people, places, and events; rings have also featured in scholastic debates and form our modern museum collections. Contributors collectively argue that a closer look at these diminutive artifacts—both precious and mundane—alongside an assessment of their place within the visual, archaeological, and written record, and in museum contexts tells us more nuanced stories about how and why these small and sensory items were crafted and created connections between people and institutions. Their focus on the social aspects of medieval finger rings unites the contributions of nine scholars with backgrounds in art history, history, archaeology, museum studies, and collecting. Together their essays cover material roughly ranging from 1100 to 1500 in Iberia, France, England, Germany, Rus, and Byzantium.

This interdisciplinary volume offers new ways to think about how disease and death, and healing and health, were considered, experienced, displayed, and portrayed across the global medieval world. Reaching across conventional disciplinary, historiographical, and geographical boundaries, Materialities of Disease investigates a broad selection of visual and material artefacts emerging from across the globe—from Western Europe, Western Africa, and Anatolia, to Japan, India, China, and New Spain. This volume focuses on non-textual narratives about disease that can be read in historical images, objects, human remains, archaeological remains, architectural spaces, materia medica, and other surviving artefacts. Taken together, these contributions, which are diverse and interdisciplinary, highlight and nuance some of the recent critical advances in scholarship being made in and for medical history across many fields

Bucolic imagery—of shepherds with flocks in idyllic surroundings—has barely been studied in Byzantine art history. These images elude our usual analytical categories of imperial, sacred, and secular art, and challenge our assumptions about visual narrative. This book demonstrates that a “bucolic mode” existed in Byzantium in diverse media, such as textiles, sculpture, mosaics, silver, and manuscripts. Through a close reading of a select group of images, this book argues that bucolic themes were deployed to reflect concerns about the salvific effects of sound, the vagaries of the weather, and the contingency of imperial rule at different moments in the Byzantine era.

This book focuses on the Byzantine court in Constantinople and the young females (aged fourteen or younger) who married into the royal and imperial households of Byzantium and medieval Europe to eventually become queens or empresses. Some married within their own culture, while many travelled hundreds of miles from their homes to encounter new customs, languages, and sometimes religion.Covering the period from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, this survey addresses a range of neglected areas of study: the crucial importance of children in society in general; the key responsibilities laid on girls and the vital roles of female children in building alliances; and the promotion of political and religious agendas. It addresses both history and art, with evidence drawn from historical sources, religious foundations, manuscripts, wall paintings, ivories, and metalwork.

Alfred the Great's early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them?This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.