History & Art - Böcker

Walk down any street in London and pause for a moment. To your left and right is an array of doors in different styles and colours. Craftsmen across the centuries have sought to impress you with elegant designs. Owners have added their own finishing touches, a hand-painted pattern here, a Shakespeare door knocker there.The front door is the focal point of a building. It draws the eye of the visitor and conveys the status and aspirations of the occupants, enhanced with a brass name plate, perhaps, a heraldic shield or a Latin inscription. Past generations have often left nostalgic traces of their presence: a ring for tying up horses, a boot scraper to clean off mud and dung, a gas lantern. The authors have researched the stories behind the doors, revealing where Dr Johnson wrote his Dictionary, where Oscar Wilde was arrested or where Mrs Simpson visited the Prince of Wales.

Set Me as a Seal Upon Thy Heart: Constructions of Female Sanctity in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period is a collection of essays focusing on saintly women's representations both in Eastern and Western Christianity starting from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The volume discusses two different categories in relation to the conceptualization of female sanctity: the context of their construction in hagiographic sources and the emergent power rendered by their martyrdoms. It offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the present research carried out in the fields of hagiography, history, and art history.

In 2012, CEU Medieval Radio was launched as an effort not only to bring medieval music to everyone but also to make complex, high-quality scholarship more approachable to the general public. Over seventy interviews were recorded for CEU Medieval Radio's program ""Past Perfect!"" with the intent of bridging the gap between ""ivory tower"" academia and the listeners at home. In this volume, sixteen first-rate scholars kindly sat down before the microphone and got the chance to explain their work in a friendly and accessible way. Scholars like Natalie Zemon-Davis and Patrick Geary represent some of the international guests, János Bak and József Laszlovszky discuss amazing new research from Central European University, while Richard Unger and Benedek Láng are part of the CEU Medieval Radio team's personal favorites, talking about topics such as beer, queens, and code-breaking. From Apocalypses to Zooarchaeology, CEU Medieval Radio's long time host, Christopher Mielke, asks the tough questions that have made this program so memorable!

Simultaneously pervasive and evasive, rebellious and oppressive, transgressive and socially specific, humour is a vast and interdisciplinary field of research. Seeking to rethink this quintessentially human expression, this volume is bringing together established and emerging directions of medieval humour research. Each contribution explores different artistic expressions, receptions and functions of humour and identifies a series of problems in researching humour historically. Medieval Humour: Expressions, Receptions and Functions dissects humour in art and thought, literature and drama, society and culture, contributing to a deeper understanding of our cultural past.

Beauty and ugliness, two extremes that intersect through human experience, remain an inexhaustible source of creative inspiration and popular belief. In 'The Beauty of Ugliness and the Ugliness of Beauty: Materializing Monstrosity in the Middle Ages,' the editors aim to redefine the concept of the medieval monster by revisiting issues that have received little attention. This collection of five essays examines various topics, including the stigmatization of disability in clerical circles through canon law decretals, the duality of good and evil in the Latin world, the image of women in marriage contract negotiations, the interpretation of monsters as 'signs' or 'things,' and the evolving interpretations of medieval monsters in post-medieval contexts.

Conocer el tiempo es esencial para la coordinación de los diferentes actores de la sociedad del siglo XXI. Cada uno de nosotros va literalmente atado a un reloj por la muñeca y mirar la hora es un gesto interiorizado e inconsciente. El origen de esta necesidad se remonta a la aparición de los primeros relojes públicos en el siglo XIV, que eran objetos de prestigio y las ciudades competían entre sí por tener el más grande y vistoso. Como accesorio urbano, quedó ligado a la imagen de ciudad y del buen gobierno. Cargado de un complejo valor simbólico, el reloj se utilizo en metáforas de conceptos tan dispares como la 'vanitas', la mecánica del universo o la creación divina. En esta obra se desgrana la historia de los relojes castellanos más destacados desde la segunda mitad del siglo XIV en adelante, estudiando su construcción y los retos técnicos a los que se enfrentaban los relojeros. También se explica cómo cambió la forma de medir el tiempo a raíz de su la introducción así como su impacto cultural en la sociedad castellana.

Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300–1600) offers a nuanced exploration of female authority across a region shaped by dynastic struggles, Ottoman expansion, and shifting political cultures. This volume brings together case studies from royal courts, urban patriciates, monastic milieus, and noble estates, while it also examines how women exercised, negotiated, and represented power in contexts ranging from thirteenth-century Hungary and fourteenth-century Zadar to the aftermath of Mohács and the sixteenth-century Adriatic world. Through analyses of queens, empresses, regents, noblewomen, and urban elites, this collection reveals the diverse forms of agency available to women between 1300 and 1600. Furthermore, it challenges the narratives of female marginality and demonstrates that women were central actors in the making, performance, and preservation of political authority in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Ambiguous Women in Medieval Art brings together the work of seven researchers who, coming from different perspectives, and in some cases different disciplines, approach the question of ambiguity in relation to different case-studies where the represented women do not follow the ever-present dichotomy exemplified by Eve and Mary. In doing so, they demonstrate the complexities of a topic that is as contemporary as it is ancient. Through them, we can get valuable insights on the understanding and experience of gender in the past and the ways in which these experiences have shaped our own understanding of this topic.