Gothic Manuscripts 1260 1320

The period c. 1260-1320 marks the emergence and the flowering of what has come to be known as the 'courtly style' in French painting, whose dynamic vitality is manifest throughout the region we now call France. By the end of this period, French art had assimilated a rich variety of regional works and styles. New texts had been introduced to a range of patrons, and patterns to be played out in the following centuries were in place. These volumes trace the cultural context of book illustration, its production, owners, and makers in the various regions of France in the last third of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. While the royal, courtly, academic and ecclesiastical patrons were critical to the cultural and artistic production of the capital, books made in provincial centres manifest an independence and originality that can be attributed to fruitful interaction with neighbouring cultures-the linguistic, literary, and artistic traditions of England in the north and west, Navarre, Aragon, the county of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Majorca in the Pyrenean regions, and the Empire along the eastern borders, from the principalities of North Italy and the Alpine regions to Burgundy, Hainaut and Flanders. Ecclesiastical boundaries cut across political divisions, contributing different sets of allegiances that impacted upon book culture in other ways. The Provinces of Reims and Tarantaise included fiefs of Empire, while Narbonne (to 1317) encompassed dioceses in Aragon, and the Provinces of Bordeaux and Tours lay in part in lands held by the English. The religious orders and the universities offered other sets of governing structures and vehicles of influence and reception. Royal and courtly patrons took their place in this period alongside churchmen and women and layfolk from the burgeoning bourgeois class, many of whom are known from ownership notes or inventories. Yet some of the finest books of the period were made for people whose identity remains obscure. Similarly the names of craftsmen-scribes, decorators, illuminators-are often known from their signatures in the books they made or from payments and other records, yet many distinguished works are the products of anonymous creators. These years witnessed an explosition in the range of texts that were deemed worthy of illustraton, extending far beyond the usual liturgical and devotional material to include works of science, medicine, law, philosophy, history and literature in verse and prose, offering a wealth of material for comparative study which is only beginning to be exploited in modern scholarship. This book is organized according to production in regional centres based on stylistic analysis and by comparative tables of the illustration of liturgical and devotional books, and a selection of romances, legal and historical works. Part 1 comprises the Introduction, the Lists of the Producers (scribes, illuminators and decorators) and Patrons whose names are known, followed by a Catalogue of Manuscripts made in the North (Paris and the Province of Sens, Normandy, the Province of Reims). Part 2 contains the Catalogue of Manuscripts made in the East, South-East, South-West, West and Centre, followed by the Comparative Tables and Index of Manuscripts Cited.

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript—a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament—Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

These two volumes collect and update Professor Stones's papers on Arthurian manuscript illustration, one of her continuing passions. These essays explore aspects of the iconography of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes in French verse, the lengthy Lancelot-Grail romance in French prose, and other versions of the chivalrous exploits of King Arthur's knights -- the best-sellers of the Middle Ages. Illustrated copies of these romances survive in huge numbers from the early thirteenth century through the beginnings of print, and were read for their text and their pictures throughout the French-speaking world. Of special interest is the cultural context in which these popular works were made and disseminated, by scribes and artists whose work encompassed all kinds of books, for patrons whose collecting was wide-ranging, including secular books alongside works of liturgical and devotional interest.

This collection of essays examines the various dynamic processes by which texts are preserved, transmitted, and modified in medieval multi-text codices, focusing on the meanings generated by new contexts and the possible reader experiences provoked by novel configurations and material presentation. Containing essays on text collections from many different European countries and in a wide range of medieval languages, this volume sheds new light on common trends and regional differences in the history of book production and reading practices.

This uniquely ambitious history offers an account of all aspects of cultural activity and production throughout the world of Latin Christendom 1200-1450. Beginning with a detailed description of the political and economic circumstances that allowed the 'Gothic Moment' to flourish, the body of the book is both a celebration of the Gothic cultural achievement - in cathedral-building, in manuscript illumination, in chivalric love-romance, in stained glass and in many other arts - and an investigation of its social origins and systems of production.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. This issue features essays on a Parthian stag rhyton and new epigraphic and technical discoveries; gendered devotion and owner portraits in illuminated manuscripts from northern France around 1300; a technical analysis of heraldic devices in a missal from Renaissance Bologna; a new social and collective practice of drawing among French architect pensionnaires of the 1820s and 1830s at Pompeii; artist Malvina Hoffman’s representations of race during her travels to Southeastern Europe as part of her work with the American Yugo-Slav Relief; Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s painting Reverie—The Letter and the small-world sensation as a methodology for global art history; arguments that disprove the attribution of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s sculpture Head with Horns to artist Paul Gauguin; Head with Horns and Gauguin’s creative appropriation of objects; and the unpublished first draft of critic Clement Greenberg’s essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon."

This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.

Jaroslav Folda traces the appropriation of the Byzantine Virgin and Child Hodegetria icon by thirteenth-century Crusader and central Italian painters and explores its transformation by the introduction of chrysography on the figure of the Virgin in the Crusader Levant and in Italy.