Medieval

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Late medieval books served as treasure chests for all kinds of religious keepsakes, notably small metal badges. Devotees sewed these religious badges and pilgrimage souvenirs to the parchment of their treasured devotional books and manuscript illuminators depicted silver and gilt badges in the margins as if they are sewn to the pages. Medieval manuscripts are often admired for their aesthetic qualities, but many of them also served a practical use as instruments for the physical and mental wellbeing of the owners and their families. Manuscripts and incunabula containing metal badges illustrate how the owners used their books, which texts they favored, but also who collected badges and why. The depicted badges that only appear in richly illuminated and expensive manuscripts expand the knowledge of these metal objects that have been passed down in small numbers only. The painted motifs that have a more decorative and structuring role in the book fulfilled different functions than the original badges. 'Silver Saints' discusses the religious life of lay people in the late Middle Ages and the meaning of badges in books, both the painted motifs in beautifully decorated manuscripts and many traces of original badges.

This book provides a series of studies concerning unique medieval texts that can be defined as 'books of knowledge', such as medieval chronicles, bestiaries, or catechetic handbooks. Thus far, scholarship of intellectual history has focused on concepts of knowledge to describe a specific community, or to delimit intellectuals in society. However, the specific textual tool for the transmission of knowledge has been missing. Besides oral tradition, books and other written texts were the only sources of knowledge, and they were thus invaluable in efforts to receive or transfer knowledge. That is one reason why texts that proclaim to introduce a specific field of expertise or promise to present a summary of wisdom were so popular. These texts discussed cosmology, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, history, and other fields. They often did so in an accessible way to maintain the potential to also attract a non-specialised public. The basic form was usually a narrative, chronologically or thematically structured, and clearly ordered to appeal to readers. Books of this kind could be disseminated in dozens or even hundreds of copies, and were often available (by translation or adaptation) in various languages, including the vernacular. In exploring these widely-disseminated and highly popular texts that offered a precise segment of knowledge that could be accessed by readers outside the intellectual and social elite, this volume intends to introduce books of knowledge as a new category within the study of medieval literacy.

This book was presented on the occasion of Christopher de Hamel's sixtieth birthday, and celebrates his many accomplishments during his years at Sotheby's and more recently as the Gaylord Donnelley Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Christopher de Hamel has described more medieval manuscripts than any other living scholar, and the sale catalogues that have come from his hands set new standards of quality and stimulated new generations of collectors, both institutional and private. This book is a tribute to his learning, his industry, imagination, spirit and good fellowship and his capacity to inspire others. Among the contributors are collectors, colleagues, librarians, curators, students of book history and scholars. The contributions are divided under the rubrics Books, The Book Trade and Collectors and Collecting, composing a varied collection of 40 highly interesting articles, including an introduction on Christopher de Hamel and a bibliography of his writings.

Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of visual and verbal communication in medieval medicine, pharmacy, and natural history. Analyzing images in works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, the essays ask: What counts as medical illustration in the Middle Ages? What purposes and audiences do these illustrations serve? How do images of natural objects, observed phenomena, and theoretical concepts amplify texts and convey complex cultural attitudes? Why do we regard some of these images as medieval productions while other exactly contemporary images strike us as typically early modern in character?

Analysing well-known Hebrew medieval poets from a new, refreshing standpoint and focusing on less known authors and periods, this book shows the maturity of the research in this field. Written in English (and French) the articles make the Hebrew texts more easily available to scholars of comparative literature.

This is a full-scale study that explores every aspect of money in Europe and the Middle Ages.