Resounding Images

"This study brings together for the first time scholars of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and music to reconstruct the complex intersection between art, architecture and sound in the medieval world. Case studies explore how ambient and programmatic sound, including chant and speech, and its opposite, silence, interacted with objects and the built environment to create the multisensory experiences that characterized medieval life. While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art, architecture, and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography, the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound, space and image in the long Middle Ages."--

This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

The articles republished in this volume are ground-breaking studies that employ a large body of religious figural imagery of Byzantine lead seals ranging from the 6th to the 15th century. A number of the studies present tables, charts and graphs in their analysis of iconographic trends and changing popularity of saintly figures over time. And since many of the seals bear inscriptions that include the names, titles or offices of their owners, information often not given for the patrons of sacred images in other media, these diminutive objects permit an investigation into the social use of sacred imagery through the various sectors of Byzantine culture: the civil, ecclesiastical and military administrations. The religious figural imagery of the lead seals, accompanied by their owners’ identifying inscriptions, offers a means of investigating both the broader visual piety of the Byzantine world and the intimate realm of their owners’ personal devotions. Other studies in the volume are devoted to rare or previously unknown sacred images that demonstrate the value of the iconography of Byzantine lead seals for Byzantine studies in general. This volume includes various articles focusing on sphragistic images of saints and on the religious imagery of Byzantine seals as a means of investigating the personal piety of seal owners, as well as the wider realm of the visual piety and religious devotions of Byzantine culture at all levels. A companion volume includes studies dedicated to the image of Christ, primarily found on imperial seals, various images of the Virgin, and narrative or Christological scenes. (CS1086).

The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower, faster, or starting on a different pitch than what is written. By the end of the century composers had begun tasking singers with solving elaborate puzzles to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. These instructions, which appear by turns unnecessary and confounding, challenge traditional conceptions of music writing that understand notation as an incidental consequence of the desire to record sound. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informedsometimes erroneouslyideas about the premodern era. Drawing on both musical and music-theoretical evidence, this book reframes our understanding of late-medieval musical notation as a system that was innovative, cutting-edge, and dynamicone that could be used to generate music, not just preserve it.

This collection offers for the first time criticism, biographical essays, analysis, translation studies, and reminiscences of Ezra Pound’s extensive interaction with Spain and Spanish culture, from his earliest visits to Spain in 1902 and 1906 and his study of significant Spanish writers to the dedication of the first monument erected anywhere to Pound in the small Spanish village of Medinaceli in 1973. Divided into two sections, Part One: “ON EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD” includes a general introduction on Pound’s lifelong involvement with Spain, together with chapters on Pound’s study of classical Spanish literature, the Spanish dimension in The Cantos, Pound’s contemporary Spanish connections, and his legacy in contemporary Spanish letters. Part Two: “EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD: A READER,” then gathers for the first time Pound’s own writings (postcards, letters, and essays) concerning Spain and Spanish writers, as well as his correspondence with Spanish poets Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ramón Jiménez and with José Vázquez Amaral, the first Spanish translator of The Cantos in its entirety. The volume includes reminiscences by Spanish Novísimos poets, Antonio Colinas and Jaime Siles, written explicitly for this collection. Besides providing a thorough exploration into Pound’s engagement with Spain, this volume pays homage to Pound’s considerable influence on Spanish culture.

Young people with tenuous relationships to schooling and education are an enduring challenge when it comes to addressing social inclusion, yet their experiences remain overlooked in efforts to widen participation in higher education. The Politics of Widening Participation and University Access for Young People examines the existing knowledges and feelings these young people have about higher education, and, through the authors’ empirical research, demonstrates how sustained connections to educational futures can be created for them. Drawing from an empirical study with nearly three hundred young people who have precarious relationships to schooling and live in disadvantaged communities, this book offers new insights into their subjects’ experiences of educational disadvantages. It explains the different ways the university is constructed as impossible, undesirable, or even risky, by young people experiencing educational disadvantage. The book brings their stories into focus to offer new ways of thinking about the educational consequences of alienation from school. It shows how our understanding of the politics of experience of these young people has an important impact on our ability to develop appropriate means through which to engage them in higher education. This book challenges and significantly advances the popular frames for international debate on widening participation and the ethical right to educational participation in contemporary society. As such, it will be of be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, sociology of education, anthropology of education, cultural studies of education, sociology as well as to those concerned by the impact of disadvantage on young people’s understandings of, and aspirations towards, education and attending university.

This analysis examines several recent reimagined science fiction franchises (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, V, and Star Wars) in order to capture how "reboots" work from a fan perspective. Previous encounters with these stories make the reboot experience distinct for fan-viewers, who bring with them a set of expectations and knowledge, often tied to franchise canon that cannot be separated from the new film or television series. Even when elements of the original versions are maintained, memories of them influence the narrative encounter. This book considers reimagined texts from several levels, including the medium, the characters, and the world building, to break down and then explore the reboot experience.

This volume, the first ever of its kind in English, introduces and surveys Greek literature in Byzantium (330 - 1453 CE). In twenty-five chapters composed by leading specialists, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature surveys the immense body of Greek literature produced from the fourth to the fifteenth century CE and advances a nuanced understanding of what "literature" was in Byzantium. This volume is structured in four sections. The first, "Materials, Norms, Codes," presents basic structures for understanding the history of Byzantine literature like language, manuscript book culture, theories of literature, and systems of textual memory. The second, "Forms," deals with the how Byzantine literature works: oral discourse and "text"; storytelling; rhetoric; re-writing; verse; and song. The third section ("Agents") focuses on the creators of Byzantine literature, both its producers and its recipients. The final section, entitled "Translation, Transmission, Edition," surveys the three main ways by which we access Byzantine Greek literature today: translations into other Byzantine languages during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts; and modern printed editions. The volume concludes with an essay that offers a view of the recent past--as well as the likely future--of Byzantine literary studies.