Ritual Gender And Narrative In Late Medieval Italy

Ritual, Gender, and Narrative in Late Medieval Italy is the first English-language study of the baptistery of Padua and its extraordinarily rich fresco program, which opens with Genesis and closes with the Apocalypse. Remarkably, when the building was refashioned and frescoed by Giusto de' Menabuoi in the 1370s, it was a woman, Fina Buzzacarini, who funded the enterprise. In late medieval Italy, baptisteries were potent symbols of civic identity, solidarity, and pride, and towns spent lavishly on them - but no other baptistery was so radically reworked at the behest of a woman. Remarkably, too, though the building continued to function as Padua's baptismal church, the renovations transformed it into the mausoleum of Fina Buzzacarini and her family. This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, using close visual analysis to argue that to a surprising degree, Fina exerted control over the images. The author argues too that ritual is equally important in understanding the frescoes: that in multiple ways that have rarely been considered, the images respond to and participate in the ritual enacted in this sacred space. The prayers intoned at the font, the actions of the officiant, the hymns chanted in procession and inside the baptistery, and even details of the rite all find visual echoes on the baptistery's walls. Ultimately, gender and ritual intersect in the multilayered frescoes of the Padua baptistery.

In this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.

This book, edited by Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone, follows the publication of two other books dedicated to Daniele Barbaro and published by Springer: Daniele Barbaro's Vitruvius of 1567 (Kim Williams, 2019) and Daniele Barbaro's Perspective of 1568 (Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone, 2021). Therefore, it can be considered another installment in a series that has deepened the scientific treatises published by Daniele Barbaro. Due to the numerous scientific interests that Barbaro matured in the years he spent at the University of Padua, we have invited experts in these topics to discuss Barbaro in relation to his training. In particular, the book opens with the essays of the two editors to frame its general theme in relation to mathematics. Cosimo Monteleone addressed the relationship between Barbaro's perspective theory with Euclid's optics, the Aristotelian process of knowledge and the ophthalmological discoveries of the University of Padova in the Renaissance. Kim Williams underlines how Barbaro's arithmetic and geometry established `the most certain sciences' and set the base of the `primary sciences'. A series of essays concerning Barbaro's training at the University of Padua complete the theoretical framework analyzed by the two editors. These studies embrace the following subjects: mathematical instruments (Filippo Camerota), astronomy and sundials (Cristiano Guarneri), mathematics, geometry and polyhedral (Vera Viana), perspective and anamorphosis (Agostino De Rosa), botany and the foundation of the botanical garden (Stefano Zaggia), Vitruvius' architecture (Ekaterina Igoshina, Ilya Anikyev, Anna Markova) and Aristotelianism (Branko Mitrović). A foreword by Xavier Salomon sets the stage for this book, outlining the innovations that Barbaro brought to scientific knowledge. Barbaro's scientific efforts are sometimes dismissed in recent studies as a compilation of known principles. The aim of this present book is to reveal the truly innovative nature of Barbaro's experiments and results and restore him to his rightful place as an original scholar of Renaissance.

English translations of the author's most important articles.

This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.

Examining the history of altar decorations, this study of the visual liturgy grapples with many of the previous theoretical frameworks to reveal the evolution and function of these ritual objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book uses traditional art-historical methodologies and media technology theory to reexamine ritual objects. Previous analysis has not considered the in-between nature of these objects as deliberate and virtual conduits to the divine. The liturgy, the altarpiece, the altar environment, relics, and their reliquaries are media. In a series of case studies, several objects tell a different story about culture and society in medieval Europe. In essence, they reveal that media and media technologies generate and modulate the individual and collective structure of feelings of sacredness among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, early modern studies, and architectural history.

Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted. It describes women's progress toward power as a push-pull movement, showing how practices and institutions that ostensibly enabled women in the Middle Ages could sometimes erode their authority as well.This book provides a much-needed theoretical and historical reassessment of medieval women's power. It updates the conclusions from the editors' essential volume on that topic, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, which was published in 1988 and altered the prevailing view of female subservience by correcting the nearly ubiquitous equation of "power" with "public authority." Most scholars now accept a broader definition of power based on the interactions between men and women.In their Introduction, Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski survey the directions in which the study of medieval women's agency has developed in the past fifteen years. Like its predecessor, this volume is richly interdisciplinary. It contains essays by highly regarded scholars of history, literature, and art history, and features seventeen black-and-white illustrations and two maps.

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.