Thresholds And Boundaries

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early ‘early modern’ period -- has been much less fully investigated. Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550) addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures), and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts). Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God—and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning. The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early 'early modern' period -- has been much less fully investigated. Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550) addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures), and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts). Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God--and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning. The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending—that is, it looks at ‘endings as endings’. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book’s argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.

From the author of the bestselling Anam Cara comes a beautiful collection of blessings to help readers through both the everyday and the extraordinary events of their lives. John O’Donohue, Irish teacher and poet, has been widely praised for his gift of drawing on Celtic spiritual traditions to create words of inspiration and wisdom for today. In To Bless the Space Between Us, his compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight offers readers comfort and encouragement on their journeys through life. O’Donohue looks at life’s thresholds—getting married, having children, starting a new job—and offers invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory. Most profoundly, however, O’Donohue explains “blessing” as a way of life, as a lens through which the whole world is transformed. O’Donohue awakens readers to timeless truths and shows the power they have to answer contemporary dilemmas and ease us through periods of change.

South Yorkshire and the North Midlands have long been ignored or marginalized in narratives of British Prehistory. In this book, unpublished data is used for the first time in a work of synthesis to reconstruct the prehistory of the earliest communities across the River Don drainage basin.

This book represents a critical yet constructive reappraisal of the role, and the limits, of the boundaries that define and separate disciplines and subfields in the social sciences, as well as the boundaries that divide distinct research traditions or paradigms in the analysis of international life. It provides an integrative and eclectic examination of the virtues of a more flexible division of labor, a division that facilitates more meaningful communication among scholars of different methodological persuasions investigating similar problems in international life. Part One addresses concrete issues in international studies ranging from international bargaining and interdependence to conceptions of collective identity. The essays therein serve as creative models for integrating concepts and analytic logics from different theoretical frameworks rooted in different disciplines. Part Two shifts the focus to more wide-ranging questions in the philosophy of the social sciences and the organization of social science research in order to shed new light on the value and validity of boundaries currently drawn between different schools, sects, disciplines, and subfields. Contributors include Tadashi Anno, Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, Anne L. Clunan, Eileen M. Doherty, Wade L. Huntley, Timothy W. Luke, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Rudra Sil.