Viewing Inscriptions In The Late Antique And Medieval World

This book considers the visual qualities of inscriptions from a cross-cultural perspective focusing on the period from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.

Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful.

A collection of Latin sources that shed light on the changing world of Late Antiquity throughout Western Europe

This edited volume includes a compilation of new approaches to the investigation of inscriptions from different cultural contexts. Innovative research questions about "material text cultures" are examined with reference to Classical Athens, late ancient and Byzantine churches and urban spaces, Hellenistic and Roman cities, and medieval buildings.

Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness.

Thirteen papers on different subjects, focussing on writings and inscriptions in medieval art, explore the faculty of writing to create and determine spaces and to generate the sacred by the display of holy scripture. The subjects range from book illumination over wall painting, mosaics, sculpture, and church interiors to inscriptions on portals and façades.

Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity considers the Greek and Latin texts inscribed in churches and chapels in the late antique Mediterranean (c. 300–800 CE), compares them to similar texts from pagan, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of worship, and explores how they functioned both textually and visually. These texts not only recorded the names and prayers of the faithful, but were powerful verbal and visual statements of cultural values and religious beliefs, conveying meaning through their words as well as through their appearances. In fact, the two were intimately connected. All of these texts – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan – acted visually, embracing their own materiality as mosaic, paint, or carved stone. Colourful and artfully arranged, the inscriptions framed human relationships with the divine, encouraged responses from readers, and made prayers material. In the first in-depth examination of the inscriptions as words and as images, the author reimagines the range of aesthetic, cultural, and religious experiences that were possible in spaces of worship. Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity is essential reading for those interested in Roman, late antique, and Byzantine material and visual culture, inscriptions and other texts, and religious life in the ancient Mediterranean.