The second issue of the AHAB comes out under the title of Art and the Sacred. Ritual and religious objects, today classified as art, were once not claimed as such. Clearly, artworks that were intended for religious services were not created on purely aesthetic grounds; they were not intended to be art works per se. Nevertheless, academic practice and discourse has treated them primarily as art even though the word ‘sacred’ is placed before the word ‘art’ in these discourses. In today’s scholarship, the proliferation of anthropological research vividly indicates the tensions that exist between art and what is considered sacred.

The first issue of the new periodical dedicated to art history art in the countries around the Baltic Sea. Co-publishers of the journal: Estonian Academy of Arts, Gdansk University and three Lithuanian institutions: Vilnius Academy of Art, Lithuanian Art Museum, and Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute.

Offering snapshots of mercantile devotion to saints in different regions, this volume is the first to ask explicitly how merchants invoked saints, and why. Despite medieval and modern stereotypes of merchants as godless and avaricious, medieval traders were highly devout – and rightly so. Overseas trade was dangerous, and merchants’ commercial activities were seen as jeopardizing their souls. Merchants turned to saints for protection and succor, identifying those most likely to preserve their goods, families, reputations, and souls. The essays in this collection, written from diverse angles, range across later medieval western Europe, from Spain to Italy to England and the Hanseatic League. They offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the ways that medieval merchants, from petty traders to influential overseas wholesalers, deployed the cults of saints. Three primary themes are addressed: danger, community, and the unity of spiritual and cultural capital. Each of these themes allows the international panel of contributors to demonstrate the significant role of saints in mercantile life. This book is unique in its exploration of saints and commerce, shedding light on the everyday role religion played in medieval life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious history, medieval history, art history, and literature.

The historiography of death, memory, and testamentary practices is already abundant in Western Europe and a fairly large number of extra-European regions. For East-Central Europe there are many short studies in various regional languages, mainly on anthropological/ethnographic aspects of the funeral rituals. This is an edited collection of studies by international scholars on the interlocking themes of attitudes and discourses on death, commemorative practices, and inheritance/testamentary strategies in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. These and other related themes are addressed comparatively and cover areas including Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and areas of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from the perspective of imperial – Ottoman and Habsburg – legacies. Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe contributes to this subject by: linking anthropological/religious/cultural approaches to death to the legal/economic aspects of inheritance/commemoration; adding a still absent East-Central European and Habsburg, Balkan, and Ottoman dimension to the study of death, memorialization, and testaments; and presenting an abundant primary and secondary material in English translation and thus placing research on death and testaments by East-Central and Greek scholars within the international scholarly circuit.

How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was "invented" and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably "Sovietized" in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Even if the new "official" discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.

The conversion of the lands on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea by Germans, Danes and Swedes in the period from 1150 to 1400 represented the last great struggle between Christianity and paganism on the European continent, but for the indigenous peoples of Finland, Livonia, Prussia, Lithuania and Pomerania, it was also a period of wider cultural conflict and transformation. Along with the Christian faith came a new and foreign culture: the German and Scandinavian languages of the crusaders and the Latin of their priests, new names for places, superior military technology, and churches and fortifications built of stone. For newly baptized populations, the acceptance of Christianity encompassed major changes in the organization and practice of political, religious and social life, entailing the acceptance of government by alien elites, of new cultic practices, and of new obligations such as taxes, tithes and military service in the armies of the Christian rulers. At the same time, as the Western conquerors carried their campaigns beyond pagan territory into the principalities of north-western Russia, the Baltic Crusades also developed into a struggle between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This collection of sixteen essays by both established and younger scholars explores the theme of clash of cultures from a variety of perspectives, discussing the nature and ideology of crusading in the medieval Baltic region, the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and the cultural confrontation that accompanied the process of conversion, in subjects as diverse as religious observation, political structures, the practice of warfare, art and music, and perceptions of the landscape.

This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians –those who lived in Byzantium. It shows how a particular type of Byzantine frescoes and icons illustrated the views of Patristic thinkers on the connections between the heavenly and the earthly worlds. The author explores the occurrence, and geographical distribution, of this new type of iconography that manifested itself in representations concerned with the human body, and argues that these were a reaction to docetist ideas. The volume also investigates the diffusion of saints’ cults and demonstrates that this took place on a North-South axis as their veneration began in Byzantium and gradually reached the northern part of Europe, and eventually the entirety of Christendom.