Against a historical backdrop of relic theft and propaganda campaigns waged by two cities vying for patriarchal authority in medieval Venetia, Thomas Dale shows how Romanesque mural painting shaped sacred space and institutional identity. His focus is on the late twelfth-century murals in the crypt of Aquileia Cathedral. The crypt, which contains the relics of Aquileia's founding bishop, Saint Hermagoras, has a historical significance rooted in a legend identifying the saint as a direct disciple of Saint Mark the Evangelist. On this basis, the Carolingians promoted the city's status as patriarchal see of Venetia--a claim that prompted Venice to steal Mark's relics from Alexandria, Egypt, and appropriate Aquileia's history. This book, the first English-language study of the crypt, explores how the paintings complement the relics of Hermagoras in their distinct devotional and political roles. Hermagoras's intercessory power is activated by his orant image displayed over the central aisle within a larger hierarchy of apostles, martyrs, and bishops. The surrounding hagiographic cycle justifies in legalistic fashion Aquileia's patriarchal title and the consecration of the city as locus sanctus of Venetia by the blood of its martyrs. The iconic images in the eastern lunettes present the Virgin's compassio as a pictorial model for the vicarious experience of Christ's Passion. Finally, a fictive curtain over the socle presents allegories of spiritual warfare in the form of exempla from crusades, pilgrimage, and the epic poem Psychomachia, which Dale analyzes as a gloss on the main program.

This book focuses on the comparatively unknown cults of new saints in late-mediaeval Venice. These new saints were near-contemporary citizens who were venerated by their compatriots without official sanction from the papacy. In doing so, the book uncovers a sub-culture of religious expression that has been overlooked in previous scholarship. The study highlights a myriad of hagiographical materials, both visual and textual, created to honour these new saints by members of four different Venetian communities: The Republican government; the monastic orders, mostly Benedictine; the mendicant orders; and local parishes. By scrutinising the hagiographic portraits described in painted vita panels, written vitae, passiones, votive images, sermons and sepulchre monuments, as well as archival and historical resources, the book identifies a specifically Venetian typology of sanctity tied to the idiosyncrasies of the city’s site and history. By focusing explicitly on local typological traits, the book produces an intimate and complex portrait of Venetian society and offers a framework for exploring the lived religious experience of late-mediaeval societies beyond the lagoon. As a result, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Venice, lived religion, hagiography, mediaeval history and visual culture.

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.

The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrepôts and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange.

This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.

Original Scholarly Monograph

This sweeping sociological analysis traces the emergence of intellectual property as a new type of legal property.