The Medieval Salento
Title | The Medieval Salento PDF eBook |
Author | Linda Safran |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Total Pages | 496 |
Release | 2014-04-18 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0812245547 |
Located in the heel of the Italian boot, the Salento region was home to a diverse population between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Inhabitants spoke Latin, Greek, and various vernaculars, and their houses of worship served sizable congregations of Jews as well as Roman-rite and Orthodox Christians. Yet the Salentines of this period laid claim to a definable local identity that transcended linguistic and religious boundaries. The evidence of their collective culture is embedded in the traces they left behind: wall paintings and inscriptions, graffiti, carved tombstone decorations, belt fittings from graves, and other artifacts reveal a wide range of religious, civic, and domestic practices that helped inhabitants construct and maintain personal, group, and regional identities. The Medieval Salento allows the reader to explore the visual and material culture of a people using a database of over three hundred texts and images, indexed by site. Linda Safran draws from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory to reconstruct medieval Salentine customs of naming, language, appearance, and status. She pays particular attention to Jewish and nonelite residents, whose lives in southern Italy have historically received little scholarly attention. This extraordinarily detailed visual analysis reveals how ethnic and religious identities can remain distinct even as they mingle to become a regional culture.
Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy
Title | Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy PDF eBook |
Author | William Randolph Robins |
Publisher | University of Toronto Press |
Total Pages | 369 |
Release | 2011-01-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1442642726 |
Based on papers presented at the 41st Conference on Editorial Problems held at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., from Nov. 6 - 8th, 2005.
Santa Caterina at Galatina
Title | Santa Caterina at Galatina PDF eBook |
Author | Maria Harvey |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | |
Release | 2019 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Mosaics in the Medieval World
Title | Mosaics in the Medieval World PDF eBook |
Author | Liz James |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 1748 |
Release | 2017-10-05 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1108508596 |
In this book, Liz James offers a comprehensive history of wall mosaics produced in the European and Islamic middle ages. Taking into account a wide range of issues, including style and iconography, technique and material, and function and patronage, she examines mosaics within their historical context. She asks why the mosaic was such a popular medium and considers how mosaics work as historical 'documents' that tell us about attitudes and beliefs in the medieval world. The book is divided into two part. Part I explores the technical aspects of mosaics, including glass production, labour and materials, and costs. In Part II, James provides a chronological history of mosaics, charting the low and high points of mosaic art up until its abrupt end in the late middle ages. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will serve as an essential resource for scholars and students of medieval mosaics.
The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium
Title | The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Edward Stewart |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 468 |
Release | 2022-03-31 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0429633408 |
This volume is the first to focus solely on how specific individuals and groups in Byzantium and its borderlands were defined and distinguished from other individuals and groups from the mid-fourth to the close of the fifteenth century. It gathers chapters from both established and emerging scholars from a wide range of disciplines across history, art, archaeology, and religion to provide an accurate representation of the state of the field both now and in its immediate future. The handbook is divided into four subtopics that examine concepts of group and specific individual identity which have been chosen to provide methodologically sophisticated and multidisciplinary perspectives on specific categories of group and individual identity. The topics are Imperial Identities; Romanitas in the Late Antique Mediterranean; Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others; and Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium. While no single volume could ever provide a comprehensive vision of identities on the vast variety of peoples within Byzantium over nearly a millennium of its history, this handbook represents a milestone in offering a survey of the vibrant surge of scholarship examining the numerous and oft-times fluctuating codes of identity that shaped and transformed Byzantium and its neighbours during the empire’s long life.
Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages
Title | Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Lucy Donkin |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Total Pages | 501 |
Release | 2022-02-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 150175386X |
Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.
Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy
Title | Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy PDF eBook |
Author | James Morton |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | 337 |
Release | 2021-03-04 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0198861141 |
Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy is a historical study of manuscripts containing Byzantine canon law produced after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, exploring how and why the Greek Christians of the region persisted in using them so long after the end of Byzantine rule.