The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures

The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures
Title The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures PDF eBook
Author
Publisher
Total Pages
Release 2016
Genre Mirrors
ISBN 9782503565644

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This volume examines the intersections between material and metaphorical mirrors in medieval and early modern culture. 0Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation

The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Title The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF eBook
Author Nancy M. Frelick
Publisher Brepols Publishers
Total Pages 0
Release 2016
Genre Mirrors
ISBN 9782503564548

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Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation.

Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Title Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF eBook
Author Barbara Baert
Publisher BRILL
Total Pages 331
Release 2013-07-18
Genre History
ISBN 9004253556

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Discussing medieval and early modern 'disembodied heads' this collection questions the why and how of the primacy of the head in the bodily hierarchy during the premodern period. On the basis of beliefs, mythologies and traditions concerning the head, they come to an ‘cultural anatomy’ of the head.

Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period
Title Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period PDF eBook
Author Maria Gerolemou
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages 296
Release 2020-01-09
Genre History
ISBN 135010129X

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This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine – prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.

Mirror of the World

Mirror of the World
Title Mirror of the World PDF eBook
Author Meg Roland
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 0
Release 2023-01-09
Genre Cartography
ISBN 9780367560584

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With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England.

Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Title Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF eBook
Author Katherine Butler
Publisher Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages 344
Release 2019
Genre Music
ISBN 1783273712

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The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated.

Solitudo

Solitudo
Title Solitudo PDF eBook
Author
Publisher BRILL
Total Pages 602
Release 2018-05-23
Genre Art
ISBN 9004367438

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This book examines the ways in which spaces and places of solitude were conceived of, imagined, and represented in the late medieval and early modern periods. It explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude, which have so far received only scant scholarly attention.