Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity written by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 1294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity offers an innovative overview of a period (c. 300-700 CE) that has become increasingly central to scholarly debates over the history of western and Middle Eastern civilizations. This volume covers such pivotal events as the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the origins of Islam, and the early formation of Byzantium and the European Middle Ages. These events are set in the context of widespread literary, artistic, cultural, and religious change during the period. The geographical scope of this Handbook is unparalleled among comparable surveys of Late Antiquity; Arabia, Egypt, Central Asia, and the Balkans all receive dedicated treatments, while the scope extends to the western kingdoms, and North Africa in the West. Furthermore, from economic theory and slavery to Greek and Latin poetry, Syriac and Coptic literature, sites of religious devotion, and many others, this Handbook covers a wide range of topics that will appeal to scholars from a diverse array of disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity engages the perennially valuable questions about the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval, while providing a much-needed touchstone for the study of Late Antiquity itself.

Download or read book The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity written by John Moorhead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past few decades there has been an explosion of interest in the period of late antiquity. Rather than being viewed within a paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire, these centuries have come to be seen as a time of immense creativity and significance in western history. Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity places the history of the papacy in a broader context, by comparing Rome with other major sees to show how it differed from these, evaluating developments beyond Rome which created openings for the extension of papal authority. Closer to home, the book considers the ability of the Roman church to gain access to wealth, retain it in difficult times, and disburse it in ways that enhanced its authority. Author John Moorhead evaluates patterns in the recruitment of popes and what these suggest about the background of those who came to papal office. Structured around a narrative of the papacy’s history from the accession of Leo the Great to the death of Zacharias II, the book does more than tell what happened between these years, applying new approaches in intellectual, cultural, and social history to provide a uniquely deep and holistic study of the period.

Download or read book Divine Inspiration in Byzantium written by Karin Krause and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, “inspiration” encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.

Download or read book Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era C 680 850 written by Leslie Brubaker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 943 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major revisionist survey of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history.

Download or read book The Many Faces of Christ written by Michele Bacci and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanks to current portrayals of Jesus of Nazareth, we are apt to think of him as having long hair and a short beard. But, the holy scriptures do not describe Christ’s physiognomy, and his representations are inconsistent in early Christian and medieval arts. How did this long-haired archetype come to be accepted in the late ninth century as the standard iconography of the Son of God? To answer this question, The Many Faces of Christ examines the complex historical and cultural dynamics underlying the making and final establishment of Christ’s image between late antiquity and the early Renaissance. Taking into account a broad spectrum of iconographic and textual sources, Michele Bacci describes the process of creating Christ’s image against the backdrop of ancient and biblical conceptions of beauty and physicality as indicators of moral, ascetic, or messianic qualities. He investigates the increasingly dominant role played by visual experience in Christian religious practice, which promoted belief in the existence of ancient documents depicting Christ’s appearance, and he shows how this resulted in the shaping of portrait-like images that were said to be true to life. With glances at analogous progressions in the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist traditions, this beautifully illustrated book will be of interest to specialists of Late Antique, Byzantine, and medieval studies, as well as anyone interested in the shifting, controversial conceptions of the historical figure of Jesus Christ.

Download or read book The Face of God written by Paul Badde and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling journalist, historian and author Paul Badde embarks on an exciting quest to discover the truth behind the Holy Face of Manoppello, a relic recently rediscovered and rumored to be the ""veil of Veronica"". Vatican correspondent for German newspaper Die Welt, journalist Paul Badde was intrigued when he heard of a mysterious image in a remote Italian village-an image of a man's face on byssus cloth. Byssus, or sea silk, is a rare and delicate fabric woven from a silky filament produced by mollusks. It is claimed that the fabric is so thin and delicate that it is impossible to paint on-yet the image in Manoppello is clearly visible and, moreover, when laid over the image of the face on the Shroud of Turin forms a perfect match. Experts determined that the cloth of Manoppello is not Veronica's veil, but rather the face cloth layed over the face of Jesus in the tomb. Unlike the Shroud of Turin, which is a ""negative"" of the image, the image on the face cloth is a ""positive"" of the face of Christ. Paul Badde takes the reader along on a thrilling journey of discovery as he travels to research this remarkable relic, tracing the turbulent history of the Holy Face from ancient times up to the historic 2006 visit to Manoppello by Pope Benedict XVI.

Download or read book Grammatology of Images written by Sigrid Weigel and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.

Download or read book Miracles and the Concept of Impossibility The Resurrection and the Shroud of Turin written by Anthony Walsh and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Miracles and the Concept of Impossibility' takes a fresh look at the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus. A miracle is inexplicable by the methods of science and thus deemed impossible. I examine the concept of impossibility with primary reference to David Hume’s notion that there is a boundary of probability beyond which the improbable becomes the impossible, calculated at 10150. Physicists have declared that the universe is inevitable and, at the same time, impossible. Its inevitability is obvious, but the mind-boggling improbability that a biocentric universe exists vastly exceeds the probability boundary. If a miracle is defined as an impossibility, the universe is a miracle. The origin of life is just as miraculously impossible because the probability of dead organic molecules evolving into the organic molecules of life is even less than it is for the existence of the universe. ... r> This book also looks at what the Resurrection means in terms of the atonement and the concepts of hell and universal salvation. This is followed by an examination of the evidence for the Resurrection and historical and archaeological reasons for trusting the New Testament. Secular explanations of the Resurrection are examined and pitted against the Christian account in terms of their explanatory scope and power. The last two chapters look at the “silent witness” to the resurrection, the Shroud of Turin bearing the image of a terribly tortured and crucified man. For 125 years, scientists have been unable to discover how the image was imprinted on the cloth; thus, I conclude that it is the “silent witness” to the Resurrection—the authentic Shroud of Jesus Christ.

Download or read book Seventeenth Century Flemish Garland Paintings written by Susan Merriam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Download or read book A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy written by Lisa Pon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1428, a devastating fire destroyed a schoolhouse in the northern Italian city of Forlì, leaving only a woodcut of the Madonna and Child that had been tacked to the classroom wall. The people of Forlì carried that print - now known as the Madonna of the Fire - into their cathedral, where two centuries later a new chapel was built to enshrine it. In this book, Lisa Pon considers a cascade of moments in the Madonna of the Fire's cultural biography: when ink was impressed onto paper at a now-unknown date; when that sheet was recognized by Forlì's people as miraculous; when it was enshrined in various tabernacles and chapels in the cathedral; when it or one of its copies was - and still is - carried in procession. In doing so, Pon offers an experiment in art historical inquiry that spans more than three centuries of making, remaking, and renewal.

Download or read book Old Saint Peter s Rome written by Rosamond McKitterick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St Peter's Basilica in Rome is arguably the most important church in Western Christendom, and is among the most significant buildings anywhere in the world. However, the church that is visible today is a youthful upstart, only four hundred years old compared to the twelve-hundred-year-old church whose site it occupies. A very small proportion of the original is now extant, entirely covered over by the new basilica, but enough survives to make reconstruction of the first St Peter's possible and much new evidence has been uncovered in the past thirty years. This is the first full study of the older church, from its late antique construction to Renaissance destruction, in its historical context. An international team of historians, art historians, archaeologists and liturgists explores aspects of the basilica's history, from its physical fabric to the activities that took place within its walls and its relationship with the city of Rome.

Download or read book Paul Gauguin written by Dario Gamboni and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French artist Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) once reproached the Impressionists for searching “around the eye and not at the mysterious centre of thought.” But what did he mean by this enigmatic phrase? In this innovative investigation into Gauguin’s art and thought, Dario Gamboni illuminates Gauguin’s quest for this “mysterious centre” and offers a fresh look at the artist’s output in all media—from ceramics and sculptures to prints, paintings, and his large corpus of writings. Foregrounding Gauguin’s conscious use of ambiguity, Gamboni unpacks what the artist called the “language of the listening eye.” Gamboni shows that the interaction between perception, cognition, and imagination was at the core of Gauguin’s work, and he traces a line of continuity in them that has been previously overlooked. Emulating Gauguin’s wide-ranging curiosity with literature, psychology, theology, and the natural sciences—not to mention the whole of art history—this richly illustrated book provides new insight into the life and works of this well-known yet little understood artist.

Download or read book Stone written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”

Download or read book A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm written by Mike Humphreys and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve scholars contextualize and critically examine the key debates about the controversy over icons and their veneration that would fundamentally shape Byzantium and Orthodox Christianity.

Download or read book Armenia Through the Lens of Time written by Federico Alpi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When ancient philosophers meet mediaeval poetry and cinema, you are sure to get a unique perspective on a culture. Encounter Armenia through the Lens of Time for new insights into art, history, literature, language, and religion, penned by leading scholars of all ages.

Download or read book Military History of Late Rome 565 602 written by Ilkka Syvänne and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh analysis of the Roman Empire in the aftermath of the reconquests of Justinian I. It is often claimed that Justinian overstretched the Roman resources, but the analysis in Military History of Late Rome 565-602 proves that view wrong. It demonstrates that the initial troubles were largely the result of the mistakes of Justin II, and that his successors, Tiberius II and Maurice, not only restored its fortunes but were, at the time of Maurice’s death, actually poised to complete the reconquests of Justinian. It was thanks to the reforms of Maurice, which were codified in the military treatise the Strategikon, that the Roman army had achieved a position of relative superiority over all of its enemies—so that by 602 the Romans had decisively defeated the Persians, Slavs, and Avars. These gains, however, were lost when Maurice was murdered in a military mutiny that brought Phocas to power. This volume explains why the Roman army overthrew one of the greatest Roman emperors who ever lived. This was an era of epic battles, so the author also pays particular attention to the period tactics and analyzes all the period battles in great detail. These include such battles as Melitene, Constantia, Sirmium, Nymphius River, Solanchon, Lake Urmiah, Plain of Canzak, Iatrus, and the epic battles of Priscus and Comentiolus in the Balkans. Praise for Military History of Late Rome 425–457 “An outstanding work . . . [the series] gives us a very good picture of the long process that has come to be known as the ‘Fall of Rome.’ This is an invaluable read for anyone with an interest in Late Antiquity.” —The NYMAS Review

Download or read book Portrait of Beatrice written by Fabio Camilletti and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-03-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.