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Book Realms of Ritual

    Book Details:
  • Author : Peter Arnade
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2018-10-18
  • ISBN : 1501720678
  • Pages : 318 pages

Download or read book Realms of Ritual written by Peter Arnade and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While earlier historians have seen the elaborate public rituals of the Burgundian dukes as stagnant forms held over from the chivalric world of the High Middle Ages, Peter Arnade argues that they were a vital theater of power through which the ducal court and the urban centers constantly renegotiated their relationship. This book is the first to apply the combined insights of social, political, and cultural history to an important but little-explored area of medieval and early modern Europe, the Burgundian Netherlands. Realms of Ritual traces the role of ritual in encounters between the dukes of Burgundy (later the Habsburg princes) and the townspeople of Ghent, the most important city in the county of Flanders. Arnade analyzes city-state ceremonies through which Ghent's aldermen, patricians, guildsmen, and the city's military and drama confraternities confronted local power and the growth of the Burgundian state. In the first serious reappraisal of Johan Huizinga's classic work The Waning of the Middle Ages, Arnade confirms Huizinga's vision of a Low Country society rich in public symbols, yet reveals the city-state conflict within which such ritual thrived. He offers a dramatically new perspective on the Northern Renaissance, as well as a historical/anthropological model for the study of urban-state relations.

Book Chivalry and the Perfect Prince

Download or read book Chivalry and the Perfect Prince written by Braden Frieder and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2008-01-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chivalry and the Perfect Prince is a survey of the ceremonial armor crafted for the Spanish Habsburg monarchs of the sixteenth century. It examines notable tournaments and pageantry held at the courts of Charles V and Philip II, and the artworks associated with them. Braden Frieder guides the reader through these tournaments, jousting, and other knightly exercises as part of a larger aristocratic culture that included arms and armor, paintings, tapestries, medals, and sculptures with chivalric themes. Frieder presents Habsburg tournaments in their proper historical context as an extension of imperial politics, drawing comparisons with popular chivalric literature of the period. Frieder’s study utilizes extensive primary source material and contemporary documents, many appearing for the first time in English. Included in this book are eighty-one illustrations of fine art and armor from the sixteenth century, the crescendo of the armorer's art in Europe. For the first time in print, these artworks are treated collectively, as integral parts of aristocratic life and culture during the Renaissance.

Book Paper Palaces

    Book Details:
  • Author : Vaughan Hart
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 1998-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780300075304
  • Pages : 442 pages

Download or read book Paper Palaces written by Vaughan Hart and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays examining early editions of Vitruvius' writings and all the major Renaissance architectural treatises by authors such as Alberti, Di Giorgio, Colonna, Serlio, and Palladio. The authors look at the significance of the treaty in the Renaissance, and trace its decline in the late 17th century.

Book The American Manufactory

    Book Details:
  • Author : Laura Rigal
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2021-03-09
  • ISBN : 0691227748
  • Pages : 268 pages

Download or read book The American Manufactory written by Laura Rigal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history of American federalism argues that nation-building cannot be understood apart from the process of industrialization and the making of the working class in the late-eighteenth-century United States. Citing the coincidental rise of federalism and industrialism, Laura Rigal examines the creations and performances of writers, collectors, engineers, inventors, and illustrators who assembled an early national "world of things," at a time when American craftsmen were transformed into wage laborers and production was rationalized, mechanized, and put to new ideological purposes. American federalism emerges here as a culture of self-making, in forms as various as street parades, magazine writing, painting, autobiography, advertisement, natural history collections, and trials and trial transcripts. Chapters center on the craftsmen who celebrated the Constitution by marching in Philadelphia's Grand Federal Procession of 1788; the autobiographical writings of John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat before Fulton; the exhumation and museum display of the "first American mastodon" by the Peale family of Philadelphia; Joseph Dennie's literary miscellany, the Port Folio; the nine-volume American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson; and finally the autobiography and portrait of Philadelphia locksmith Pat Lyon, who was falsely imprisoned for bank robbery in 1798 but eventually emerged as an icon for the American working man. Rigal demonstrates that federalism is not merely a political movement, or an artifact of language, but a phenomenon of culture: one among many innovations elaborated in the "manufactory" of early American nation-building.

Book The Dangers of Ritual

    Book Details:
  • Author : Philippe Buc
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2021-07-13
  • ISBN : 1400832497
  • Pages : 287 pages

Download or read book The Dangers of Ritual written by Philippe Buc and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to current understandings of medieval history is the concept of political ritual, encompassing events from coronations to funerals, entries into cities, civic games, banquets, hunting, acts of submission or commendation, and more. ''Ritual?'' asks Philippe Buc. In The Dangers of Ritual he boldly argues that the concept shouldn't be so central after all. Modern-day scholars, gently seduced by twentieth-century theories of ritual, often misinterpret medieval documents that ostensibly describe such events, in part because they fail to appreciate the intentions behind them. The book begins with four case studies whose arrangement--backward from texts on tenth-century kingship to fourth-century representations of Christian martyrdom--allows for the line of development to be peeled back layer by layer. It then turns to an analysis of the formation of the intellectual traditions that contemporary historians have employed to interpret medieval documents. Tracing the emergence of the concept of ritual from the Reformation to the mid-twentieth century, Buc highlights the continuities yet also the profound transformations between the early medieval understandings and our own, social-scientific models. Medieval historians will find this book an indispensable resource for its insights into methodological issues crucial to their discipline. As Buc demonstrates, only rigorous attention to the contexts within which authors worked can allow us to reconstruct from medieval documents how ''rituals'' might have functioned. Ultimately, he argues, too swift an application of contemporary models to highly complex textual artifacts blinds us to the specificities of early medieval European political culture.

Book Enter the King

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gordon Kipling
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 1998
  • ISBN : 9780198117612
  • Pages : 422 pages

Download or read book Enter the King written by Gordon Kipling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study describes for the first time the ritual purposes, symbolic vocabulary, and quasi-dramatic form of one late medieval courtly festival, the royal entry. Although the royal entry as a formal ceremony can be traced back as an unbroken tradition from late Classical times through to the Renaissance, Kipling begins where the royal entry adopts pageantry as its essential medium in the late fourteenth century.

Book Recreating Ancient History  Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period

Download or read book Recreating Ancient History Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the question: how did scholars and artists in the early modern period represent, or rather, recreate (Greek and Roman) history? It appears that ancient history was not just studied so as to reconstruct the past, it was used as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. Sixteen authors from various disciplines have studied the works of scholars and artists in different media so as to reveal how they used ancient history as a rich field of raw material, that could be used, recycled and adapted to new needs and purposes. The studies in this volume are important for historians of the early modern period from all disciplines, and for all those interested in the reception of classical antiquity. Contributors include: Maria Berbera, Jan Bloemendal, Anton Boschloo, Jeanine De Landtsheer, Jan L. de Jong, Karl Enenkel, Marc Laureys, Olga van Marion, Alicia Montoya, Mark Morford, Bettina Noak, Sjaak Onderdelinden, Paul Smith, Wilfried Stroh, Francesca Terrenato, Arnoud Visser, and Bart Westerweel. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Book Exorcising our Demons  Magic  Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Download or read book Exorcising our Demons Magic Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe written by Charles Zika and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

Book The Marvel of Maps

    Book Details:
  • Author : Francesca Fiorani
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2005-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780300107272
  • Pages : 368 pages

Download or read book The Marvel of Maps written by Francesca Fiorani and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most beautiful and compelling works of Renaissance art, painted maps adorned the halls and galleries of princely palaces. This book is the first to discuss in detail the three-dimensional display of these painted map cycles and their full meaning in Renaissance culture. Art historian Francesca Fiorani focuses on two of the most significant and marvelous surviving Italian map murals--the Guardaroba Nuova of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII. Both cycles were not only pioneering cartographic enterprises but also powerful political and religious images. Presenting an original interpretation of the interaction between art, science, politics, and religion in Renaissance culture, the book also offers fresh insights into the Medici and papal courts.

Book The Arts of Democracy

    Book Details:
  • Author : Casey Nelson Blake
  • Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Release : 2007
  • ISBN : 9780812240290
  • Pages : 388 pages

Download or read book The Arts of Democracy written by Casey Nelson Blake and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America.

Book Occasions of State

    Book Details:
  • Author : J.R. Mulryne
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2018-12-07
  • ISBN : 1317146972
  • Pages : 317 pages

Download or read book Occasions of State written by J.R. Mulryne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sixth volume in the European Festival Studies series stems from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the European Science Foundation’s PALATIUM project. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, a Europe-wide group of early-career and experienced academics provides a unique account of spectacular occasions of state which influenced the political, social and cultural lives of contemporary societies. International pan-European turbulence associated with post-Reformation religious conflict supplies the context within which the book explores how the period’s rulers and élite families competed for power – in a forecast of today’s divided world.

Book Reconstructing the Roman Republic

Download or read book Reconstructing the Roman Republic written by Karl-J. Hölkeskamp and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

Book The Power and the Glorification

Download or read book The Power and the Glorification written by Jan L. de Jong and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a turbulent time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Power and the Glorification considers how, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the papacy employed the visual arts to help reinforce Catholic power structures. All means of propaganda were deployed to counter the papacy’s eroding authority in the wake of the Great Schism of 1378 and in response to the upheaval surrounding the Protestant Reformation a century later. In the Vatican and elsewhere in Rome, extensive decorative cycles were commissioned to represent the strength of the church and historical justifications for its supreme authority. Replicating the contemporary viewer’s experience is central to De Jong’s approach, and he encourages readers to consider the works through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century eyes. De Jong argues that most visitors would only have had a limited knowledge of the historical events represented in these works, and they would likely have accepted (or been intended to accept) what they saw at face value. With that end in mind, the painters’ advisors did their best to “manipulate” the viewer accordingly, and De Jong discusses their strategies and methods.

Book Power and Image in Early Modern Europe

Download or read book Power and Image in Early Modern Europe written by Jessica Goethals and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are images and spectacles fundamental mediators of power relationships in the West? This book draws upon the language of cultural studies to investigate a contemporary hypothesis in the shifting ideological landscape of early modern Europe. Apparently aesthetic choices by artists may also have been the means to consolidate and subvert institutionalized or non-institutionalized bodies of power. Meanwhile, communities in Europe reacted to the intrinsic power of the image in literature and letters, commenting upon both its use and abuse. Both diachronic and geographic connections are made among disparate but important moments of image making in the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. The influence of Descartes is traced from La Rochefoucauld and the communal spectacles of the Ancien Régime salon, to the Netherlands and Rembrandt’s sketch, Death of the Virgin. Shakespeare bears similar anxieties about Joan of Arc’s transgression of gender boundaries in Henry VI, as does Castiglione’s Courtier when serving the Renaissance Prince. Spenser’s dilemma about the (non)difference between fiction and history resolves itself in the same way as does the Byzantine rejection of iconoclasm. Other articles in the collection examine anomie in Vatican frescoes by Giorgio Vasari, corporeal decay and the supernatural as spectacle on the early modern English stage, and affective self-perception and subjectivity in the scoring of Italian opera. ""[..] not as "just" a conference volume, but [as] an organic group of essays on early modernity. The essays span an impressive number of cultures – from "Byzantium" to England, Italy and Spain to the Netherlands – and theorize the image from a number of disciplinary vantage points. Not surprisingly, art history and theatre are well-represented, but so are music history and literary studies. Most of the essays are short, but sufficiently developed to allow for thoughtful arguments on the status of the visual in early modern culture: on the stage, on the page, and as artistic and musical representation. […] "they [do] deliver fine close readings and leave me sufficiently intrigued to want to return to, or familiarize myself with, the original "texts." I come away from this collection encouraged about the state of graduate studies in Europe and North America." —Jane Tylus, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, New York University "The essays are interdisciplinary and touch upon many themes that lie outside my own field of specialization. I was therefore surprised and pleased to find them not only original and instructive, but also inviting and accessible to the non-specialist. Although they range far with respect to chronology and theoretical suppositions, they are coherently united in their concern for the functioning of the image in the conservation, revision or critique of socio-political power in their respective cultural contexts. I will mention three essays, representing three different fields, as striking examples of disparate images used to consolidate, reconstruct or overthrow the dominant powers of their times. Kathryn Falzareno's essay, "Mother's Milk and Deborah's Sword," is a close reading of Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc in Henry VI. It is a close analysis of the paradoxical status of Joan, Saint of the French, strumpet for the English, Christian warrior maiden, contrasting with Deborah in the Ancient Testament. The dominant and totally unexpected image which brings together the contradictions embodied by Joan are the breasts, the source of nurture in the figure of Mary, but an encumbrance for the mythological amazons who removed one breast to facilitate their use of the bow. Ljubica Ilic's "Echo and Narcissus: Labyrinths of the Self," is an elegant reading of "echo music," the apparently impossible "translation" of the Ovidian story into music and opera. Ovid's story represents the nymph Echo as the auditory equivalent of Narcissus' reflection -- echoing sound as reflecting light. Ovid's echo myth undoubtedly influenced opera by Jacopo Peri (during the time of the Medici) and then, Monteverdi in the musical setting of "Orfeo." Finally, Elissa Auerbach's "Taking Mary's Pulse: Cartesianism and Modernity in Rembrandt's 'Death of the Virgin' " is a brilliant commentary on the Dutch painter's rendering of an ancient theme, the "dormition" of the Virgin, but at the center of the painting is the figure of a physician taking the pulse of her limp hand. The intrusion of this "scientific" element in the ancient iconography of the event of Mary's death is the unmistakeable sign of the wave of modernity that swept over the Netherlands with the popularity of Cartesian philosophy and science." —John Freccero, Professor of Italian and Comp. Lit., NYU

Book Elizabethan Silent Language

Download or read book Elizabethan Silent Language written by Mary E. Hazard and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabethan Silent Language is an anatomy of an alternative or supplementary mode of communication in a culture prized for its literary contributions. Through the use of nonverbal media, Elizabethans coexpressed, enhanced, andøsometimes even subverted the medium of the written or spoken word. Besides written documents and works of art, extant material reveals new referents and deeper meaning for Elizabethan verbal expression. Funeral monuments, jewelry, costume, foodstuffs, protocol, sumptuary laws, portraits, architecture, management of public appearance, absence, and silence?all were forms of a silent language. The main elements of the semantic system of Elizabethan silent language were in many cases those of literal language, with resources in religion, in antiquity as translated through humanist tradition, in custom and law, in the Continental Renaissance, and in Tudor historiography?syntactic elements translated through word and practice and subject to personal inflection. Assumed as given values were the masculine norm, young adulthood, courtly service, discernment of ethical and aesthetic dimensions in all aspects of life, a comprehensive rule of decorum, and the preservation of religious, political, and social hierarchy. Elizabethan Silent Language is a unique book. Although Renaissance scholars have focused their attention on individual components of texts, such as ceremony, costume, architecture, protocol, and portrait, no other source synthesizes these components.