Manuscript Production in Florence

2020 ◽  
pp. 831-849
Author(s):  
Xavier van Binnebeke
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The West ◽  
Manuscript Production

Florence was the center of humanist book production, not only in Italy, but more generally in the West. This essay discusses the new style of classical and humanist books produced in fifteenth-century Florence, focusing on script, decoration, major libraries (the Angeli, the badia, San Marco), collectors (the Medici, Parentucelli, Jean Jouffroy, King Alfonso of Naples, Federico da Montefeltro), and the booksellers (Guarducci, Vespasiano).

Observations on the First Book of Lucan

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
Robert J. Getty
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The West ◽  
East And West

The mistranslation by Mr. J. D. Duff of nox ubi sidera condit as ‘where night hides the stars’ is also the interpretation of many commentators from Sulpitius in the last decade of the fifteenth century to Lejay in the last decade of the nineteenth. Lucan is clearly speaking of East and West in 15, of South in 16, and of North in 17–18. How can night be said to hide the stars in the West? Burman saw the difficulty and expressed himself thus: ‘…dubito, an recte dicatur, nox condere sidera, id est, Stellas, quae sole cadente prodeunt, et se spectanda praebent, obscurare et occulere: neque nunc occurrit alius ex veteribus locus, unde ita locutos fuisse Poetas appareat. Nox enim adveniens prodit sidera, praecipitans uero, aurora adveniente, potest recte dici condere, et quasi auferre ex oculis hominum sidera.’ Burman then was tempted to understand sidera as the sun, but could not parallel this use of the plural, although he admitted the use of sidera solis. He cited Ouid. Met. 14, 172–3 caelumque et sidera solis / respicio, as did Haskins, who took the same view with hesitation. Ezra de Clerq van Jever in his Specimen Selectarum Observationum, which he published at Leiden in 1772, definitely understood sidera as the sun, though he could parallel only sidus in the singular from Ouid. A.A. 1, 723–4 aequoris unda / debet et a radiis sideris esse niger. But, it may be said, these Ovidian passages are such that no ambiguity is possible, and are not quite relevant to Lucan's phrase.

Postmedieval Ships and Seafaring in the West

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Hocker
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Maritime Archaeology ◽  
The West ◽  
Ship Construction ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Merchant Ship ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Interest

Postmedieval maritime archaeology is focused more on naval ships than classical or medieval maritime archaeology. Merchant ship archaeology lived for many years in the shadow of naval ships. Ships and seafaring were an essential part of that growth and expansion, connecting remote parts of the world in a global economy. The period after 1400 is characterized by growth and bureaucratization in most of Europe. There were major developments in ship construction after 1400. In the Mediterranean, frame-based design and construction methods reached a stage of sophisticated geometrical precision. Mediterranean techniques began to be adopted along the Atlantic coast. The demographic and economic recovery of the fifteenth century and the globalization of seafaring lead to the use of a wider range of ship sizes. Privateering was a profitable enterprise in wartime. The growth of maritime archaeology was tied directly to popular cultural interest in perceived high points in national histories.

Exodus from the West

1997 ◽  
pp. 4-28
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Ottoman Balkans ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
New Phase

This chapter discusses the mass exodus of Jews from western and central Europe, which began in the later fifteenth century and shifted the focus of European Jewish life to Poland, Lithuania, and the Ottoman Balkans. It was the outcome of a rising tide of anti-Jewish agitation which swept the whole of Europe from Portugal to Brandenburg and from the Netherlands to Sicily. This new and vast process continued relentlessly down to the 1570s, by when the exodus was almost complete. Thus, this new phase, a sequence of expulsions which drastically restricted Jewish life west of Poland, was essentially a product of the dawning modern era — of the age of the Renaissance — rather than of the Middle Ages. Paradoxical though it may seem, this new and more thorough-going rejection of Jews and Judaism coincided with what in other respects represented a dramatic broadening in culture and attitudes, including a deeper Christian involvement in Hebrew and Hebrew literature than had ever been seen previously.

Nizam al-Mulk Remembered

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Neguin Yavari
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The focus in the fifth and final chapter is on the afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk, of his legacy as well as of his representations. By the late fifteenth century, in Timurid Iran, Nizam al-Mulk is already the stuff of legend. In one historian’s estimation, the vizier is a veritable eleventh-century avatar of the martyr par excellence of Shi’i lore Husayn b. ‘Ali (d. 680), and the progenitor of modern Iran. But the story of Nizam al-Mulk does not end with his metamorphosis into a crypto-Shi‘i and a proto-Iranian patriot. In the 2010s, it is Nizam al-Mulk who is the most regularly invoked exemplar of legitimate Islamic governance, exhorting prudence and expedience to guide the Iranian polity through the treacherous waters of nuclear negotiations with the West, and to domesticate outlier and extremist fervor. The Iranian invocation of Nizam al-Mulk differs radically from his depiction in modern Sunni—Arab or Turkish—historiography. That living legacy is the true history of the laureled vizier.

Ritual Brotherhood in Western Medieval Europe

Traditio ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 357-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Gerald Of Wales ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Difference

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.

The amber beads

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 237-244
Author(s):  
Nancy Sandars
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
West Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Ionian Islands ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
Different Shapes ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Lapis Lazuli

It has long been axiomatic that amber is seldom found in Crete, and it is therefore of some interest to be able to record amber beads in two of the Gypsades tombs, Nos. II and VII. In Mycenaean sites on the mainland of Greece amber beads of different shapes are found in great numbers and so frequently as to appear a fairly constant feature of these sites; certainly as much as faience and rather more so than lapis lazuli, an exotic from Asia.In the shaft-graves of both the new and old grave circles at Mycenae amber is plentiful and thereafter at Prosymna in graves dating from Late Helladic I to Late Helladic III; and this is characteristic of all the principal sites, though the number of beads found may be much smaller. Amber is also particularly plentiful on the west coast of the Peloponnese: at Kakovatos in Elis, in tholos A (dated L.H. IIA); at Epano Englianos in western Messenia, in the tholos excavated by Lord William Taylour, close to the palace, and dated to the fifteenth century or earlier, in which about 360 beads were recovered; and in the second tholos recently excavated by Professor Marinatos at Myrsinochorion in the same area. Farther north there was much in the Ionian Islands, particularly in Cephalonia; and a little has been found in Epirus.

The Fifteenth-Century Garner at Leadenhall, London

1989 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Samuel
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Common Market ◽  
The West ◽  
Dual Purpose ◽  
Ground Plan ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The North ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Full Height

Excavation and observations from 1984–6 on the Leadenhall Court site in the City of London revealed elements of the fifteenth-century market building known as ‘The Leadenhall’. The truncated foundations were located in various areas of the site; 177 medieval moulded stones were found reused in later cellar walls; and a fragment of the west wall survived to its full height of 11.17m encased between Victorian buildings. The recording and subsequent study of these features, together with a reassessment of such plans and drawings of the building as have survived, established the ground plan of the quadrangle and chapel, and made possible a complete reconstruction of the north range of this important civic building. The methodology used in the reconstructions is described with particular emphasis upon the analysis of the moulded stones. In conclusion, both the design of the structure and the documentary sources are studied to show how it may have been intended to function.The arcaded ground floor functioned as part of a common market, while the upper floors were intended to be a granary. For convenience, however, this dual-purpose building is referred to as the ‘garner’ throughout the text.

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