scholarly journals Holy Land Pilgrimage and Geography in Fifteenth-Century England

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-139
Author(s):  
Marianne O’Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
English Manuscript

This article discusses a single late-fifteenth-century English manuscript as evidence for an understudied form of “virtual” pilgrimage. Bringing together the techniques of codicological, textual, and cartographic-historical research, the article shows how Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 426 presents a vision of the world profoundly inflected by Holy Land pilgrimage, in which scholarly, mathematical geography is placed in the service of knowledge and understanding of the Holy Land. Indeed, within MS 426, the process of gaining understanding of the world’s geography and of the place of the Holy Land within it becomes a kind of virtual pilgrimage: a form of vicarious wandering that prompts religious contemplation and devotion. The article, which includes discussion of the manuscript’s unique and previously unstudied Jerusalem map, thus reminds us to keep in mind the inadequacy of modern taxonomies for dealing with the messy materialities of medieval texts.

An Illuminated English Guide to Pilgrimage in the Holy Land: Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 357

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Rudy
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Scale Model ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Made In

Few medieval pilgrims' guides were written in English; even fewer were illuminated. This chapter examines Oxford, Queen's College, MS 357, a manuscript made in England in the late fifteenth century, which possesses both qualities. The manuscript contains a variety of texts written in Latin and English including pilgrims' guides, prayers to be said at holy sites in Palestine, travellers' tales, and descriptions of miracles that have taken place at shrines. It is also exuberantly illuminated. The miniatures begin with an Annunciation and end with Christ in Judgment. These two images form the parentheses around the others in the manuscript, which depict sites in the Holy Land. The miniatures and decoration unite the disparate texts, turning them into a scale model of salvation history and providing a prompt to virtual pilgrimage.

Cultural Encounter

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This chapter begins to set out the landscape of Willem Bosman's cultural encounter as it unfolded on the Gold Coast from the late fifteenth century. It highlights a set of fundamental metaphysical questions that, in the broadest sense, framed understandings of life and death among the Akan and their neighbours: Where did mankind come from? How did death come into the world? Where do people go when they die? By beginning the story with Bosman, the intention is not to recapitulate older ideas of the coast of Guinea as a 'white man's grave'. Rather, the chapter suggests that the reality and representation of the African encounter with mortality became entangled with the encounter with European others.

Mega-structures of the Middle Ages: the construction of religious buildings in Europe and Asia,c.1000–1500

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Prak
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modular Design ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Construction Work ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Modern Engineering ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractHow did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I. The matter of Bitu

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Late Fifteenth

In late medieval and early modern times West Africa was one of the principal suppliers of gold to the world bullion market. In this context the Matter of Bitu is one of much importance. Bitu lay on the frontiers of the Malian world and was one of its most flourishing gold marts. So much is clear from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings, both African and European. A review of this body of evidence indicates that the gold trade at Bitu was controlled by the Wangara, who played a central role in organizing trade between the Akan goldfields and the towns of the Western Sudan. It is shown that Bitu cannot be other than Bighu (Begho, Bew, etc.), the abandoned Wangara town lying on the northwestern fringes of the Akan forest country, which is known (from excavation) to have flourished in the relevant period. In the late fifteenth century the Portuguese established posts on the southern shores of the Akan country, so challenging the monopolistic position which the Wangara had hitherto enjoyed in the gold trade. The Portuguese sent envoys to Mali, presumably to negotiate trade agreements. The bid was apparently unsuccessful. The struggle for the Akan trade in the sixteenth century between Portuguese and Malian interests will be treated in the second part of this paper.

Evidence for the Construction of Quires in a Fifteenth-Century English Manuscript

The Library ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-396
Author(s):  
Daniel Wakelin ◽  
Christopher Burlinson
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
English Manuscript

Abstract Recent conservation work on St John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.54, a late-fifteenth-century collection of Middle English carols and lyrics, uncovered connecting ‘bolts’ showing that what had seemed to be separate bifolia were in fact quadrifolia, with further evidence suggesting that the quadrifolia derived from octofolia, or pages created by folding sheets three times and only then cutting them apart. These are the only recorded surviving ‘bolts’ in a manuscript in English, and they offer further evidence for the importance of folding in the construction of quires. The use of folded sheets, cut open at a late stage, also tells us much about the transmission and circulation of the Middle English carols and lyrics in this manuscript.

scholarly journals New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
The World ◽  
Objects Of Knowledge ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities ◽  
Private Collections

From the late fifteenth century to the present day, the New World has been plundered and pilfered for its many ‘treasures’ and ‘wonders’ and as a consequence, many of its natural and cultural productions have been scattered around the world, often hidden in libraries, museums and private collections. New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities gathers a fascinating sampling of these scattered objects in forty richly illustrated essays written by world-leading scholars in the field. We discover the secret, often global, itineraries of such things as Aztec codices and Inca mummies, colonial paintings and indigenous maps, giant tortoises and precious hummingbirds.

Marian texts and themes in an English manuscript: a miscellany in two parts

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Page
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
The World ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
English Manuscript ◽  
English Composers ◽  
Source Of Information

Michael Morrow was an acute reader of medieval literature, and one who knew that every medieval text is a potential source of information for the modern performer and musicologist. A striking example is provided by the 453 chapters of a fifteenth-century anthology now in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. This imposing book appears to be one of the largest collections of Marian miracle-stories in the world. Assembled in the year 1409, perhaps in East Anglia, it contains forty-nine chapters about Marian devotions, liturgies, plainsongs and prayers, among them several texts that were set by English composers: Salve regina (there are ten chapters devoted to this chant alone), Alma redemptoris mater, Gaude flore virginali, Sancta Maria non est tibi similis, Salve sancta parens, Gaude Maria virgo, Ave maris Stella and Gaude virgo mater Christi.

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