scholarly journals Word and Image. Polish Medieval and Renaissance Religious Writings in the European Context

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1193-1215
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Agnieszka Kaczor-Scheitler

The article presents the Polish religious writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as an expression of correspondence between the word and image. It also demonstrates the impact of European graphics, including Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, upon Polish religious works of the period (such as the works by Pseudo-Bonaventura in his rendering of Baltazar Opec’s Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta and Jan Sandecki’s Historie biblijne or Rozmyślania dominikańskie. The article also emphasizes that it was Dürer who paved the way for the book illustration, thus turning woodcuts into an art form in their own right. The fifteenth century was a watershed in book culture. As new illustration techniques at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encouraged the growth of illustrated printed books, the codex became obsolete.

Jerusalem was the object of intense study and devotion throughout the Middle Ages. This book illuminates ways in which the city was represented by Christians in Western Europe, from the 600s the 1500s. Focusing on maps in illuminated manuscripts and early printed books, it also considers views and architectural replicas, and treats depictions of the Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre alongside those of Jerusalem as a whole. The chapters draw on new research and a range of disciplinary perspectives to show how such depictions responded to developments in the West, as well as to the shifting political circumstances of Jerusalem and its wider region. One central theme is the relationship between text, image and manuscript context, including discussion of images as scriptural exegesis and the place of schematic diagrams and plans in the presentation of knowledge. Another is the impact of trends in learning, such as the reception of Jewish scholarship, the move from monastic to university education, and the creation of yet wider audiences through mendicant preaching and the development of printing. The book also examines the role of changing liturgical and devotional practices, including imagined pilgrimage and the mapping of Jerusalem onto European cities and local landscapes. Finally, it seeks to elucidate how two- and three-dimensional representations of the city both resulted from and prompted processes of mental visualization. In this way, the book is conceived as a contribution to manuscript studies, the history of cartography, visual studies and the history of ideas.


Author(s):  
James Morton

Chapter 2 offers a historical narrative of Greek Christianity in medieval southern Italy from the era of Byzantine rule in the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century. It begins with the transformation of Byzantine Italy during the era of Iconoclasm (8th–9th centuries) and the Macedonian dynasty (9th–11th centuries). Faced with the external crisis of Islamic invasion and the internal political crises that resulted, the Byzantine authorities placed southern Italy under the patriarchate of Constantinople and established a military government (the katepanikion) over the region, bringing settlers from Greece and Anatolia to reinforce the Greek presence there. It then describes the impact of the Norman invasion of the eleventh century, noting the hostilities that flared between Greek and Latin Christians in southern Italy as a result. Next, the chapter moves on to address the aftermath of the Norman conquest for the Italo-Greeks, discussing the so-called ‘Italo-Greek Renaissance’ of the twelfth century and Norman patronage of Greek ecclesiastical institutions such as the Patiron of Rossano and the Holy Saviour of Messina. It then details the changing circumstances of the thirteenth century, with the demise of the Norman Hauteville dynasty and the arrival of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. It also highlights the significance of the Fourth Crusade and the Fourth Lateran Council as developments that heralded increased papal interference in Italo-Greek affairs. Lastly, the chapter examines the impact of the Angevin conquest and the relegation of the southern Italian Greeks to an ethnic minority within the hierarchy of the Roman Church.


2019 ◽  
pp. 80-106
Author(s):  
Ronald Findlay

This chapter studies the political and economic evolution of trade and international relations of the counties and regions of Asia, both between themselves and the rest of the world, over the past millennium, paying particular attention to the geographic and cultural background; the underlying demographic and economic mechanism of the classical Malthus-Ricardo model; the Pax Mongolica and overland trade along the Silk Roads during the Middle Ages; the European intrusion at the turn of the fifteenth century and the impact of the discovery of the New World; the spread of European imperialism and the rise of nationalism and the achievement of independence. A final section discusses the comparative evolution of Europe and Asia and the question of why the Industrial Revolution did not first occur in Asia.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 450-452
Author(s):  
John M. Jeep

Under the somewhat different, certainly intentionally punning title, Unter Druck: Mitteleuropäische Buchmalerei im Zeitalter Gutenbergs / Under Pressure / Printing […] in the Age of Gutenberg, this volume first appeared in German (Lucerne: Quaternio, 2015) to accompany a series of twelve different exhibitions of largely fifteenth-century book illumination across Central Europe. The exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were held, in part overlapping, from September 2015 – March 2017. They were bookended by exhibits in Vienna and Munich (for the latter, see Bilderwelten. Buchmalerei zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Katalogband zu den Ausstellungen in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek vom 13. April 2016 bis 24. Februar 2017, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger et al. Buchmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts in Mitteleuropa, 3 (Lucerne: Quaternio, 2016). For each of ten somewhat smaller exhibitions a catalogue of uniform size and format was produced; they are, according to the publisher, already out of print. The three editors of the more comprehensive collection, Painting the Page, penned contributions that complement Eberhard König’s study, “Colour for the Black Art,” which traces <?page nr="451"?>the development of ornamentation to the Gutenberg and following printed Bibles. Early printed Bibles, in Latin or in the vernacular, tended only to provide space for initial and marginal, as opposed to full page illumination. These admittedly limited artistic accomplishments often allow for more precise localization of incunabula than other available resources. At the same time, differences and even misunderstandings – such as failure to follow instructions to the illuminator – on occasion lead to fruitful cultural analysis. Finally, printed copies that were never adorned were sometimes in the past thought to be superior, untouched, as it were, by the artistry of the ‘old’ manuscript world. König argues that the study of early printed books, and especially the illuminations they contain, should be celebrated not only as ancillary scholarship, but also as a discipline in its own right.


Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

Our three existing master narratives of the early Reformation in Poland are all over a century old and mutually contradictory, drawing on different sources to serve differing confessional and national/ist agendas. This chapter offers a fresh narrative of the impact of Lutheranism on the Polish composite monarchy to c.1540, synthesizing these older accounts and updating them with new research findings. This is a narrative in three parts: early signs (1517–24), the great Reformation year (1525), and aftershocks (1526–40). The chapter discusses the challenges of measuring ‘Lutheran’ sentiment, sets these Polish-Prussian events clearly in their comparative European context, and considers what implications they might have for that bigger, familiar tale. It stresses the precocity of Sigismund I’s monarchy, which saw the most far-reaching urban and violent Reformation in 1520s Europe (Danzig), a peasant Reformation rising, and Christendom’s first territorial-princely Reformation, in Ducal Prussia.


Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.


2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona Anna Gray

Montrose was one of Scotland's earliest royal burghs, but historians have largely overlooked its parish kirk. A number of fourteenth and fifteenth-century sources indicate that the church of Montrose was an important ecclesiastical centre from an early date. Dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, by the later middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage linked in local tradition with the cult of Saint Boniface of Rosemarkie. This connection with Boniface appears to have been of long standing, and it is argued that the church of Montrose is a plausible candidate for the lost Egglespether, the ‘church of Peter’, associated with the priory of Restenneth. External evidence from England and Iceland appears to identify Montrose as the seat of a bishop, raising the possibility that it may also have been an ultimately unsuccessful rival for Brechin as the episcopal centre for Angus and the Mearns.


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