The Mirror of Man's Salvation: Music in Devotional Life About 1500

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Mayer Brown
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
Devotional Life

Composers working during the last quarter of the fifteenth century wrote many more motets than previous composers had done. At any rate, far more have come down to us. This apparent explosion of activity coincided with the founding, reorganization, or revitalization of a number of cathedral or princely chapel choirs. Moreover, the character of the motet as a musical genre also seems to have changed at about the same time. By far the largest number of motets composed before 1475 set texts celebrating the Virgin Mary, or else they were compositions written to celebrate particular political or social occasions.

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old French ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Image Context ◽  
Panel Paintings

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.

scholarly journals The vow of Ivan Crnojevic to the Virgin Mary in Loreto under the shadow of the ottoman conquest

Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Valentina Zivkovic
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Adjustment ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Institutional Organization

This paper looks at the circumstances in which Ivan Crnojevic, a fifteenth-century ruler of Zeta (historic region in present-day Montenegro), made a vow to the Virgin in a famous pilgrimage shrine, the Santa Casa in Loreto (Italy), where he was in exile fleeing another Ottoman offensive. The focus of the paper is on a few issues which need to be re-examined in order to understand Ivan?s vow against a broader background. His act is analyzed in the context of the symbolic role that the Virgin of Loreto played as a powerful antiturca protectress. On the other hand, much attention is paid to the institutional organization of Slavs (Schiavoni) who found refuge in Loreto and nearby towns, which may serve as a basis for a more comprehensive understanding of the process of religious and social adjustment of Orthodox Slav refugees to their new Catholic environment.

A FEAST OF THE ARTS: JOANNA OF CASTILE IN BRUSSELS, 1496

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 213-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn R. Tammen
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Picture Book ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Late Fifteenth

As the only late fifteenth-century picture book devoted to a ‘joyous entry’, inv. 78.D.5 of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett is a source of singular importance, conveying a total of twenty-seventableaux vivantsstaged for Joanna of Castile (‘the Mad’) on the occasion of her entry into Brussels, 15 December 1496, as duchess of Brabant. The present contribution focuses on two tableaux with musical subject matter, consciously displayed at the very beginning and at the very end: Jubal and Tubalcain, the biblical inventors of music, on the one hand, and St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary with Child, enriched by the means of angelic musicians, on the other. Besides iconographic issues, special emphasis is placed on Joanna, her musical inclinations, and the respective institutional background: whereas the St Luke tableau contributes to the corporate identity of Brussels's painters' guild, the biblical inventor of music allows for the self-presentation of the rhetoricians, who were in charge of ‘programming’ the joyous entry and its festive apparatus. In sum, political messages have been musically disguised; uncommon biblical or even extra-biblical subjects become vehicles for a complex layer of meaning that permeates the public space.

Praying against the Turks

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
Devotional Life

This chapter examines the intercessory rites that were written primarily for military help against the Ottomans. The center of gravity here moves eastward to the area between Vienna and Augsburg along the Danube, the region most threatened by the “new Turk.” The ritual texts at the heart of this chapter bespeak men's (and women's) understanding of their relationship to God, offer an interpretation of fifteenth-century events, and reveal an apocalyptic anxiety pinned to the Ottoman specter (different in agency and reception from the apocalyptic expectations of the early crusaders). Above all, these texts suggest the extent to which the ideological constructs underlying the reaction to the Ottomans, which was itself a medieval inheritance, became an integral part of the fabric of early modern devotional life.

Signs and Gestures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss
Keyword(s):  
Central Place ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Visual Symbols ◽  
Devotional Life ◽  
Spanish Explorers ◽  
Religious Iconography

Early contact between native peoples and Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries was mediated by signs and gestures with mixed success. Visual symbols by themselves often conveyed the wrong message or none at all. Religious iconography would occupy a central place in the devotional life of the Mexican church. But from the first encounters with Caribbean islanders through the use of images of the Virgin Mary to Christianize pagan space, to the experiments with pictorial catechisms and sermons illustrated by scenes of heaven and hell, the Spanish learned that visual codes needed to be combined with verbal communication to reveal their meanings.

A Newly Discovered Roll Copy of Peter of Poitier‘s Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi (JRL Gaster MS 2037) and Alexander Nequam on the Immaculate Conception

2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114
Author(s):  
Irene O‘Daly
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into

This article investigates a series of additions made to JRL Gaster MS 2037, a newly identified copy of Peter of Poitier‘s Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Following a detailed description and dating of the manuscript, it investigates two sets of additions to the roll in depth. It establishes that the first motive behind the inclusion of such additions was educative – serving to extend the historic information given in the Compendium, while the second motive was devotional – elevating the status of the Virgin Mary through the enhancement of her genealogical record. Given the fact that the manuscript was produced in the mid-fifteenth century, this focus on the Virgin likely had a polemic purpose, situating the manuscript in the context of debates over the Immaculate Conception, and using Alexander Nequams Expositio super Cantica canticorumto this end. In identifying the sources used, as well as the limits on the compiler imposed by the physical form of the roll, this examination of Gaster MS 2037 offers an insight into the later reception of this popular text.

Nicholas Love as an Ecclesiastical Reformer

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-64
Author(s):  
Michael G. Sargent
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Nicholas Love ◽  
Blessed Virgin Mary ◽  
General Chapter ◽  
John Wyclif

Nicholas Love was the prior of the Carthusian house of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Mount Grace from its incorporation into the Order at the General Chapter of 1410 until shortly before his death, which occurred between 15 March and 28 July, 1423. He is most commonly known to present-day scholarship as the author of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and because of the licensing of the Mirror by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in accordance with the stipulations of the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409, as an agent in the archbishop's campaign against the followers of John Wyclif, and against Wycliffite translation of the scriptures into the vernacular. It would be better, however, to see him as an actor in his own right, a promoter, like his continental European Carthusian confrères, of the reform of the western Church in the fifteenth century.

scholarly journals A contemporary Madonna from the Eastern Cape: Female agency in the Keiskamma Art Project's Rose Altarpiece

Image & Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Schmahmann
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Rose ◽  
The Church

The Keiskamma Art Project, based in Hamburg in the Eastern Cape, produced the Rose Altarpiece in 2005. A work modelled on the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece in the Church of the Dominicans in Colmar, France, that features a panel made by Martin Schongauer in 1473, the Rose Altarpiece substitutes the fifteenth-century rendition of the Virgin Mary in an enclosed garden with a representation of Nokwanda Makubalo, a project member, with a child whom she had adopted. The Rose Altarpiece may best be understood as a "parody" of the Virgin of the Rose Bower altarpiece in the sense that this term is defined by Linda Hutcheon (1985), including her concept that the various likenesses between a representation and its source serve in fact to emphasise their differences from one another. Particularly distinctive in this instance is the difference between the idea of virtuous womanhood conveyed in the two works. Whereas the iconography that informs the Virgin Mary's representation in images such as Schongauer's panel was not grounded in the empowerment of females, the Rose Altarpiece represents women as having agency and capacity to effect social transformations. Made in the context of escalating HIV/AIDS infections, the South African work gives visual form and shape to "feminist ubuntu" in its suggestion of the way in which women have sought to negotiate this health crisis.

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