Visualizing Reading Practices in the Late Middle Ages: Images in a Book of Hours Held at Memorial University

Florilegium ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. e34008
Author(s):  
Sébastien Rossignol
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
University Libraries ◽  
Books Of Hours ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Book Of Hours ◽  
The Subject ◽  
French Texts

This article studies the images and the Latin and French texts in a Book of Hours of Premonstratensian Use held at Memorial University Libraries. While the Annunciation scene in Books of Hours has been the subject of numerous studies, the Pentecost scene representing Mary reading to the Apostles has received limited attention in research. The article assesses the meaning of these images and their possible connection to reading practices in late medieval Europe.

scholarly journals Les complexités hagiographiques, liturgiques et iconographiques d'un livre d'Heures régional (McGill, MS 156)

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Kogen
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Book Of Hours ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moyen Age ◽  
New Hypothesis

Le livre d’Heures McGill, MS 156 n’a jamais fait objet d’une étude scientifique exhaustive, hormis quelques notices plaçant son élaboration en Franche-Comté ou en Bourgogne après 1450. En effet, ce manuscrit offre plusieurs difficultés d’identification et d’interprétation. Ainsi, le caractère composite de ses textes liturgiques, tout en pointant vers l’Est de la France, rend opaque la définition de son usage ; son décor, partiellement détérioré et mutilé, ne fut jamais lié à un atelier particulier ; son hagiographie se réfère à un horizon cultuel apparemment hétéroclite. Nous tenterons de relever ces défis grâce à une analyse détaillée des dimensions codicologique, hagiographique, liturgique et artistique de ce manuscrit, laquelle mènera à de nouvelles hypothèses concernant l’usage liturgique, les circonstances de l’élaboration et la datation de ce livre d’Heures. De même, nous proposerons d’associer le décor de ce manuscrit à l’atelier d’un des enlumineurs les plus intéressants de l’Est français de la fin du Moyen Âge. The Book of Hours McGill, MS 156 has never been the subject of an exhaustive scientific study apart from some notices placing its production in Franche-Comté or Burgundy after 1450. In fact, this manuscript includes many challenges of identification and interpretation. While pointing toward the east of France, the composite character of these liturgical texts makes it difficult to define its usage; its illumination, partially deteriorated and mutilated, was never linked to a particular workshop, and its hagiography pertains to a seemingly incongruous religious background. We will attempt to remedy these issues by means of a detailed analysis of the codicological, hagiographical, and artistic dimensions of this manuscript, which will lead to a new hypothesis concerning its liturgical usage, the circumstances of its production, and the date of this Book of Hours. Likewise, we will propose to associate the decoration of this manuscript with the workshop of one of the most interesting illuminators of eastern France during the late Middle Ages.

The Archaeological Collection of the Yalta Historical-Literary Museum

1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-123
Author(s):  
Nataliya G. Novichenkova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fold Increase ◽  
Ww Ii ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Burial Grounds ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Glass Metal

AbstractFounded in 1892 and now containing ca. 11,000 pieces, the Yalta museum draws on pre-Revolutionary private collections, especially of Classical objects obtained locally and abroad, as well as on objects associated with the Mountain and Southern regions of the Crimea, acquired more systematically as a result of archaeological excavations and chance finds in the region. The most important pre-Revolutionary collection, that of Grand Prince Alexander Mikhajlovich, still contains-despite the destruction of WW II-more than 50 amphoras and 500 other ceramic pieces, especially of Archaic Corinthian and Samian ware. The museum houses many finds from pre-War excavations, e.g. from the Balim-Kosh site (ca. 20,000 Neolithic artefacts) and from the Roman legionary fortress at Charax. The creation after WW II of an Archaeological Department of the Museum has led to a 5-fold increase in the size of its collection. This now includes finds from late classical and early medieval burial grounds (Aj-Todor, Alushta, Druzhnoe, Verkhynaya Oreandal, the Gothic necropolis near Goluboj Zaliv, and the Mesolithic complex of Cape of Trinity I. The most important addition has been of more than 5000 objects from the sanctuary excavated in the past decade at the pass of Gurzufskoe Sedlo, which was in use from the Stone Age to the late Middle Ages. Its heyday was 1st cent. B.C.-1st cent. A.D. and from this period date the overwhelming majority of finds of bronze and silver statuettes, glass, metal instruments, ceramics, arms and coins. Such material provides a rare insight into all of the main phases of Crimean history and coins and other objects from the site have formed the subject of a recent exhibition in the museum.

Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-313
Author(s):  
Kathryne Beebe
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Scant Attention

Observant reform is central to the religious, social, cultural, economic, and political changes fundamental to late medieval Europe. However, modern scholars have traditionally devoted scant attention to it, focusing instead on pre-1300 religious movements or the changes of the Reformation. Yet in the past two decades, more work focusing on the ‘Observance Movement’ has begun to remedy that neglect. This chapter highlights the essential questions and issues that drive recent studies, such as property, the involvement of women and the laity, and resistance to reform. It evaluates the current challenges presented by the conceptualization of an emerging field and argues that while greater collaboration between scholars and the production of basic overviews are needed, we should also strive to understand those who professed or embodied Observant ideals not just from the viewpoint of our own labels and concepts, but also to understand them in their own terms.

scholarly journals Religious Poverty, Mendicancy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Urban Spirituality ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

The idea and the ideal of religious poverty exerted a powerful force throughout the Middle Ages. “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff,” Christ had commanded his apostles. He had sternly warned, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for someone who is rich to enter into the kingdom of God.” And he had instructed one of the faithful, who had asked what he needed to do to live the most holy sort of life, “if you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give your money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” Beginning with these biblical injunctions, voluntary poverty, the casting off of wealth and worldly goods for the sake of Christ, dominated much of medieval religious thought. The desire for a more perfect poverty impelled devout men and women to new heights of piety, while disgust with the material wealth of the church fueled reform movements and more radical heresies alike. Often, as so clearly illustrated by the case of the Spiritual Franciscans andfraticelliin the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the lines separating devout believer from condemned heretic shifted and even reversed themselves entirely depending on how one understood the religious call to poverty. Moreover, the Christian ideal of poverty interacted powerfully with and helped to shape many major economic, social, and cultural trends in medieval Europe. As Lester Little demonstrated over two decades ago, for example, developing ideals of religious poverty were deeply intermeshed with the revitalizing European economy of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and did much to shape the emerging urban spirituality of that period.

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conte Du Graal ◽  
Marginal Characters ◽  
French Texts

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

“Let Them Make Him Duke to Rule that People”: TheLaw of the Bavariansand Regime Change in Early Medieval Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-899
Author(s):  
Jonathan Couser
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The early Middle Ages produced a series of law codes for the new “barbarian” kingdoms of Europe, which succeeded the western Roman Empire. These law codes were often inspired by the precedent and sometimes the content of Roman vulgar law as well as the customs of the respective peoples for whom they were written and the interests of their rulers. The making of law could often play a vital role in the stabilization of kingdoms, especially under new rulers. Early medieval secular lawmaking falls into three broad periods: the early royal laws of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries; the interrelated composition of Lombard, south German, and perhaps also early Anglo-Saxon law in the seventh and eighth centuries; and the writing up of the last “ethnic” laws for peoples subject to Charlemagne's empire, such as Frisians and Saxons, in order to accommodate them into a multiethnic empire committed to the principle of personality of the law. The subject of this article, the law of the Bavarians (Lex Baiuvariorum, hereafter abbreviated “Lb”), belongs to the second of these stages. However, scholars have never reached consensus as to the date of its composition nor where it was created. This has inhibited the use of the Lb for any but they most general discussion of Bavarian society. This article will review the evidence for the Lb's date and place of composition, to suggest that we can plausibly identify them more precisely than has been done, and therefore argue that the distinctive features of this text can be tied to specific political needs.

scholarly journals Кавказ в системе культурных связей Евразии в древности и средневековье XXX «Крупновские чтения»

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Р.М. Мунчаев
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Conference ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject

Сборник составлен по материалам, представленным на Международную на- учную конференцию по археологии Северного Кавказа «Кавказ в системе куль- турных связей Евразии в древности и средневековье» – XXX «Крупновские чте- ния». Тематика докладов отражает широкий круг проводимых археологических исследований, охватывающих хронологический диапазон от каменного века до позднего средневековья. The collection was compiled from the materials presented at the International Scientific Conference on the Archeology of the North Caucasus «The Caucasus in the System of Cultural Relations of Eurasia in the ancient time and the Middle Ages» – XXX «Krupnovsky Readings». The subject of the reports reflect a wide range of ongoing archaeological studies covering the chronological range from the Stone Age to the late Middle Ages.

De Gouden Eeuw van de Bourgondisch-Habsburgse Nederlanden

Queeste ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Ann Kelders
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Panel Paintings

Abstract The Royal Library of Belgium (kbr) has opened a new permanent museum showcasing the historical core of its collections: the luxurious manuscript library of the dukes of Burgundy. Centred around a late medieval chapel that is part of kbr’s present-day building, the museum introduces visitors to medieval book production, the historical context of the late medieval Low Countries, and the subject matter of the ducal library. The breadth of the dukes’ (and their wives’!) interests is reflected in the manuscripts that have come down to us, ranging from liturgical books over philosophical treatises to courtly literature. The Museum places late medieval book production squarely in its historical and artistic context. Visitors are not only introduced to the urban culture that provided a fruitful meeting place between artists, craftsmen, and patrons, but also to the broader artistic culture of the late Middle Ages. By presenting the manuscripts in dialogue with other forms of art such as panel paintings and sculpture, the exhibition stresses that artists at times moved between various media (e.g. illumination and painting) and were influenced by iconography in other forms of art.

scholarly journals Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (40) ◽  
pp. 20-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Moran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Direct Method ◽  
First Language ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Subject

Did educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance use Latin routinely (Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin), rather than a regional vernacular, to conduct real-life conversations about ordinary, everyday matters? Were they taught how to do this in the schools of the day with the help of specimen written dialogues (colloquia)? Did their teachers use a Renaissance equivalent of the ‘direct method’, and did they teach Latin in the way that modern foreign languages are taught today? Or was spoken Latin, with a simulacrum of practical relevance to everyday life, a way of ‘bringing the subject to life’, an enjoyable diversion from the standard pedagogical fare (the ‘grammar grind’)? These are the questions that this article addresses. I argue that Latin was not generally used for everyday conversations, and that students were not taught how to conduct them outside the classroom any more than they are today, though spoken Latin was used as a medium for teaching and learning Latin, as it is to some extent today. Since Latin was not the first language of any native speaker, and since it was learned as a language primarily for reading and writing, comparisons with the teaching of modern foreign languages are specious. I also argue that spoken Latin today, as a pedagogical tool, is best kept out of the classroom and used, if it must be used, as a hobby or a pastime. It has limited usefulness as a means of learning Latin to a meaningful level (a level at which the learner can engage with original Latin texts). And the kind of Latin that is spoken in the classroom, an attempt to render a spoken form of Classical Latin, however ‘correct’ it may be grammatically and phonologically (and the grammar and phonology even of Classical Latin changed over time), is most unlikely to have been spoken routinely in the same kind of informal situations by an educated (one who is adept in Classical Latin) native speaker of Latin. In fact, the more ‘correct’ it is, the less likely it is to resemble authentic everyday spoken Latin, even of the educated elite that learned Classical Latin. This is even more the case after Classical Latin came increasingly to be different from the contemporary Latin that anyone spoke, and had increasingly to be learned from grammar books as if it were a second language. What Quintilian says of written Latin may be said of educated spoken Latin too: aliud est Latine, aliud grammatice scribere.

The extent to which the rise in the worship of images in the late Middle Ages was influenced by contemporary theories of vision

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Joby
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
The Invisible

There are several ways whereby medieval theories of vision may have contributed to the rise of practices some saw as idolatrous. A feature of much medieval art is the rise of naturalistic representation. This process was facilitated by the use of linear perspective, based ultimately on Euclid's visual cone. We are told its application led viewers to confuse a representation with its object. The theory of extramission influenced medieval piety profoundly. First, by suggesting that the eye emits a ray and ‘touches’ its object, it led worshippers to believe that seeing the Eucharistic host had a salvific effect. This may have led them to think that seeing images of saints or God had a similar effect. Second, by implying that the subject was active in the process of seeing, it underpinned Augustine's theory of vision, whereby one trained the eye to access the invisible through the visible. However, as he was aware, the untrained eye could linger on physical objects and want to possess them. Finally, there was much debate about how visual information was mediated. Some argued that it was transmitted by intermediate bodies. The parallels between their language and that used by iconophobes to describe the images they rejected are striking and merit further investigation. Others argued that the viewer had direct access to the object. This understanding, when combined with the idea that seeing equates to knowing, may have led worshippers to believe that seeing an image of God meant they might in some sense know him.

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