The Medieval Python

Inscriptions convey meaning not just by their contents but also by other means, such as choice of script, location, scale, spatial organisation, letterform, legibility and clarity. The essays in this book consider these visual qualities of inscriptions, ranging across the Mediterranean and the Near East from Spain to Iran and beyond, including Norman Sicily, Islamic North Africa, Byzantium, medieval Italy, Georgia and Armenia. While most essays focus on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, they also look back at Achaemenid Iran and forward to Mughal India. Topics discussed include real and pseudo-writing, multilingual inscriptions, graffiti, writing disguised as images and images disguised as words. From public texts set up on mountainsides or on church and madrasa walls to intimate craftsmen's signatures, barely visible on the undersides of precious objects, the inscriptions discussed in this volume reveal their meanings as textual and visual devices.

The friars represented a remarkable innovation in medieval religious life. Founded in the early 13th century, the Franciscans and Dominicans seemed a perfect solution to the Church's troubles in confr

Who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the past? How did people preserve their recollections and pass them on to the next generation? Did they write them down or did the

“An extraordinary achievement and a fitting final volume in the Medieval Mythography series. It contains stunning, original treatments of the three enormous figures of the later Middle Ages: Dante, Bo

An examination of the portrayal of one of the most important uprisings in the middle ages in subsequent history writing.

"In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of anti-Semitic iconography in the Middle AgesThe straggly beard, the hooked nose, the bag of coins, and gaudy apparel--t

The culture of medieval Spain was anything nut homogeneous. It varied not only through time, with the approach of the Renaissance, but also geographically, with great differences between north and sou

This study, covering the period c.1000 to c.1800 AD, is of the medieval and early modern houses of Bristol, England’s second city in the later middle ages and again in the 18th century.

The Ormesby Psalter is one of the most well-known yet mysterious manuscripts to survive the Middle Ages. Commissioned in the late thirteenth century to celebrate a marriage that never took place, thi

Friars transformed the relationship of the church to laymen by taking religion outside to public and domestic spaces. Mendicant commitment to apostolic poverty bound friars to donors in an exchange of

Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written. Here, Henri Pirenne argues that it was not the invasi

Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn’t until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening ep

The Medieval Salento explores the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in this region between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, showing the ways Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Rom

The Allegory of Love is a landmark study of a powerful and influential medieval conception. C. S. Lewis explores the sentiment called 'courtly love' and the allegorical method within which it developed in literature and thought, from its first flowering in eleventh-century Languedoc through to its transformation and gradual demise at the end of the sixteenth century. Lewis devotes particular attention to the major poems The Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene, and to poets including Chaucer, Gower and Thomas Usk.

As seen from the perspective of 1492, the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was nowhere as dramatic or enduring as in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic. Its Christian kingdoms continued their ad

Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods of

During the middle ages, belief in God was the single more important principle for every person, and the all-powerful church was the most important institution. It is impossible to understand the medie

The recent movement to apply the tenets of ecocriticism to medieval literature has missed Spanish literature until now. Scarborough concentrates on canonical works that have been thoroughly examined f

This two-volume catalogue is the first comprehensive scholarly description of the Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, one of the finest collections in Ame

In The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz, author Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges the dominant perception that medieval Ashkenazic rabbinic scholarship was lacking in intelle

Focusing on the medieval reception of Book Zeta of Aristotle s "Metaphysics," Volume One of this work offers an unprecedented and philosophically oriented study of medieval ontology against the backgr

During the later Middle Ages, new optical theories were introduced that located the power of sight not in the seeing subject, but in the passive object of vision. This shift had a powerful impact not

The Glossa Ordinaria is an extensively annotated Bible that was printed in circa 1841 and has been a rich source of biblical commentary ever since. In the form in which it was originally circulated, t

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Exploring a cross-section of 9th through

The two volumes of The Archaeology of Medieval Europe together comprise th first complete account of Medieval Archaeology across the continent. This ground-breaking set will enable readers to track th

This two-volume set was conceived as a textbook for archaeology courses focusing on that part of Europe that was, or would become, Latin Christian. Among the topics discussed are the Medieval landscap

Bristol cathedral, formerly the abbey of St Augustine, is a remarkable building. To medievalists it is an enigmatic and compelling place, filled with important work of various periods, work that raise

In this painstaking iconography, Kuehn compiles an exhaustive survey of the occurrence of dragons in art and architectural decoration in Turkey, especially Anatolia, and stretching east into Central A