Search results for ""author nicholas howe""

Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World contains original essays by five leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, and literature on the ways in which communities were imagined and built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. These essays, which function as case studies, range geographically from Europe to Africa, the Near East to regions of Latin America. While acknowledging major factors that affect community—such as religious belief, imperial expansion, and warfare—these studies focus on precise examples and moments in the pre-modern world. Giles Constable discusses the ways in which monastic vows of service to God served as the basis for communities of monks in Europe in the Middle Ages. Anthony Cutler explores the means by which Byzantine and Islamic communities were created and maintained through the use of visual and textual signs. Annabel Patterson draws on visual images and representations to explore how endangered Catholic communities struggled to survive in Reformation England. Richard Kagan offers a survey of city images and plans in the Hispanic world of Europe and the Americas. Pamela Sheingorn focuses on the attempts of fifteenth-century French theologian Jean Gerson to reinvent forms of religious community at a time of crisis. An introduction by Nicholas Howe places this work in its scholarly context. The five contributors to this volume reveal the inherent complexity and variety of communities within pre-modern Europe. They offer a powerful argument against sweeping generalizations about the ways in which humans form themselves into groups, and encourage further scholarly research into the ways in which communities are formed and shaped.

Read more less

Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World contains original essays by five leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, and literature on the ways in which communities were imagined and built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. These essays, which function as case studies, range geographically from Europe to Africa, the Near East to regions of Latin America. While acknowledging major factors that affect community—such as religious belief, imperial expansion, and warfare—these studies focus on precise examples and moments in the pre-modern world. Giles Constable discusses the ways in which monastic vows of service to God served as the basis for communities of monks in Europe in the Middle Ages. Anthony Cutler explores the means by which Byzantine and Islamic communities were created and maintained through the use of visual and textual signs. Annabel Patterson draws on visual images and representations to explore how endangered Catholic communities struggled to survive in Reformation England. Richard Kagan offers a survey of city images and plans in the Hispanic world of Europe and the Americas. Pamela Sheingorn focuses on the attempts of fifteenth-century French theologian Jean Gerson to reinvent forms of religious community at a time of crisis. An introduction by Nicholas Howe places this work in its scholarly context. The five contributors to this volume reveal the inherent complexity and variety of communities within pre-modern Europe. They offer a powerful argument against sweeping generalizations about the ways in which humans form themselves into groups, and encourage further scholarly research into the ways in which communities are formed and shaped.

Read more less

By enabling the spiritual or ineffable to register as visible and palpable, ceremonies perform the essential cultural work of ensuring continuity of belief and practice across generations. In the process, each ceremony becomes a visual drama with highly scripted acts, movements, and rhythms. Unlike anthropologists in the field, scholars of the medieval and early modern world cannot witness ceremonies—the processions, dramas, rituals, and liturgies—and their choreography, or how they engaged with time and space. Denied the possibility of personal observation, how are historians to understand ceremonies such as a Catholic liturgical procession moving through a medieval town or the triumphal entry of a Renaissance ruler into a subjected city? Fortunately, considerable documentary, visual, and material evidence survives from Europe to help scholars frame necessary questions about pre-modern ceremonies. The essayists in this volume identify and recover the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. Each turns to key issues: the relation between public and private space, the development of fully-realized dramas and rituals from earlier forms, and the semiotic code that ceremonies manifested to their audiences. Their subjects include the Adventus procession at Chartres; Epiphany and Palm Sunday rituals in medieval Moscow; the staged entry of the future Emperor Charles V into Bruges in 1515; and ceremonies in Italian Renaissance cities interpreted through the lens of Renaissance optical theory. What emerges from each essay is a deeper understanding that any ceremony is, finally, an attempt to close the divide between abstract and literal, ideal and actual.

Read more less

With contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field, Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson is a distinguished collection of essays on Old and Middle English literature and textual analysis. Focusing on issues ranging from philology to literary criticism, the essays represent a variety of perspectives in Old and Middle English scholarship. Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson is a worthy tribute to one of the outstanding figures in Old English scholarship in the last quarter of this century.

Read more less