Search results for ""Schnell Steiner GmbH, Verlag""

Every booklet in this Series presents an important medieval fortress, a castle, a stately home or a fortified complex in central Europe. The carefully and competently written texts, the ample number of photographs and the many drawings and plans provide both experts and booklovers interested in history and culture with state-of-the-art research on castles. In addition to extraordinary architectural photographs, many specially created drawings illustrate previous forms and buildings, while information boxes analyse various Subjects and provide the main historical data.

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In 1955, Arnold Bode initiated the documenta in Kassel, thus laying the foundation for the internationally important exhibition series of contemporary art. The permanent exhibition "about: documenta" in the Neue Galerie uses artworks from the museum's own collection, visual material and documents to provide an overview of the development of documenta: from the initially one-off art event to the globally active discussion platform. "about: documenta" is a cooperation of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel with documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH and the documenta archiv.

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In this multi-award-winning study, Joanna Olchawa sheds light on the extraordinary utensil type known as aquamanile, watering vessels for the religious hand-washing rite. The detailed research not only on Christian, but also on Islamic works leads to a new view of the bronze utensils of the Middle Ages. Lions, dragons or even women on horseback–figurative watering vessels for the hand-washing rite, which are referred to by the modern term as 'aquamaniles', have been enjoying great public attention for several years. They are admired for their shiny gold bronze, their technically sophisticated production and their unusual shapes. More astonishing is the lack of academic research into the form. With her dissertation, Joanna Olchawa presents basic research on aquamaniles. The catalogue includes detailed studies of the objects not only from West Central Europe and Hungary (12th–13th centuries), but also from the Islamic regions for the first time. Based on this catalogue, Joanna Olchawa approaches questions about the genesis of the form in West Central Europe, the dissemination of knowledge about its production and its significance in Islamic as well as Christian ceremonies and comes to new, surprising results.

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While many sources have been lost, scholars have devoted much time and effort to unearthing and analyzing the surviving material in Roman and European archives and libraries, allowing for a reassessment of Rome as a long-devalued place of university study. The term place of study (Studienort) is also intended to direct our attention beyond university institutions as such to the considerable range of locations for acquiring education that Renaissance Rome offered. The second section of the essay collection is dedicated in particular to a comparative, European view of two of the universities founded in the Holy Roman Empire north of the Alps within the context of a more general educational renewal: Trier and Mainz in 1473 and 1477, respectively. Taking the example of critiques of Rome and the pope, the volume’s closing essay illuminates selected controversies that also point to transalpine processes of perception and transfer on both sides of the Alps. The “national” and confessional discourses that developed above all from the sixteenth century on generated narratives that would have a lasting impact.

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The concept of »transformation« or simply »reshaping« contains the elements of what remains, the conservative, the kernel of what continues, as well as the elements of what changes, the innovative. In the framework of this publication of articles from a conference in 2016 on »Transformations of City and Countryside in the Byzantine Period«, we draw attention to this dichotomy and investigate the social dynamics behind changes in urban and rural life in the Byzantine period that can be detected by archaeology, history and art history. The Byzantine Empire is an ideal subject for studying how social transformation proceeds, what triggers transformation, what factors underlie it and what the processes involved are. Who were the agents of transformation and how did they and their environment change? How flexible were the state or its citizens in handling external and internal pressures of innovation? In what manner and to what extent were the Byzantines able to preserve their identity and the internal cohesion of their empire in the course of these processes of adaptation?

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Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt (Morocco), is one of the most famous cave sites in North Africa. This book presents new findings on the Iberomaurusian hunter-gatherer inhabitants who faced the major challenges of a rapidly changing climate. In this volume we describe archaeological evidence covering the period 23,000 to 12,500 years ago. We examine the nature of environmental and behavioural changes, culminating in a major broadening of the food spectrum at around 15,000 years ago, linked to technological innovation in some aspects but conservatism in others. The cave also came to be used as a substantial human cemetery, enabling us to explore burial practices and recover additional information on diet and lifestyles.

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An introduction to the dispute about religious art conducted in France from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The debate involved not only Catholic and Protestant theologians, but also lay writers who tried to replace dogmatic Christianity with the ‘religion of reason’ invented by the philosophes. A recurrent theme in the majority of statements in this discussion is a contention that religious images must not be perceived as ‘portraits of God’, but that they should be seen merely as ‘separated signs’, detached from their invisible prototype; signs that only remind the faithful about God. French writers favoured restraint in shaping paintings and sculptures, fearing that otherwise works of art might excessively fascinate viewers with their sophisticated appearance, or might too profoundly move the emotions of the faithful. Christianity was for these writers above all a religion of the Word, and they considered images merely as a pastoral aid intended for ‘simpletons’ who either could not read or were unable to grasp the teachings of the catechism or the message of simple homilies. So, these writers approached religious art with reservations. Yielding to the above theoretical assumptions, the makers of religious art in seventeenth-century France achieved a high level of workmanship, characterized by noble simplicity and purity, only to succumb to the banality of schematic solutions in the following century, as they were unwilling to exert themselves in a domain that was becoming increasingly disregarded by the elites.

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Thanks to a fortunate and rare circumstance, throughout the centuries her tomb was never robbed and numerous, precious grave goods survived. In 2001 an unusually rich and filigree assemblage of jewellery was lifted together with the deceased's skeleton in two blocks by a team of Chinese archaeologists in a far-sighted way and brought to the archaeological laboratory in Xi'an. There specialists of the German-Sino co-operation project of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (Mainz) and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology (Xi'an) worked together on the uncovering, documentation and presentation of the finds and contexts. For the first time such a multipartite and fine jewellery assemblage could be analysed and reconstructed within its archaeological context. The result is of impressive singularity. In the publication presented here an interdisciplinary team of academics deal in many individual studies with the complex investigations into the Tang period burial of Li Chui. Apart from archaeology, art and cultural history, as well as sinology, it is not only the scientific restoration and conservation, but also various fields of the natural sciences, which worked together towards one goal: to convey a unique and realistic insight into the world of Li Chui and her times.

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Between 1200 and 750 BC, the Mediterranean world saw the breakdown of Bronze Age civilizations, and the rise of Iron Age cultures. These chronological stages which unfortunately are often taken into consideration separately, have been bridged. The editors’ introduction and a picture of the theoretical framework of Mediterranean studies, are followed by five geographical parts. By commenting on cultural changes and interculturality in the sub-regions of the Mediterranean, new important insights into interregional mobility, connectivity, and decentering phenomena are provided. The vision of the Mediterranean parts as equally important for understanding the significance of contacts represents a special feature of the volume.

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The lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate was one of ancient Babylon’s city gates. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II built it in the 6th century BCE. During the annual New Year festival, the processions of the gods passed through this gate as they entered the city centre. But how did the Babylonians make the glazed bricks used in the gate’s construction? What was the significance of the lions, dragons, and bulls that adorned the gate? How and why did pieces of the gate end up in Berlin, where the Ishtar Gate was reconstructed from thousands of fragments in the 1920s? And how authentic is this reconstruction?

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In recent years, effective Dirac systems have received a lot of attention in solid state physics. These are systems whose dispersion can effectively be described by a Dirac cone, the most prominent examples being graphene and topological insulators (TIs). These systems exhibit intriguing phenomena---for example, TIs can host perfectly transmitted modes or, in conjunction with superconductors, Majorana zero modes. This work deals with superconducting heterostructures of both of the aforementioned materials and examines transport phenomena as well as the formation of sub-gap states in such systems: In the first chapter, superconducting bilayer graphene with a chemisorbed adatom is investigated and the existence of peculiar sub-gap states, so-called Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states, is shown. The second chapter deals with T junction devices made out of three-dimensional (3D) TI nanowires. Together with proximity induced superconductivity in one arm and external magnetic fields, this setup allows for the occurrence of crossed Andreev reflection, including perfect crossed Andreev reflection, and negative nonlocal conductance. In the third chapter, Josephson junctions of 3D TI nanowires are investigated. The origin of unusual, experimentally observed supercurrent oscillations in dependence of a parallel magnetic field is examined in a semiclassical analysis.

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The Cathars: not the largest heretical movement of the Middle Ages, but a modern invention? Richly illustrated and supplemented by the translations of central sources, the book introduces into their complex history the idea that these famous heretics were constructed as an enemy image in the High Middle Ages and then became a myth in modern times. The Cathars are considered the largest heretical movement of the Middle Ages, a kind of counter-church, ultimately destroyed by crusaders and inquisitors. This traditional image of the famous heretics has been fundamentally questioned by international research over the past quarter of a century. Instead of a historical mass phenomenon, the Cathars seem to be a modern myth, essentially based on an enemy image created in the High Middle Ages for the struggle for heresy, developed by historians in the 19th century and now closely linked to the regional identity of today's southern France, which is also marketed as "Cathar country" for tourism. Richly illustrated and supplemented by the translations of central sources, the volume introduces the complex history of this "invention" for the first time. Language of text: German

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Among the German Staufen castles, the architecture and architectural sculpture of the Gelnhausen pfalz, with its Upper Rhine-Alsatian and Southern French forms, is the most artistically noble. However, with the end of the Staufen dynasty and the system of pfalzen in the 13th century, the complex lost its importance. A period of decay set in. What is now only in ruins was once a seat of administration and hosted a farmyard, a place of adjudication, receptions, festivities and imperial diets. Thomas Biller explains the significance of the building, which was used as a seat of government, on the basis of individual building elements and ornaments and sheds light on various reconstruction attempts.

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This study reveals the artistic and cultic multiplicity of arrangements, consisting of archaism and modernization, ahead of the crystallization of the Iconostasis as the »distinctive feature of churches of the Byzantine rite«. Thus it demonstrates a material proof of cultural identity and religious consciousness of the Orthodox populace in an area (Crete) and a period (Venetian rule) that is characterized by both osmosis and conflict. The book researches the Bema display of Cretan churches in a time period spanning from the Byzantine re-conquest of the island (11th century) until the middle of the Venetian dominance (15th century). It focuses on the apparition and distribution of the Templon-barrier, the function of a certain group of frescoes as prostration images and the (partial) establishment of fresco-painted masonry screens at the Orthodox churches of the island, just before the prevalence of the »wooden wall of icons« – known as Iconostasis.

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Based on the research project the project "Metal finds as testimony to the interaction between Greeks and indigenous people in Sicily between the 8th and 5th centuries BC", the nineteen contributions to this volume deal with the interactions between archaeological legacies and identities both from a theoretical-methodological point of view and on the basis of concrete case studies. The focus is on ancient Sicily and its extensive connections and interdependencies, but the geographical framework extends from Asia Minor and Greece via Sicily and Lower Italy to France and Central Europe.

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A comprehensive account of Protestant church building in the early modern period throughout Europe. 26 German- and English-language contributions by renowned experts present a wide range of topics that open up the form and content of church building in its peculiarities as well as theological and socio-political issues. The volume is the result of a workshop that took place in Vienna at the end of 2013 as part of the research project of the same name under the direction of Prof. Dr. Jan Harasimowicz. The contributions show the efforts made by the denominations that emerged from the Reformation movement to create a ‘preaching space’ adapted to their needs. Western European, especially Dutch and French solutions soon found their way to Northern and Central Europe, where they were modified differently as needed. A feature of the post-Reformation era, however, was the emergence of new ways of cultural transfer. An important role was played by the countries in the Baltic Sea region, which, thanks to the Reformation, gained their own cultural identity.

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Behind the intriguing title of this volume is a compilation of many of the papers presented during a session of the 15th Congress of the Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques held in Lisbon in 2006. The session reviewed the current state of research into the spatial analysis of western Eurasian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites. Covering a broad temporal and geographical range, these studies reflect the enormous variety of spatial evidence preserved in the archaeological records of these periods.

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Since Antiquity, the routes of the so-called Silk Road formed an important network for commercial, cultural and technological exchange. Far-reaching and criss-crossing the Asian continent they connected eastern and south-eastern parts of Asia to the Mediterranean world via both maritime and overland routes. Named after the lucrative silk trade, which developed during Han Dynasty, one tends to think of the Silk Road as a one-way road starting in China and ending at the Mediterranean. However, goods, technologies and ideas were travelling in both directions, and glass is an excellent example for a trade-good that arrived in the East from the West. The key developments of glass, which had its origins in the Middle and Near East, mainly took place in the Mediterranean and in the Arab World during Antiquity and Islamic times. Although known in the Far East since at least the Han Dynasty and treated as equivalent to precious stones, glass never played a significant role in Far Eastern cultures. Therefore, glass finds from Far Eastern sites provide evidence for far-reaching trade-relationships and imply cross-fertilization with other cultures. Thus, the contributions to this conference dealt with a geographical area between Western Europe, the Balkans, the Near East, Central Asia, as well as Eastern and Southeastern Asia and covered a chronological range from 200 BC to AD 1000. The conference focused on the one hand on recent results of scientific analyses of glass and on the other hand on archaeological questions. The possibility of interdisciplinary research was one of the focal points of the conference and hence this volume, as well as questions on workshops, raw material, technology and trade. The current state of research on glass along the Silk Road was the subject of an international conference within the scope of the "Sino-German Project on Cultural Heritage Preservation" of the RGZM and the Shaanxi Provincal Institute of Archaeology, hosted in 2008 in Mainz. The book contains the contributions to that conference.

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