Search results for ""Author Lucy Donkin""

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

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Jerusalem was the object of intense study and devotion throughout the Middle Ages. This collection of essays illuminates ways in which the city was represented by Christians in Western Europe, c. 700-1500. Focusing on maps in manuscripts and early printed books, it also considers views and architectural replicas, and treats depictions of the Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre alongside those of Jerusalem as a whole. Authors draw on new research and a range of disciplinary perspectives to show how such depictions responded to developments in the West, as well as to the shifting political circumstances of Jerusalem and its wider region. One central theme is the relationship between text, image, and manuscript context, including discussion of images as scriptural exegesis and the place of schematic diagrams and plans in the presentation of knowledge. Another is the impact of trends in learning, such as the reception of Jewish scholarship, the move from monastic to university education, and the creation of yet wider audiences through mendicant preaching and the development of printing. The volume also examines the role of changing liturgical and devotional practices, including imagined pilgrimage and the mapping of Jerusalem onto European cities and local landscapes. Finally, it seeks to elucidate how two- and three-dimensional representations of the city both resulted from and prompted processes of mental visualisation. In this way, the volume is conceived as a contribution to manuscript studies, the history of cartography, visual studies, and the history of ideas.

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