Brepols

This book enriches our understanding of the circumstances and conditions that have made the relation between science and diplomacy a primary concern of the political landscape in the twenty first century. As western liberal democracy and its effects on the environment but also on global war politics are under question, authors in this collective volume rethink the effects that an ahistorical definition of science diplomacy has had on world politics. They document the historicity of the entanglement between, on the one hand, epistemic practices and knowledge production and, on the other, foreign policy strategies and negotiation tactics. The book is the first in a series of what Rentetzi calls 'Diplomatic Studies of Science', a highly inter- and trans- disciplinary field that analyzes science and diplomacy as historically co-produced. It primarily focuses on the entanglements of science and diplomacy after the Second World War, bridging history of science, diplomatic history and international relations

While the multilingualism of the medieval world has been at the forefront of research agendas across medieval studies in recent years, there nonetheless remain many questions to answer. What, for example, were the stakes and consequences of multilingualism for literary culture? And how do these change if we think of multilingualism through cultural, social, artistic, or material lenses? Taking such concerns as their starting point, the essays in this volume address a variety of aspects of medieval literature and literary culture related to multilingualism. They deal with multilingualism in relation to manuscripts, literary contexts, and historical contexts. The chapters gathered together here address considerations that have been overlooked in previous scholarship, and ask where the future of the study of medieval multilingualism lies. Contributions to the volume are grouped thematically, rather than by date or period, in order to draw out comparative perspectives, with the aim of encouraging innovative new approaches to future research in the field.

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts-materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces-and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings-not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.

Interest in the content of this book has developed out of an examination of the prompter who operated in full view of the audience and offered all the lines to the players. In 2001 at Groningen a production of the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play focused on an examination of this convention. Many of the audience responses then were concerned with the figure of the prompter as he was seen to operate simultaneously both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the action of the play. Such a role and its function is fascinating, not only in its own right, but also in relation to how it might inform us about the nature and purpose of presented theatre. The ability of such a figure to move in and out of the action, and thus different realities, characterizes a relationship to the action and the audience. The same fascination exists in relation to roles of the narrator and the expositor. Sometimes these roles are overt ones; sometimes they ‘double up’ with roles of actors, personages or characters. These figures are of pivotal significance in the communication of those plays in which they operate. The purpose of this book is to investigate the nature of these roles in order to identify their influence upon the performance of medieval plays.

In both popular memory and in their own histories, the Normans remain almost synonymous with conquest. In their relatively brief history, some of these Normans left a small duchy in northern France to fight with Empires, conquer kingdoms, and form new ruling dynasties. This book examines the explosive Norman encounters with the medieval Mediterranean, c. 1000-1250. It evaluates new evidence for conquest and communities, and offers new perspectives on the Normans’ many meetings and adventures in history and memory.

The contributions gathered here ask questions of politics, culture, society, and historical writing. How should we characterize the Normans’ many personal, local, and interregional interactions in the Mediterranean? How were they remembered in writing in the years and centuries that followed their incursions? The book questions the idea of conquest as replacement, examining instead how human interactions created new nodes and networks that transformed the medieval Mediterranean. Through studies of the Normans and the communities who encountered them - across Iberia, the eastern Roman Empire, Lombard Italy, Islamic Sicily, and the Great Sea - the book explores macro- and micro-histories of conquest, its strategies and technologies, and how medieval people revised, rewrote, and remembered conquest.

Since the time of Vitruvius, architects have been expected to have a broad knowledge of the arts and sciences. The need for good skills in sketching and working up drawings even led, from the sixteenth century onwards, to fierce debates on the meaning and status of ‘disegno’. While Italy saw the emergence of famous painters who excelled as architects, also in the Southern Netherlands the notion that an architect must also have a mastery of the painter’s art became widespread, owing in part to the dissemination of publications by Sebastiano Serlio and Pieter Coecke van Aelst. In the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens was able to make his own contribution to this discussion as a consequence of his sojourns in Italy (1601-1608). Bringing together distinguished art and architecture historians from Europe and North America, this interdisciplinary approach will shed light on the interrelationship of architecture and painting in the Southern Netherlands.

Piet Lombaerde is professor in theory and history of architecture and urbanism at the University of Antwerp, faculty of design sciences. His research interests cover the history of fortifications (1500-1900), urban history and the history of hydraulics. He is co-editor with Krista De Jonge (KU Leuven) of the series Architectura Moderna (Brepols Publisher) and author of several books on the history and theory of architecture and urban planning.

The quarter-century that has passed since Paul Szarmach’s and Bernard Huppé’s groundbreaking The Old English Homily and its Backgrounds (1978) has seen staggering changes in the field of Anglo-Saxon homiletics. Primary materials have become accessible to scholars in unprecedented levels, whether digitally or through new critical editions, and these have generated in turn a flood of secondary scholarship. The articles in this volume showcase and build on these developments. The first five essays consider various contexts of and infuences on Anglo-Saxon homilies: patristic and early medieval Latin sources, continental homiliaries and preaching practices, traditions of Old Testament interpretation and adaptation, and the liturgical setting of preaching texts. Six studies then turn to the sermons themselves, examining style and rhetoric in the Vercelli homilies, the codicology of the Blickling Book, sanctorale and temporale in the works of Ælfric, and the challenges posed by Wulfstan’s self-referential corpus. Finally, the last entries take us past the Conquest to discuss the re-use of homiletic material in England and its environs from the eleventh to eighteenth century. Together these articles offer medieval scholars a new Old English Homily, one that serves both as an introduction to key figures and issues in the field and as a model of studies for the next quarter-century.

Thomas Percy was the first serious translator of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry into English. He published his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry in London in 1763 and in 1770 published his translation of Mallet's very influential work on early Scandinavian literature and culture as Northern Antiquities (with extensive annotations and additions by Percy himself). In publishing Five Pieces, Percy was influenced by the success of Macpherson's first volume of Ossian poetry (1760) and his own wide-ranging interest in ancient, especially 'gothic' poetry. Five Pieces had a mixed reception and was never republished as a separate work, but reappeared as an appendix to the second edn. of Northern Antiquities. Nevertheless, it was a seminal work in the history of reception and understanding of Old Norse poetry in Britain and it also has more general significance in our understanding of the development of the discipline of Old Norse-Icelandic studies. This work makes available to the modern scholarly community the work of one of the pioneers of the discipline and produces in easily accessible format a text that is currently only available as a rare book. The study comprises a facsimile of the 1763 edition, with facing-page notes to allow the modern reader to situate Percy's work in its intellectual context, together with an introduction on Percy himself, his work on Old Norse-Icelandic studies, and the contemporary context of the reception of Old Norse poetry in Britain (and to some extent in the rest of Europe). In addition, this study publishes eight other poetic translations (one from Old English and the others from Old Icelandic) that Percy completed about the same time as the translations now in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, but did not then publish, due to the restrictions of contemporary tolerance for demanding or difficult 'ancient' poetry. This publication reveals his full range as a translator for the first time.

The annual colloquium of the SIEPM in Freiburg, Germany, was groundbreaking in that it featured a more or less equal number of talks on all three medieval cultures that contributed to the formation of Western philosophical thought: the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Indeed, the subject of the colloquium, ‘The Origin and Nature of Language and Logic in Medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Thought’, lent itself to such a cross-cultural approach. In all these traditions, partially inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, partially by other sources, language and thought, semantics and logic occupied a central place. As a result, the chapters of the present volume effortlessly traverse philosophical, religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and thus in many respects open up new perspectives. It should not be surprising if readers delight in chapters of a philosophical tradition outside of their own as much as they do in those in their area of expertise.

Among the topics discussed are the significance of language for logic; the origin of language: inspiration or convention; imposition or coinage; the existence of an original language; the correctness of language; divine discourse; animal language; the meaningfulness of animal sounds; music as communication; the scope of dialectical disputation; the relation between rhetoric and demonstration; the place of logic and rhetoric in theology; the limits of human knowledge; the meaning of categories; the problem of metaphysical entailment; the need to disentangle the metaphysical implications of language; the quantification of predicates; and the significance of linguistic custom for judging logical propositions.

The Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, commonly known as the Cinquantenaire, possess a collection of about 1200 pieces of Islamic Art (not including some 1.000 potsherds from Fustat in Egypt). They originate from countries located between Spain and India, and date from the 7th to the beginning of the 20th century. The emphasis is on silk textiles. This we owe to Isabella Errera (Florence 1869 - Brussels 1929), who collected, published and eventually donated or bequeathed no less than 764 textiles to the museum, about three hundred of which are Islamic. The 43 Ottoman items in this collection form the subject of this study.

Except two, for which we cannot be certain, these Ottoman textiles were woven in the major metropolitan weaving centres of the Ottoman Empire, namely Bursa, Istanbul and their surroundings. They all date from the period between the second half of the 15th and the early 19th century. Two types of weaves are represented: velvets and kemha or lampas fabrics. One of the velvets, of which the collection numbers 25 examples, is an important çatma, probably the earliest preserved in the world. Six kemha or lampas fabrics, of which we possess 16 specimens, bear inscriptions; the others are decorated with various patterns. The third main type of Ottoman weave, the serâser or cloth of gold and silver, which is rare in Western collections, is not represented. Finally, the collection contains two silks in a distinctive weave, an extended tabby, of which one is a military banner. Although these fall slightly outside of the otherwise homogeneous group, they where included in this study because they were definitely produced within the Ottoman realm.

This catalogue is the result of a collaboration between different specialists. The technological study of the textiles was executed by Daniël De Jonghe, textile engineer, and Chris Verhecken-Lammens, both independent scientific collaborators at the Royal Museums of Art and History. Mieke Van Raemdonck, curator of the Islamic Collection and editor of the present publication, described the textiles and traced their origin. For the natural dye analysis and conservation treatment, the museum appealed to the Royal Institute for the Cultural Heritage, located in the same Cinquantenaire-complex. The study and report of the natural dyes were performed by Ina Vanden Berghe, textile engineer, and Dr Jan Wouters, chemist, Head of the Laboratory of Materials and Techniques, with the practical assistance of Marie-Christine Maquoi, lab technician. The conservation treatment took place under the responsibility of Vera Vereecken, Head of the Textile workshop, who also wrote the reports and comments on this aspect.

The aim of this catalogue is to present a status quaestionis of knowledge that was gathered the past ten years regarding this group of silks and to put it at the disposal of other museum curators and researchers. Since the scrutiny of the weaving technology and of the natural dyes can lead to a better understanding of the silk industry, special focus is laid on these aspects. They may indeed yield concrete information allowing us to delimit groups of textiles and - why not - workshops and production centres.