Brepols

In the introduction to his Early Netherlandish Painting, Erwin Panofsky characterised 15th-century European painting with an opposition between the art of Italy and that of Flanders, and significantly, he recalled that in the eyes of a Luther or of a Michelangelo, no other School deserved attention. Six centuries later, Spanish art of this period remains little known outside the Iberian Peninsula. The fact that a large number of the works of art are still kept in their original location surely plays a part in this, but there is also a lasting prejudice that this art is aesthetically and intellectually little exciting. Retables were then the utmost artistic expression. At first sight, they mostly look the same. Because this art seems changeless, its exegesis has been routine and vague.

The Visual Liturgy challenges this situation. Focusing on the Aragonese city of Valencia, then at the height of its pride and glory, it examines a school of painters, which reflects a wider scene, namely the civic and religious preoccupations of a whole culture. Not only does it provide a comprehensive view of current research on Valencian painting, it connects it to the wider context of Valencian piety and tackles the dialectics at work in civic culture: how the monarchy took hold of the municipality; how foreign influences challenged local tradition; how sophisticated altarpieces emerged from the standard stock of artistic production; how, finally, the liturgy prevented ruptures between the religion of the learned and more popular, even at times slightly unorthodox, expressions of the faith.

The Visual Liturgy thus provides a better understanding of 15th-century Spanish art. It sheds important new light on the birth of an artistic school in a context of competing foreign influences, and on the reception of such influences into a radically different culture; finally, it is the first attempt to explore the meaning of Valencian altarpieces with reference to their cultural, spiritual and liturgical context of creation.

In its understated way, this work establishes several theses each one of which, taken separately, could reasonably be considered sensational. First we have the discovery of the autograph of Cassiodorus. In shorthand, as one would expect from a busy man with a strong sense of time management, it testifies that Cassiodorus reviewed (Cassiodorus legi), or verified (perlegi Cassiodorus) a text. The signature occurs in codices that had already, through other considerations, been associated with Vivarium, and becomes in turn a strong criterion for the identification of works not previously associated with the Calabrian foundation. In some manuscripts a hand already known as 'manus prima', can now be identified with those of scribes active at Vivarium. These hands were not simply copying orthodox texts, but critically examining those written by authors of different persuasions: we know now that a codex well-known for its Arian scholia was studied and annotated at Vivarium. Cassiodorus and his team of writers/translators were squirreling away on texts by Church Fathers and heretics, analysing them, taking from them what could be suitable, reading everything. So, Vivarium was a militantly Chalcedonian monastery, but also one where the alternatives, dubbed by modern scholars 'Arian scholia' were duly studied and annotated. These essays by Fabio Troncarelli are an example of 'integral palaeography' in the sense of the definition, by now a classic, of Leonard E. Boyle (Medieval Latin Palaeography, Author's Preface, p. xv). Through the highly specialised technique of demanding discipline, the author succeeds in reconstructing the intellectual climate and the historical setting of Vivarium.

Die Aufgabe der klassischen Variationsrechnung besteht darin, Kurven oder Funktionen zu bestimmen, denen im Vergleich mit anderen eine bestimmte Eigenschaft im größten oder kleinsten Maße zukommt. Die Art des Vergleichens bestimmt dabei den Charakter des Extremums. In dieser Studie wird die Frage untersucht, wie für starke Extrema (in der Norm des C 0) hinreichende Kriterien (sogenannten Feldtheorie) entstanden, entwickelt und eingesetzt worden sind. Diese Untersuchungen sind mit Namen wie Joh. Bernoulli, Jacobi, Weierstraß, Schwarz, Darboux, Hilbert, Kneser, Carathéodory, Lepage und anderen verbunden. Der Zeitraum reicht von Brachistochronenproblem 1696 bis in die Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts, betrachtet werden sowohl einfache als auch mehrdimensionale Variationsprobleme mit mehreren gesuchten Funktionen. Neben den entsprechenden gedruckten Arbeiten sind in die Untersuchungen in einem Maße, wie es in der Geschichte der Variationsrechnung bisher noch nicht erfolgt ist, ungedruckte Quellen wie einschlägige Briefe, Notizbücher, Vorlesungskonzepte, -mitschriften und -ausarbeitungen einbezogen worden, wodurch selbst in manchen Fragen auf die allgemeine Entwicklung der Variationsrechnung neues Licht geworfen wird.

This volume presents the impressive corpus of studies by Robert I. Burns, SJ, on the topic that he has spent a half-century exploring in meticulous detail: the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia. These studies focus on one of Europe’s greatest medieval monarchs, James the Conqueror of Aragon-Catalonia, who made an enduring contribution to Western civilization.

James I ‘the Conqueror’ conquered Mediterranean Spain from Islam during fifty crusading years (1225-1276). Not only did he contend with ‘infidel’ powers around him, he frequently vied with warring Christian neighbours. This book presents a rich depiction of King James’s warrior neighbours, Muslim and Christian, from the king who was his greatest ally and greatest rival, Alfonso X the Learned (1212-1284), to the redoubtable and resourceful al-Azraq, a Muslim adventurer, rebel, and leader of one of the most formidable Islamic countercrusades in Spain. These studies illuminate such themes as cultural conflict and interchange, border tensions and frontier relations, medieval warfare and crusading, piracy, brigandage and reprisals, grievance management, medieval queenship and papal relations, the role of Jews in a pluri-ethnic kingdom, Mudejars and Moriscos, and the warrior heroes of Islam. King James presided over a society more complex than any in Christendom, and these studies unlock the details of this stunning achievement.

Robert I. Burns, SJ, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University), Doc. es Sc. Hist. (Fribourg University, Switzerland), was Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and Director of the Institute of Medieval Mediterranean Spain. He was an elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and of the Hispanic Society of America, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His distinctions include the Haskins gold medal of the Medieval Academy of America, seven national book awards, eight honorary doctorates, and the Order of the Cross of St George.

This volume provides a new contribution to the understanding of twelfth-century monasticism and medieval intellectual culture by exploring the relationship between water and the composition of thought. It provides a fresh insight into twelfth-century monastic philosophies by studying the use of water as an abstract entity in medieval thought to frame and discuss topics such as spirituality, the natural order, knowledge visualization, and metaphysics in various high medieval texts, including Godfrey of Saint-Victor’s Fons Philosophiae, Peter of Celle’s letter corpus, and the Description of Clairvaux.

Through case studies of water in poetry, landscape narrative, and epistolary communication, this work traces the role of water as a uniquely medieval instrument of thought. Theoretical chapters of this book use water to explore the shaping of the medieval metaphor. Further case studies examine the differing and complex uses of water as a metaphor in various monastic texts. Focussing on the changeable power and material properties of water, this volume assesses the significance and deployment of environmental imagery in the composition, narration, and recollection of organized thought within the twelfth-century monastic community.

Christianity is a religion of clothing. To become a priest or a nun is to take the cloth. The Christian liturgy is intimately bound with veiling objects and revealing them. Cloths hide the altar, making it all the more spectacular when it is revealed. Fragments of imported silk cradle the relic, thereby giving identity to the dessicated bone. Much of that silk came from the east, meaning that a material of Islamic origin was a primary signifier of sanctity in Christianity. Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing brings together twelve essays about text and textile, about silk and wool, about the formation of identity through fibre. The essays bring to light hitherto unseen material, and for the first time, establish the function of textiles as a culturally rich way to approach the Middle Ages. Textiles were omnipresent in the medieval church, but have not survived well. To uncover their uses, presence, and meanings in the Middle Ages is to reconsider the period spun, draped, clothed, shrouded, and dressed. Textiles in particular were essential to the performance of devotion and of the liturgy. Brightly dyed cloth was a highly visible maker of meaning. While some aspects of culture have been studied, namely the important tapestry industry, as well as some of the repercussions and activities of cloth guilds, other areas of textile studies in the period are yet to be studied. This book brings an interdisciplinary approach to new material, drawing on art history, anthropology, medieval text history, theology, and gender and performance studies. It makes a compelling miscellany exploring the nature of Christianity in the largely uninvestigated field of text and textile interplay.