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The textuality and materiality of documents are an essential part of their communicative role. Medieval writing, as part of the interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules to ensure the legibility and understanding of a text and its connotations. This volume provides new insights into how different kinds of rules were designed, established, and followed in the shaping of medieval documents, as a means of enabling complex and subtle communicational phenomena. Because they provide a perspective for approaching the material they are supposed to organize, these rules (or the postulation of their use) provide powerful analytical tools for structural studies into given corpora of documents.

Originating in talks given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2012, the twenty papers in this collection offer a precise, in-depth analysis of a variety of medieval scripts, including books, charters, accounts, and epigraphic documents. In doing so, they integrate current developments in palaeography, diplomatics, and codicology in their traditional methodological set, as well as aspects of the digital humanities, and they bridge the gap between the so-called ‘auxiliary sciences of history’ and the field of communication studies. They illustrate different possibilities for exploring how the formal aspects of scripts took their place in the construction of effective communication structures.

Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation.

In the most recent years a group of young researchers has given a new impetus to the study of Book Illumination in Portugal, promoting national and international research that focuses on understanding illuminated manuscripts in both their aesthetics and material dimensions, as well as the relationship between text and image. The developement of interdisciplinary research thanks, in part, to strategic partnerships between the Humanities and the domain of Exact Science has been established to address new issues raised by the need of more comprehensive and wide studies around the illuminated manuscript.

This volume gives thus light to the most important contributions of these new approaches, including new technical studies of pigments in manuscripts of the fund of the Monastery of Alcobaça and three copies of Hugh of Fouilloy’s Book of Birds, inquiries concerning a mismounted mappamundiin the Lorvão Beatus, a study of two southern French legal manuscripts, the image of the artist in astrological iconography, problems raised by two books of hours in the National Library of Portugal, and penwork decoration in fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscripts.

The authors of the volume belong to three Portuguese academic institutions. Maria Adelaide Miranda, Alicia Miguélez Cavero, Catarina Fernandes Barreira, Maria Alessandra Bilotta, Ana Lemos and Luís Ribeiro are integrated members of the Institute of Medieval Studies of the Nova University of Lisbon; Maria João Melo, Rita Castro, Conceição Casanova, Vania Solange Muralhas e Rita Araújo are members of the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the Nova University of Lisbon; Luís Urbano Afonso e Tiago Moita are members of the Institute of History of Art of the University of Lisbon.

Le présent volume se propose, à travers des approches comparatives appliquées à un corpus de textes d’histoire appartenant à des périodes et des milieux différents, d’aboutir à une compréhension plus approfondie de l’infl uence de la typologie et des images bibliques sur l’historiographie du Moyen Âge: historiae, chronica, gesta, annales, vitae, epistolae, etc. Il s’agit, en effet, d’un aspect souvent négligé de l’historiographie médiévale, en raison, probablement, des controverses théoriques qui entourent le domaine. Cette publication devrait fournir de nouveaux outils de travail qui seront des apports précieux pour tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’historiographie à l’époque médiévale.