Category Archives: New Publications

New Publication: Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages, by A. Hiatt

Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, maps, and geographical descriptions – and utilising the ancient but now largely discarded scholarly genre of the dialogue – Dislocations argues that medieval spatial representation was complex and richly textured, whether in the form of a careful gloss in a manuscript of Lucan’s Civil War, or as the exuberant sexualized allegories of the fourteenth-century papal notary Opicinus de Canistris.

New Publication: Visualizing Justice in Burgundian Prose Romance: Text and Image in Manuscripts of the Wavrin Master (1450s-1460s), by Rosalind Brown-Grant

This book explores the textual and visual representation of justice in a corpus of chivalric romances produced in the mid-15th century for noble patrons at the court of Burgundy. This is the first monograph devoted to manuscripts illuminated by the mid-fifteenth-century artist known as the Wavrin Master, so-called after his chief patron, Jean de Wavrin, chronicler and councillor at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy.

New Publication: The Notion of Liminality and the Medieval Sacred Space, edited by Ivan Foletti & Katarína Kravčíková

The thematic frame of this issue is the anthropological notion of liminality, applied both to physical as well as imaginary places of transition in medieval art. The volume is thus dedicated to the phenomenon of the limen, the threshold in medieval culture, understood mainly as a spatial, ritual and temporal category. The structure of the book follows the virtual path of any medieval visitor entering the sacred space.

New Publication: Venetian and Ottoman Heritage in the Aegean: The Bailo House in Chalcis, Greece, edited by Nikos Kontogiannis & Stefania Skartsis

This book tells the astonishing story of a secular building and its inhabitants over six centuries and four successive civilizations. The Bailo House was constructed as a public loggia in the 14th century by Venetian officials in their Aegean colony of Negroponte on the Byzantine island of Euripos. Italian designs were followed and copied in the style of the lagoon’s palaces, digging the foundations through the earlier Byzantine layers.

New Publication & Call for Manuscripts: Eastern European Visual Culture and Byzantium (13th – 17th C.), edited by Maria Alessia Rossi & Alice Isabella Sullivan

This series explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, as well as early-modern Russia and Ruthenia between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through historically grounded examinations of the visual and cultural productions of these Eastern European territories, this series highlights the prismatic relationships between local traditions, the Byzantine heritage, and cultural forms adopted from other models.

New Publication: Sephardic Book Art of the Fifteenth Century, Edited by Luís U. Afonso and Tiago Moita

The current volume presents ten different studies dealing with the final stages of Hebrew book art production in medieval Iberia. Ranging from the Farhi Codex, copied and illuminated in the late 14th century, to the Philadelphia Bible, copied and illuminated in Lisbon in 1496, this volume discusses a wide scope of topics related with the production, consumption and circulation of medieval decorated Hebrew manuscripts.

New Publication: Romanesque Saints, Shrines and Pilgrimage, edited by John McNeill & Richard Plant

The 23 chapters in this volume explore the material culture of sanctity in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean between c. 1000 and c. 1220, with a focus on the ways in which saints and relics were enshrined, celebrated, and displayed.

New Publication: Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650, by Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Narrative Pasts retrieves the social history of a Muslim community in Gujarat, a region that has one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the book reveals the importance ofContinue reading “New Publication: Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650, by Jyoti Gulati Balachandran”