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: 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”

New Publication: Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries, Edited by Rebecca Abrams and César Merchán-Hamann

Representing four centuries of collecting and 1,000 years of Jewish history, this book brings together extraordinary Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the collections include a fragment of Maimonides’ autograph draft of the Mishneh Torah; the earliest dated fragment of the Talmud, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of theContinue reading “New Publication: Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries, Edited by Rebecca Abrams and César Merchán-Hamann”

New Publication: East Anglian Church Porches and their Medieval Context, by Helen E. Lunnon

The church porches of medieval England are among the most beautiful and glorious aspects of ecclesiastical architecture; but in comparison with its stained glass, for example, they have been relatively little studied. This book, the first detailed study of them for over a century, gives new insights into this often over-looked element.