Including a wealth of vivid detail and ranging over theology, poetry, painting, heraldry, fashion, and daily life, this book elucidates the attitudes toward color in medieval times and the effect these attitudes still have on modern society.

The essays assembled in this new volume explore the fascination of the Middle Ages with the mystery of light, and its central role in the period's thought and creativity. Spanning medieval theology, literature, science and material culture, the topics covered include the history of light (and, inseparably, darkness) as a literary figure, from the Latin Bible to Geoffrey Chaucer; theoretical speculations on colour, sight and blindness, and their unexpected fertilization of fields such as poetic imagery; medieval preachers' evocations of light as much more than merely figuring the moral and religious, from St. Simeon in the ninth century to John Fisher in the early sixteenth; indeed the belief that light possessed not only reality but physical materality, as manifested in artefacts such as the Gloucester Candlestick. On Light thereby reveals not only the importance of this phenomenon to diverse aspects of medieval culture, but profound and unremarked ways in which it helped to bind these into a whole.

As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s "The Yellow Face" (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). While color has been historically viewed as suspicious and seductive in Western culture, the Victorian period constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies and the upheavals of the first avant-garde art movements result in an increase in coloring’s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. These artist-authors draw on color’s traditional association with constructions of otherness to consider questions of identity and difference through the imaginative possibilities of color.

Did you know that the ultramarine that shimmers at the centre of Vermeers Milkmaid connects that masterpiece with 6th-century Zoroastrian paintings found on the walls of cave temples in Bamiyan, Afghanistan? Or that the surging waves that crest and curl in Hokusais perilous Great Wave off Kanagawa owe their absorbing blue lustre to an alchemist who was born in Frankensteins Castle in 1673? And were the Pre-Raphaelites really obsessed with a murky brown hue derived from the pulverized remains of ancient mummies? (Spoiler: they were.) Invented by prehistoric cave-dwellers and medieval conjurers, cunning conmen and savvy scientists, the colours of art tell a riveting tale all their own. Over ten scintillating chapters, acclaimed author Kelly Grovier helps bring that tale vividly to life, revealing the astonishing backstories of the pigments that define the greatest works in the history of art. Interwoven between these chapters is a series of features focusing on key moments in the evolution of colour theory from the revelations of the Enlightenment to the radicalism of the Bauhaus while reproductions of carefully selected artworks help illuminate the narratives twists and turns. The history of colour is an epic saga of human ingenuity and insatiable desire. Read this book and you will never look at a work of art in quite the same way.

The complex phenomenon of colour has received detailed attention from the perspectives of physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. However, the people who work most closely with colour artists have rarely been canvassed for their opinions on this mysterious subject.John Gage sets out to address this omission by focusing on the thoughts and practices of artists. Colour in Art is concerned with the history of colour, but is not itself a history; instead each chapter develops a theme from a different scientific discipline, as seen from the viewpoint of such diverse artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Drawing on examples through the ages, from ancient times to the present, the many topics covered include flags, synaesthesia, Theosophy, theatre design, film, chromotherapy and chromophobia.Featuring a new foreword by art writer Kelly Grovier outlining contemporary developments in the study of colour, and an updated bibliography, this new edition of this classic text offers a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art.

'Sicily Herald and the Blazon of Colours' brings together the original texts with original English translations of two closely related primary sources on Renaissance colour symbolism. 'Le Blason de toutes armes et scutz' (The blazon of all arms and shields) was completed about 1420 by Jean Courtois (c. 1375-1436), the Sicily Herald, and printed in Paris in 1495. The second, 'Le Blason des couleurs en armes, livr es, et devises' (The blazon of colours in arms, liveries and devices), by Gilles Corrozet (1510-68), was published in Paris in 1527 by Pierre Le Brodeur. They were first two books on colour to be printed in Europe, and are now available in English for the first time in five centuries. Roy Osborne is an artist, educator and historian, and author of books on colour. He was awarded the Turner Medal of the Colour Group (Great Britain) in 2003, and the Colour in Art, Design and Environment Medal of the International Colour Association in 2019.

"Renaissance Colour Symbolism brings together texts and translations of the four earliest printed books on the meaning of colours: Le Blason de toutes armes et éscutz [The Blazon of All Arms and Escutcheons] (1495) by Jean Courtois, the Sicily Herald; Le Blason des couleurs en armes, livrées et devises [The Blazon of Colours in Arms, Liveries and Devices] (1527) by Gilles Corrozet; Libellus de coloribus [Booklet on Colours] (1528) by Antonio Telesio (Thylesius); and Del significato de' colori [On the Signification of Colours] (1535) by Fulvio Pellegrino Morato. Parts of three other early books are included, from The Accedens of Armory (1562) by Gerard Legh; Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura, et archittetura [Treatise on the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture] (1584) by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo; and A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge and Buildinge (1598) by Richard Haydocke"--Provided by publisher.

'Telesio and Morato on the Meaning of Colours' brings together the original texts with original English translations of two closely related primary sources on Renaissance colour symbolism. The first is the 'Libellus de coloribus' (Booklet on colours), the most extensive lexicon of Latin colour terminology of its time, published in Venice in 1528 by Antonio Telesio (1482-1534), who latinised his name as Antonius Thylesius. The second is 'Del significato de' colori' (On the signification of colours), the most extensive digest of current and classical colour meanings of its time, published in Venice in 1535 by Fulvio Pellegrino Morato (c. 1483-1548). They were the third and fourth books on colour to be printed in Europe. Roy Osborne is an artist, educator and historian, and author of books on colour. He was awarded the Turner Medal of the Colour Group (Great Britain) in 2003, and the Colour in Art, Design and Environment Medal of the International Colour Association in 2019.

William Chester Jordan’s scholarship has demonstrated the complexity of negotiating power at both the center and margins of medieval society, taking us into the inner chambers of medieval power structures where kings, churchmen and courtiers dwell to the margins of society inhabited by disenfranchised peoples such as Jews, women and the poor. Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester, honors Professor Jordan by taking up these themes and expanding them from France into Spain, Italy, the Lowlands, and the Mediterranean. The volume highlights how Jordan’s work inspired and influenced a generation of medievalists working in North America and Europe today. Contributors are John W. Baldwin, Adam J. Davis, Jonathan Elukin, Hussein Fancy, Michelle Garceau, G. Geltner, Erica Gilles, Holly J. Grieco, Maya Soifer Irish, Katherine L. Jansen, Emily Kadens, Richard Landes, Jacques Le Goff, Anne E. Lester, Christopher MacEvitt, David Nirenberg, Mark Gregory Pegg , Jarbel Rodriguez, E.M. Rose and Teofilo Ruiz.