This book is the first detailed investigation to focus on the late medieval use of Tree of Jesse imagery, traditionally a representation of the genealogical tree of Christ. In northern Europe, from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, it could be found across a wide range of media. Yet, as this book vividly illustrates, it had evolved beyond a simple genealogy into something more complex, which could be modified to satisfy specific religious requirements. It was also able to function on a more temporal level, reflecting not only a clerical preoccupation with a sense of communal identity, but a more general interest in displaying a family’s heritage, continuity and/or social status. It is this dynamic and polyvalent element that makes the subject so fascinating.

Generations injects fresh energy into tired debates about England's plural and protracted Reformations by adopting the fertile concept of generation as its analytical framework. It demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations that experienced them, but were also forged and created by them. The book investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these, in turn, reconfigured the relationship between memory, history, and time. It explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that early modern people formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. Generations highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in shaping these events, as well as in mediating our knowledge of the religious past and in the making of its archive. Drawing on a rich array of evidence, it provides poignant glimpses into how people navigated the profound challenges that the English Reformations posed in everyday life.

Arboreal Symbolism in European Art, 1300–1800 probes the significance of trees in religious iconography of Western art. Based in the disciplines of art history, botany, and theology, this study focuses on selected works of art in which tree forms embody and reflect Christian themes. Through this triple lens, Brown examines trees that early modern artists rendered as sacred symbols—symbols with origins in the Old Testament, New Testament, Greek and Roman cultures, and early medieval legends. Tree components and wood depicted in works of art can serve as evidence for early modern artists’ embrace of biblical metaphor, classical sources, and devotional connotations. The author considers how artists rendered seasonal change in Christian narratives to emphasize themes of spiritual transformation. Brown argues that many artists and their patrons drew parallels between the life cycle of a tree and events in the Gospels with their respective annual, liturgical celebrations. This book will interest scholars in art history, religion, humanities, and interdisciplinary studies.

In 1484, William Caxton, the first publisher of English-language books, issued The Golden Legend, a translation of the most well-known collection of saints’ lives in Europe. This study analyzes the molding of the Legenda aurea into a book that powerfully attracted the English market. Modifications included not only illustrations and changes in the arrangement of chapters, but also the addition of lives of British saints and translated excerpts from the Bible, showing an appetite for vernacular scripture and stories about England’s past. The publication history of Caxton’s Golden Legend reveals attitudes towards national identity and piety within the context of English print culture during the half century prior to the Henrician Reformation.

This book is the first introduction to Western art that not only considers how choice of materials can impact form, but also how objects in different media can alter in appearance over time, and the role of conservators in the preservation of our cultural heritage. The first four chapters cover wall and easel paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints, from the late Middle Ages to the present day. They examine, with numerous examples, how these works have been produced, how they might have been transformed, and how efforts regarding their preservation can sometimes be misleading or result in controversy. The final two chapters look at how photography, new techniques, and modern materials prompted innovative ways of creating art in the twentieth century, and how the rapid expansion of technology in the twenty-first century has led to a revolution in how artworks are constructed and seen, generating specific challenges for collectors, curators, and conservators alike. This book is primarily directed at undergraduates interested in art history, museum studies, and conservation, but will also be of interest to a more general non-specialist audience.

In The Legend of Veronica in Early Modern Art, Katherine T. Brown explores the lore of the apocryphal character of Veronica and the history of the “true image” relic as factors in the Franciscans’ placement of her character into the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) as the Sixth Station, in both Jerusalem and Western Europe, around the turn of the fifteenth century. Katherine T. Brown examines how the Franciscans adopted and adapted the legend of Veronica to meet their own evangelical goals by intervening in the fabric of Jerusalem to incorporate her narrative − which is not found in the Gospels − into an urban path constructed for pilgrims, as well as in similar participatory installations in churchyards and naves across Western Europe. This book proposes plausible reasons for the subsequent proliferation of works of art depicting Veronica, both within and independent of the Stations of the Cross, from the early fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, theology, and medieval and Renaissance studies.

This book focuses on the earliest surviving Christian icons, dated to the sixth and seventh centuries, which bear many resemblances to three other well-established genres of ‘sacred portrait’ also produced during late antiquity, namely Roman imperial portraiture, Graeco-Egyptian funerary portraiture and panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities. Andrew Paterson addresses two fundamental questions about devotional portraiture – both Christian and non-Christian – in the late antique period. Firstly, how did artists visualise and construct these images of divine or sanctified figures? And secondly, how did their intended viewers look at, respond to, and even interact with these images? Paterson argues that a key factor of many of these portrait images is the emphasis given to the depicted gaze, which invites an intensified form of personal encounter with the portrait’s subject. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, theology, religion and classical studies.

This book explores the issue of ecclesiastical authority in Romanesque sculpture on the portals and other sculpted “gateways” of churches in the north Italian region of Lombardy. Gillian B. Elliott examines the liturgical connection between the ciborium over the altar (the most sacred threshold inside the church), and the sculpted portals that appeared on church exteriors in medieval Lombardy. In cities such as Milan, Civate, Como, and Pavia, the liturgy of Saint Ambrose was practiced as an alternative to the Roman liturgy and the churches were constructed to respond to the needs of Ambrosian liturgy. Not only do the Romanesque churches in these places correspond stylistically and iconographically, but they were also linked politically in an era of intense struggle for ultimate regional authority. The book considers liturgical and artistic links between interior church furnishings and exterior church sculptural programs, and also applies new spatial methodologies to the interior and exterior of churches in Lombardy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, architectural history, and religious studies.

Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.

The book examines the process of symbolic and material alteration of religious images in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period. The process by which the form and meaning of images are modified and adapted for a new context is defined by a large number of spiritual, religious, artistic, geographical or historical circumstances. This book provides a defined theoretical framework for these symbolic and material alterations based on the concept of iconotropy; that is, the way in which images change and/or alter their meaning. Iconotropy is a key concept in religious history, particularly for periods in which religious changes, often turbulent, took place. In addition, the iconotropic process of appropriating cult images brought with it changes in the materiality of those images. Numerous accounts from antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period detail how cult images were involved in such processes of misinterpretation, both symbolically and materially. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture and religious history.