Medieval churchmen typically defended religious art as a form of "book" to teach the unlettered laity their faith, but in late medieval England, Lollard accusations of idolatry stimulated renewed debate over image worship. Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages places this dispute within the context of the religious beliefs and devotional practices of lay people, showing how they used and responded to holy images in their parish churches, at shrines, and in prayer books. Far more than substitutes for texts, holy images presented a junction of the material and spiritual, offering an increasingly literate laity access to the supernatural through the visual power of "beholding."

Redigeret af Henning Laugerud og Laura Katrine Skinnebach.Sekulariseringen af den vestlige kultur er om ikke en myte, sa betydeligt overvurderet. I dagens aktuelle debatter om religiositet, anerkender langt de fleste kristendommens indflydelse pa Europas historie, filosofi og kultur.Instruments of Devotion er en tvAerfaglig antologi skrevet af internationalt anerkendte forskere fra The European Network on the Instruments of Devotion, ENID, og i 11 artikler fokuseres specifikt pa de instrumentielle aspekter af andagt og fromhedspraksis i perioden fra det 14. arhundrede og frem til i dag. Artiklerne diskuterer relationen mellem den materielle kultur og det religiose liv; hvordan musik, bonneboger, litteratur og billeder har udtrykt og intensiveret fromhed og pietet i den kristne kultur i et historisk perspektiv.Antologiens mange forskelligartede indgangsvinkler spAender fra middelalderens visuelle teorier til postmodernismens perspektiver pa katolicismen og illustrerer saledes det komplekse monster af Aendringer, kontinuitet og sammenhAenge i den europAeiske kultur- og pietetshistorie.

"The Matter of Piety provides the first in-depth study of Zoutleeuw's exceptionally well-preserved pilgrimage church in a comparative perspective, and revaluates religious art and material culture in Netherlandish piety from the late Middle Ages through the crisis of iconoclasm and the Reformation to Catholic restoration. Analyzing the changing functions, outlooks, and meanings of devotional objects - monumental sacrament houses, cult statues and altarpieces, and small votive offerings or relics - Ruben Suykerbuyk revises dominant narratives about Catholic culture and patronage in the Low Countries. Rather than being a paralyzing force, the Reformation incited engaged counterinitiatives, and the vitality of late medieval devotion served as the fertile ground from which the Counter-Reformation organically grew under Protestant impulses"--

Based on an exhaustive and varied study of predominantly unpublished archival material as well as a variety of literary and non-literary sources, this book investigates the relation between patronage, piety and politics in the life and career of one Late Medieval Spain's most intriguing female personalities, Maria De Luna.

Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches. In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culture—though these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.

This book seeks to understand the music of the later Middle Ages in a fuller perspective, moving beyond the traditional focus on the creative work of composers in isolation to consider the participation of performers and listeners in music-making.

Examines the complex relationships between religion, society and charity in private and public life in Florence - Development of confraternities.

Redigeret af Henning Laugerud og Laura Katrine Skinnebach.Sekulariseringen af den vestlige kultur er om ikke en myte, sa betydeligt overvurderet. I dagens aktuelle debatter om religiositet, anerkender langt de fleste kristendommens indflydelse pa Europas historie, filosofi og kultur.Instruments of Devotion er en tvAerfaglig antologi skrevet af internationalt anerkendte forskere fra The European Network on the Instruments of Devotion, ENID, og i 11 artikler fokuseres specifikt pa de instrumentielle aspekter af andagt og fromhedspraksis i perioden fra det 14. arhundrede og frem til i dag. Artiklerne diskuterer relationen mellem den materielle kultur og det religiose liv; hvordan musik, bonneboger, litteratur og billeder har udtrykt og intensiveret fromhed og pietet i den kristne kultur i et historisk perspektiv.Antologiens mange forskelligartede indgangsvinkler spAender fra middelalderens visuelle teorier til postmodernismens perspektiver pa katolicismen og illustrerer saledes det komplekse monster af Aendringer, kontinuitet og sammenhAenge i den europAeiske kultur- og pietetshistorie.

This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.