Louise Bourdua examines how Franciscan church decoration developed between 1250 and 1400 by focusing on three important churches. She argues that local Franciscan friars were more interested in their personal conception of artistic programs than following models of decoration issued officially from the mother church at Assisi. Lay patrons also had considerable input into the decoration programs. Bourdua demonstrates how archival documentation and art can be combined to extend our understanding of the Franciscan art programs.

Political strife and religious faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto's commissions are best understood against the background of this social turmoil. They reflected the demands of his patrons, the requirements of the Franciscan Order, and the restlessly inventive genius of the painter. Julian Gardner examines this important period of Giotto's path-breaking career through works originally created for Franciscan churches: Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Francesco at Pisa, now in the Louvre, the Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence, and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi.

St Francis of Assisi is one of the most admired figures of the Middle Ages - and one of the most important in the Christian church, modelling his life on the literal observance of the Gospel and recovering an emphasis on the poverty experienced by Jesus Christ. From 1217 Francis sent communities of friars throughout Christendom and launched missions to several countries, including India and China. The movement soon became established in most cities and several large towns, and, enjoying close relations with the popes, its followers were ideal instruments for the propagation of the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. They quickly became part of the landscape of medieval life and made their influence felt throughout society.BR>This book explores the first 250 years of the order's history and charts its rapid growth, development, pastoral ministry, educational organisation, missionary endeavour, internal tensions and divisions. Intended for both the general and more specialist reader, it offers a complete survey of the Franciscan Order. Dr MICHAEL ROBSON is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology at St Edmund's College, Cambridge

The rise of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages coincided with rapid and dramatic shifts in the visual arts. The mendicants were prolific patrons, relying on artworks to instruct and impress their diverse lay congregations. Churches and chapels were built, and new images and iconographies developed to propagate mendicant cults. But how should the two phenomena be related? How much were these orders actively responsible for artistic change, and how much did they simply benefit from it? To explore these questions, Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy looks at art in the formative period of the Augustinian Hermits, an order with a particularly difficult relation to art. As a first detailed study of visual culture in the Augustinian order, this book will be a basic resource, making available previously inaccessible material, discussing both well-known and more neglected artworks, and engaging with fundamental methodological questions for pre-modern art and church history, from the creation of religious iconographies to the role of gender in art.

Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.

This volume offers unparalleled coverage of all aspects of art and architecture from medieval Western Europe, from the 6th century to the early 16th century. Drawing upon the expansive scholarship in the celebrated 'Grove Dictionary of Art' and adding hundreds of new entries, it offers students, researchers and the general public a reliable, up-to-date, and convenient resource covering this field of major importance in the development of Western history and international art and architecture.

This volume includes a collection of essays of scholars from several disciplines and focuses on the art produced for the Franciscans in Italy from the 13th to the 15th century. They contain a wide range of subject matter (fresco, panel, stained glass window) and a variety of approaches.

Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands. A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily—the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II—into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available. Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.

Of the twenty-five essays in this volume, most were published between 1961 and 2013, but four are printed here for the first time. They represent the work of a great and original scholar in Mediterranean history whose unflagging interest in Frederick II and his world consistently led him out into broader fields, which he always viewed in original ways. In an age often called that of papal monarchy and secular-minded rulers, Powell found popes with complex agendas and extensive pastoral concerns, a rather more Christian Frederick II, the human personnel and mechanics of the Fifth Crusade, the sermons of the devout urban layman Albertanus of Brescia, and Muslims under Christian rule. His studies here assert a continuity between the pontificates of Innocent III and Honorius III as well as the pragmatic necessity that only secular rulers could launch and direct crusading expeditions. His interest in the northern Italian communes relates their devotional culture to the ideals of virtuous government and communal identity. The devotional culture of the communes was to be the subject of his next book, now unfinished; several parts of it could be rescued and are now included here.

In Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria, Anna Welch explores how Franciscan friars engaged with manuscript production networks operating in Umbria in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to produce the missals essential to their liturgical lives. A micro-history of Franciscan liturgical activity, this study reassesses methodologies pertinent to manuscript studies and reflects on both the construction of communal identity through ritual activity and historiographic trends regarding this process. Welch focuses on manuscripts decorated by the ateliers of the Maestro di Deruta-Salerno (active c. 1280) and Maestro Venturella di Pietro (active c. 1317), in particular the Codex Sancti Paschalis, a missal now owned by the Australian Province of the Order of Friars Minor.