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In 1560, the Augustinian cardinal Girolamo Seripando commissioned a chapel and library in the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples. In the late fifteenth century, this congregation ...

This essay reconsiders a little-known collection of Latin alchemical recipes from the fifteenth century attributed to one “Leonard of Marburg.” Preserved today in only one manuscript (MS La...

In tracing the histories of two Greek copies of the complete works attributed to Dionysios the Areopagite, known as the Corpus Dionysiacum, this article considers the kind of agency exerted by medieval books as distinct from other art objects mobilized in the cross-cultural diplomatic arena. An examination of the entangled social lives of these two Byzantine books sent from Constantinople to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris as imperial gifts in the ninth and fifteenth centuries reveals their transformation over time as objects of translatio akin to sacred relics in the negotiation of political, hagiographic, and humanistic agendas, and, further, in the cultivation of medieval patrimony in the service of medieval kingship and modern statehood.

The use of small objects in ritual contexts has been observed in many civilizations and is usually considered from the perspective of miniaturization. This article aims to broaden this perspective and address the issue in terms of manipulation/modification of dimensions. Based on archaeological and ethnological evidence from Mesoamerica from the fifteenth century to the present, I lay the foundations for a typology of the referent: the person, object, action, or abstract idea to which a symbol refers. First, I examine the forms of miniaturization (with geomorphic and dual referents) and metaphoric miniaturization. I then consider the self-referential system provided by fractals, a system in which each shape is the referent of the pattern represented in the subsequent iteration.

This article sheds new light on some Ashkenazi images by interpreting them as evidence of religious and cultural identity created by Jewish minority groups living in urban Christian centers between the thirteenth and fifteenth century. As a case study, it analyzes several images of the Receiving of the Law, one of the central biblical events that played a continuous role in the debate between Jews and Christians. In medieval northern Europe, the round-topped tablets of the Law were crucial components in this debate; in the thirteenth century they found their way into Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. The use of Christian signifiers in Ashkenazi illumination occasionally stimulated the simultaneous presence of opposing views. This active aspect of the visual language, alternating between Christian and Jewish meanings, could exist as long as the artistic language of the surrounding Christian communities was in use. Its effectiveness was especially dramatic in such ambiguous images as the one found in ...

Montreal architect Ernest Cormier designed and occupied the art deco house at 1418 Pine Avenue starting in 1930–31 to accommodate his unusual living arrangement with Clorinthe Perron. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fifteenth prime minister of Canada, purchased the house in 1979 to suit his different and yet equally atypical masculinity as retired head of state and single father. The house’s unique spatial program and its artifacts comprise an architecture of domestic masculinity reflecting Cormier’s autobiographical narrative as well as Trudeau’s reanimation of that narrative by restoring, maintaining, supplementing, showing, and/or rearranging those spaces and signifiers to accommodate his self-image.

Miri Rubin justly concluded that “most remaining traces” of medieval atrocities against Jews “represent the position of Christian authorities—chroniclers, preachers, town officials—who were almost always writing in defence or celebration of the events.” The exceptions to this rule, however, are illuminating. This article explores images produced for Christians that condemn Christian acts of violence against Jews. Although these are few in number, their existence complicates our understanding of medieval anti-Semitism. The first part of the essay investigates an episode in a fourteenth-century French chronicle, the pillage of the Jews of Paris in 1380. The second part examines depictions of the fable of the murdered Jew, which date from the late thirteenth through the fifteenth century. Both narratives—one drawn from a historical event, the other grafted onto an ancient fable—portray the Jew as the innocent victim and the Christian as the treacherous assailant. In so doing, they reverse the better-...

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY , Italian pictorial representations of the Adoration of the Magi genre began to change as classical architecture—in particular ruins—played an increasingly prominent role. Earlier, for example, the shelter of the Holy Family in Domenico Veneziano’s Adoration of the Magi, dated 1439–43, is but a simple wooden hut (fig. 1). Some two decades prior, in Gentile Fabriano’s sumptuous rendering (fig. 2), the biblical manger is an inconspicuous part of a larger composition: amid the abundance of wealth and opulence, the facade is simple and monochromatic, although there is a hint of a fracture in its top right corner. In the trecento nativity panel of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maesta altarpiece (1308–11), there is even less emphasis on architectural features (fig. 3). Mary and the infant Jesus are enveloped within a manger, itself enfolded within a grotto, the former motif typical of the northern European Gothic style, and the latter found in Byzantine manuscript illuminations. In contrast, Sandro Botticelli in his Adoration of the Magi (1472–73) places an incomplete classical structure in its perspectival center (fig. 4). Occupying the majority of the painting, the once humble manger is transformed into an impressive structure of three rows of smooth rectilinear Doric columns bearing a broken entablature on which a gabled wooden roof rests. Although clearly dominant, this is set within a suite of architectural ensembles that frame the painting: a

The earliest English rutter, a maritime navigational treatise from the mid-fifteenth century, is among the oldest of its kind to survive in Europe. Its three manuscripts, one with vivid illuminations, and a sixteenth-century print edition address the landmasses, coastal seas, and shores around England, Ireland, northern France, Spain, and Portugal. From the rutter we can gain an intimate sense of how the ecotones—the coastal areas—were perceived. Given the relatively large quantity of available information about early owners, we also can begin to ask what this group of people might have found attractive about a navigational text. The answers to these inquiries, I will demonstrate, cast light on the geographical topic of the sea, on the nature of anthology manuscripts, and on late-medieval understandings of space more generally.

Apart from Latin, French was Britain and England's only medieval supraregional language: English remained a regional language of the British Isles until well into the early modern period, with, for example, almost no translations of major English-language works until then. Although insular French differed over time from the various Frenches of Continental regions, French retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility throughout Europe and on both sides of the Channel, and exchanges between England and Continental regions in both directions continued throughout the Middle Ages. The importance of England as the location of the earliest French-language literary culture early in the twelfth century is now widely recognized, and England's influence on the development of French-language literary writing in Europe becoming more so: interchange, exchange, and mutual influence continued in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, though in shifting proportions. French also remained indispensable to external contac...

Why is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper not a legendary figure within American feminism in the same way that Sojourner Truth is? This essay suggests that the difference in feminist standing between these two nineteenth-century activists can be traced to the historiographical construction of a particular moment within suffrage history: the 1869 “split” within the movement, in which suffragists disagreed about whether to support or denounce the Fifteenth Amendment and the enfranchisement of black men ahead of women. These “split-narratives,” as I call them, pair Harper with Truth as black women who had to “choose” between privileging either their race or their sex in the face of the amendment and the debates it sparked in the suffrage movement. I argue that it is the critical attachment to the split and its attendant need to understand how historical figures reacted to the divide that effaces Harper’s career as a writer-activist and the feminist theorizing that can be drawn from her work. Through readin...

From the time of their first appearance at the end of the eleventh century, medieval funerary effigies have presented their viewers with a strikingly uniform set of compositional conventions. The sculptural representation of the frontal body carved in relief on a rectangular slab is found so consistently among effigies of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries that this formula has become very nearly synonymous with the term “effigy” itself. The standard compositional type had already appeared in the bronze effigy of Rudolf of Swabia in Merseburg Cathedral (c.1080–1084), the earliest surviving effigy known to medieval art, and would be repeated for the tombs of the Nellenburg dukes of Schaffhausen (c.1105–1110), the Ottonian abbesses of Quedlinburg (c.1129), and the Merovingian kings from Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris (c.1150, now installed at Saint-Denis), to name just a few prominent examples. Each of these sculptures shows its subject dressed in different costume and holding different attributes as ...

Unsurprisingly, references to the fourthcentury-B.c.E. Greek painter Apelles appear in both of Elsum's books. Largely due to the publication and translation of the elder Pliny's Natural History in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Apelles' reputation, in spite of the absence of any of his works, was well established before Elsum's day.2 Still, as has not been widely noticed, Elsum's contributions to the literature on Apelles are innovative and, therefore, worthy of examination and appreciation.3 In Epigrams , Elsum includes an entry on each of two of Apelles' paintings, one of which Pliny briefly describes. Epigram VII contains only four lines and is entitled "Alexander Triumphant," a reference to Alexander the Great (356-323 b.c.e.), king of Macedonia and world-conquering general: This Eastern Monarch seated in a Car, Insults an Image representing War; And War appears with both hands ti'd behind him

A recent efflorescence of scholarly work in art history has interrogated the significance and ontological or scientific status of medieval diagrams. The Astronomical Anthology for Wenceslas IV (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 826, after 1400) offers a salient case study of late medieval erudition and astrological tradition, presented as a comprehensive anthology detailing the semiotic and natural philosophical import of astrology for courtly contexts. Made in Prague for a hapless Bohemian king, the manuscript anthology provides an opportunity to investigate two historic medieval individuals: King Wenceslas IV (d. 1419) and the court astrologer, Terzysko (act. fifteenth century). In addition, in its construction and system of cross-references between text and diagram, the Astronomical Anthology supplies an important record of a text that sought its own self-serving justification, appealing for the ontological and epistemic legitimacy of the astrological system put on display in the book. R...

This study presents an alternative interpretation of one of the most aesthetically charged objects known from southwestern Mesoamerica, a tripod vessel seemingly manufactured in the fifteenth century CE. The analysis links the content of the visual narrative painted on the vessel with the use of the object, a function glyphically described around its neck. I argue that the binary structure of the depicted imagery and of the myth of origin encoded in the narrative was dialectically projected into the historical social field that motivated the commissioning of the artifact: a marital alliance to unite two powerful noble houses in order to forge a new dynasty. The deployment of the vessel to drink cacao during a marriage ceremony helps explain how its inscribed surface was meant to be read, and the depicted archetypical toponyms are hypothetically identified with lived places in the valleys of Nochixtlan and Coixtlahuaca.

An influential strand of English alchemy was the pursuit of the “vegetable stone,” a medicinal elixir popularized by George Ripley (d. ca. 1490), made from a metallic substance, “sericon.” Yet the identity of sericon was not fixed, undergoing radical reinterpretation between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as Ripley’s lead-based practice was eclipsed by new methods, notably the antimonial approach of George Starkey (1628–65). Tracing “sericonian” alchemy over 250 years, I show how alchemists fed their practical findings back into textual accounts, creating a “feedback loop” in which the authority of past adepts was maintained by exegetical manipulations—a process that I term “practical exegesis.”

Fragments of thirty-six Aegean-type vessels were found at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath in Areas A, E, F, and P between 1996 and 2014, some of which have already been published (Gadot, Yasur-Landau, and Uziel 2012; Shai et al., this issue) and then subsequently revaluated in a broader context (Stockhammer in press). The earliest import so far can be dated to the Mycenaean pottery phase Late Helladic (LH) IIIA1, which is the late fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries B.C.E. This closed vessel of unclear shape can be considered as one of the early Mycenaean imports to the southern Levant. It reached this region in a time when the spectrum of imports was still dominated by Aegean-type pottery from Crete.

Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, eds., Society in an Age of Plague. (Fifteenth Century 12.)Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. x, 223; 9 black-andwhite figures and 1 map. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84383-875-3.

Between 1069, the year of his arrival at St. Martin in Mainz, where he spent the rest of his life in voluntary enclosure in a cell, and his death in 1082, the Irish monk Marianus Scottus dedicated countless hours to assembling the most sophisticated and comprehensive work on historical chronology that had ever been produced by a Latin writer up to that time. The fruits of his labors became a massive world chronicle, completed in 1076, whose most famous innovation consisted in a far-reaching correction to the Christian, or “common,” era, which had been introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. Having compared the data of the Easter computus with the chronological parameters traditionally associated with the passion of Christ—the fifteenth day of the moon on Friday, 25 March—Marianus found that the only year in which the numbers could be made to fit was AD 12 rather than the traditionally accepted AD 34. As a result, he decided to predate the life of Jesus by twenty-two years, assigning his birt...

In 1460 Karl von Seckendorf sent the following note along with a manuscript that included a biblical commentary, the Postilla super epistulas dominicales by Matthias de Liegnitz, to an acquaintance.

History of science and history of medicine are today largely organized as distinct disciplines, though ones widely recognized as interrelated. Attempts to evaluate the extent and nature of their relation have reached varying conclusions, depending in part on the historical period under consideration. This essay examines some characteristics of European medicine from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century and considers their relevance for the history of science. Attention is given to the range of interests and activities of individuals trained in or practicing medicine, to the impact of changes in natural philosophy, to the role of observation, description, and accumulation of information, and to the exchange of knowledge among the medical community.

The prolific English poet John Lydgate (c.1371–1449) has been known as the “monk of Bury” since the early fifteenth century. Both his popularity and perceptions of his literary merit have fluctuated wildly since his zenith as the famous laureate of Henry V, Henry VI and Duke Humphrey, but readers have been constant in their association of Lydgate with the Benedictine abbey from which the epithet derives. However, there has been remarkably little examination of the details of Lydgate's existence at Bury: the critical emphasis has been on Lydgate's contact with Lancastrian society rather than on his quotidian life as a monk. “To trace in detail the connection between the Bury library and the characteristic configuration of Lydgate's thought and work, to see how his mind was formed and influenced by the books with which he was in such familiar contact” remains an unfulfilled desire. In particular, given the range of Lydgate's literary and intellectual allusions, it is surprising that there has been no full a...

“The semicolon has become so hateful to me,” confessed Paul Robinson in a 2002 essay, “that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.” When Robinson, a humanities professor at Stanford University, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he is filled with hate and “exasperation.”1 Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted foe, but he is hardly its only modern detractor. A host of novelists, from George Orwell to Donald Barthelme, have discoursed on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both.2 Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”3 Nor is Robinson the only member of the academy to spurn the semicolon; it was an academic who congratulated Umberto Eco for using no semicolons whatsoever in The Name of the Rose.4 Yet it was the scholarly community—the humanists in particular—that brought the mark to life in the fifteenth century. They conceived of the semicolon as an aid to clarity, not, as Robinson now

Despite differences in layout, the Lowland Maya planting almanacs on pages 24-31 of the Madrid Codex are structurally and iconographically similar to the almanacs on pages 27-28 of the Codex Borgia from highland Central Mexico. We compare the agricultural pests pictured in the two groups of almanacs, consider the seasonal variation in their feeding habits, relate them to the tonalpohualli/tzolkin dates mentioned in the almanacs, and conclude that the temporal focus of the Madrid almanacs overlaps the years covered by the Borgia almanacs, which date to the fifteenth century (specifically 1467-1472, and more generally 1467-1519). The close thematic and chronological ties between the two sets of almanacs suggest that scribes in the two regions were communicating with each other and represent another facet of the spread of the Mixteca-Puebla tradition into the Maya area in Late Postclassic times.

Conference Theme: Travel and Exploration, marking the 550th anniversary of the death of prince Henry ‘The Navigator’

This article offers new insight into the conceptualization of pictorial naturalism in the late Middle Ages through close analysis of how the Middle French modifiers "au vif" and "apres le vif" are used in ekphrastic texts from 1350 to 1550. These descriptors are undoubtedly the period terms for realism. Modern ideas about what precisely they meant in the late Middle Ages, however, have largely been shaped by what they later came to mean. By about 1600, drawn "au vif" meant drawn "from life. "Scholars have rightly located, in the term's deployment in relation to Early Modern artifacts, the rise of the modern paradigm of pictorial naturalism, a paradigm anchored in an epistemological anxiety about the causal connection between an image and its referent. It has long been assumed that modifiers containing vif denoted indexicality in the fifteenth century as well, that when late medieval authors described an image as "fait au vif, "they meant it was based on a drawing that was made in the presence of the refer...