Patrons, Authors and Workshops


Book Description

Patrons, Authors and Workshops invokes a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of late medieval books and book production in Paris, from the troubled years of the early fifteenth century onwards. It shows the extent to which such activity was able to flourish even against the backdrop of the endemic struggle between Burgundians and Armagnacs, or the subsequent English invasion which led to Agincourt and the regency of Bedford. Extensive coverage is given to the key role played by the libraire, to the author as scribe or copyist (Christine de Pisan, Jean Lebegue), and also to the development of commercial production under figures such as Jean Trepperel. A section on bibliophiles and their various commissions leads into a group of essays that focus on particular texts and authors, whilst a further section concentrates on what we can discover about the role of the scribe. The volume concludes with four essays offering insights into the work of particular artists and illuminators. The authors include scholars from the UK, France, Greece, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA. Godfried Croenen is Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool. Peter Ainsworth is Professor of French at the University of Sheffield.




Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence


Book Description

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.




Library Security


Book Description

Library work is really all about people. And the inclusive, welcoming nature of the library means that all kinds of people pass through its doors. Not all difficult patrons are dangerous, but some frighten staff and other library users, which can lead to situations that are distracting, troubling, and fraught with liability. For more than a decade, Albrecht, a 15-year police veteran, has presented workshops for libraries on dealing with challenging patrons. His no-nonsense advice will empower library staff in their personal security and give them the tools to confidently communicate with their colleagues, patrons, and members of law enforcement regarding inappropriate behavior. In this book he addresses security issues important to all libraries, including Specific guidance for common situations, such as unruly teens, unwanted sexual advances, chronically homeless substance abusers, and moreThe elements of an effective Code of Conduct and how to enforce itTips on how to manage internet usage to minimize potential problemsHow to align with patrons and use language that defuses the conflictForming partnerships with service organizations, homeless shelters, mental health advocacy groups, and other community resourcesHow to know when it’s time to call the police, plus ideas for increasing law enforcement supportWays to make the library more secure through changes to facilitiesThrough the methods outlined in this book, Albrecht demonstrates that effective communication not only makes library users feel more comfortable but also increases staff morale, ensuring the library is place where everyone feels welcome.




The Red Lands


Book Description

The Red Lands Survival Here Means Risking Death Bai Feng lived the life of a business graduate. He toiled his way up the corporate ladder, only to be cast aside by those with connections. Broken and demoted to a company branch in the country, he made an oath one night to live an average life--and then he woke up. In a fantasy world where the rich prey on the poor, capitulation leads to death, and creatures and demons of legends become real, Bai Feng must navigate through dangers from man and beast alike. But first he must come to terms with his new identity-- A starving twelve year old boy, residing in the village slums. Now called Chu, Bai Feng finds himself living alone in a rickety shack on the frontiers of an infant Empire. Malnourished and without a copper coin to his name, he realises he has transmigrated to face a torturous demise. Stifling his hunger, Bai Feng must climb out of poverty, while treating each step as his last. Join the young Chu as he strives to survive before he can explore this strange new world, and one day hope to earn the right to a surname. A gripping tale of a boy rising literally from the ashes to stamp his mark in a fantasy world.




The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure?


Book Description

The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure? introduces a new approach to literary patronage through a reassessment of the medieval paragon of literary sponsorship, Charles V of France. Traditionally celebrated for his book commissions that promoted the vernacular, Charles V also deserves credit for having profoundly altered the literary economy when bypassing the traditional system of acquiring books through gifting to favor the commission. When upturning literary dynamics by soliciting works to satisfy his stated desires, the king triggered a multi-generational literary debate concerned with the effect a work's status as a solicited or unsolicited text had in determining the value and purpose of the literary enterprise. Treating first the king's commissioned writers and then canonical French late medieval authors, Deborah McGrady argues that continued discussion of these competing literary economies engendered the concept of the "writer's gift," which vernacular writers used to claim a distinctive role in society based on their triple gift of knowledge, wisdom, and literary talent.




Angels in the American Theater


Book Description

Composed of sixteen essays and fifteen illustrations, Angels in the American Theater explores not only how donors became angels but also their backgrounds, motivations, policies, limitations, support, and successes and failures.




The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words (Expanded Third Edition)


Book Description

With over twenty percent more material, a must for any lover of distinctive words. This entertaining and informative reference features sophisticated and surprising alternatives to common words together with no-fail guides to usage. Avoiding traditional thesauruses’ mundane synonym choices, Peter E. Meltzer puts each word—whether it’s protrepic, apostrophize, iracund, or emulous—in context by using examples from a broad range of contemporary books, periodicals, and newspapers. His new introduction makes the case for why we should widen our vocabulary and use the one right word. This groundbreaking thesaurus remains a unique venture, one that enriches your writing while helping you find the perfect word.




The Art of Allusion


Book Description

At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.




Medieval Mythography, Volume Three


Book Description

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal. No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships among these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.




Killing Hercules


Book Description

This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?