Medieval Scholarship: Philosophy and the arts


Book Description

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




The Absent Image


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.







Medieval Scholarship


Book Description

This is the third of a three-volume set on medieval scholarship that presents original biographical essays on scholars whose work has shaped medieval studies for the past four hundred years. A companion to Volume 1: History and Volume 2: Literature and Philology, Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts covers the lives of twenty eminent individuals-from Victor Cousin (1792-1867) to Georges Chehata Anawati (1905-1994) in Philosophy; from H.J.W. Tillyard (1881-1968) to Gustave Reese (1899-1977) in Music; and from Alois Riegl (1858-1905) to Louis Grodecki (1910-1982) in Art History-whose subjects were the art, music, and philosophical thought of Europe between 500-1500. The scholars of medieval philosophy strove to identify the nexus of philosophical truth, whether they were engaged in the clash of the Christian church and secular republicanism as reflected in the tension between theology and philosophy, in addressing the conflicting perceptions of Muslim identity, or in defining Jewish philosophical theology in non-Jewish culture. Medieval musicologists, who are included as the subjects of the essays, pioneered or recontextualized traditional views on the definition of music as subject matter, on the relationship between music and philosophical concepts, on interpretative distinctions between secular and sacred music, monophony and polyphony, and concepts of form and compositional style. The art historians treated in this volume not only overturn the view of medieval art as an aesthetic decline from classical art, but they demonstrate the continual development of form and style inclusive of minor and major arts, in textiles, architecture and architectural sculpture, manuscripts, ivory carvings, and stained glass. The philosophers, musicologists, and art historians who appear in Volume 3 worked in three newly-emerging disciplines largely of nineteenth-century origin. In their distinguished and extraordinary output of energy in scholarly and academic arenas, they contributed significantly to the emergence and formation of medieval studies as the prime discipline of historical inquiry into and hence the key to understanding of the human experience.




Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms


Book Description

“This well-written, accessible [essay] collection demonstrates a maturation in Jewish studies and medieval philosophy” (Choice). Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.




Medieval Art


Book Description

This educational resource packet covers more than 1200 years of medieval art from western Europe and Byzantium, as represented by objects in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the contents of this resource are: an overview of medieval art and the period; a collection of aspects of medieval life, including knighthood, monasticism, pilgrimage, and pleasures and pastimes; information on materials and techniques medieval artists used; maps; a timeline; a bibliography; and a selection of useful resources, including a list of significant collections of medieval art in the U.S. and Canada and a guide to relevant Web sites. Tote box includes a binder book containing background information, lesson plans, timeline, glossary, bibliography, suggested additional resources, and 35 slides, as well as two posters and a 2 CD-ROMs.




Medieval Scholarship


Book Description

Surveying the development of medieval scholarship through biography, this volume contains 23 original essays on scholars whose work shaped medieval historiography for the past 300 years. Their subject was Europe between 500 and 1500, and they labored to define that protean and multinational culture. Each of them pioneered or revolutionized traditional views on fields such as diplomatics (Mabillon); economic, social, and constitutional history (Power, Pirenne, Bloch, Stubbs, Waitz, Whitelock, Maitland); manuscript and archival studies (Delisle, Muratori); Jewish history and the history of Islam and Byzantium (von Grunebaum, Ostrogorsky); symbology and intellectual history (Kantorowicz, Schramm, Smalley); general and cultural history (Gibbon, Adams, Haskins, S nchez-Albornoz); and ecclesiastical history (Bolland, Lea) and the history of magic and science (Thorndike). Some of the scholars pioneered comparative and interdisciplinary studies; all published work that is still essential to our understanding of the past and, more important, the present.




Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline


Book Description

First published in 1998. Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline: Volume 2: Literature and Philology is the second volume of three that present Biographies of scholars whose work influenced the study of the Middle Ages and transformed it into the discipline known as Medieval Studies. Volume 2 provides thirty~two accounts of men and women from the sixteenth century to the twentieth who developed medieval philology and literature into a profession. Their subject deals with the languages and literatures of greater Europe from about the seventh century through the fifteenth and includes Celtic, Scandinavian, Germanic, and Romance nations.




A Companion to Medieval Art


Book Description

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.




John Buridan


Book Description

John Buridan (ca. 1300-1361) was the most famous philosophy teacher of his time, and probably the most influential. In this important new book, Jack Zupko offers the first systematic exposition of Buridan's thought to appear in any language. Zupko uses Buridan's own conception of the order and practice of philosophy to depict the most salient features of his thought, beginning with his views on the nature of language and logic and then illustrating their application to a series of topics in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. Part 1 of John Buridan considers the picture of language and logic developed in Buridan's Summulae de dialectica. Buridan systematically overhauled the logic he first learned and later taught at the University of Paris, redeeming the older tradition of Aristotelian logic in terms, propositions, and arguments. This made possible newer and more powerful forms of philosophical discourse. The second part of this volume provides a reading of Buridan's philosophy, showing how this discourse shaped his treatment of speculative questions such as the relation between soul and body, the nature of knowledge, the proper subject of psychology, the function of the virtues, and the freedom of the will. This groundbreaking book is sure to become the standard work on John Buridan.