Toward an Art History of Medieval Rings


Book Description

Toward an Art History of Medieval Rings gives a full survey of Merovingian, Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance rings ranging in date from around 300 to 1600 AD. They include marriage rings, seal rings, stirrup rings, tart mould rings, iconographic rings, merchant rings, and gemstone rings, and are arranged chronologically.




Rings Around the World


Book Description




The Art of Medieval Jewelry


Book Description

What are the origins of the imagery and designs on common jewelry and portable artwork between late antiquity and the Middle Ages? These dynamic centuries encompass the transformation of the Greco-Roman world into the nascent kingdoms and medieval states upon which most modern European nations are based. The choices of jewelry and other forms of personal expression among the lower classes in ancient times is notoriously difficult to contextualize for a number of reasons. Nonetheless, these precious articles were expressions of individual identity as well as signifiers of rites of passage. As such, they reflect not only the people who wore them, but also the social milieu and artistic trends at that moment in time. This new study assists in identifying the types, origins and routes of transmission of personal artwork, particularly finger rings, across Europe and Byzantium, an area of study that has been neglected in previous works. Some of this material represents the first time relevant research from Central and Eastern Europe has been translated and made available to the general reader in the English-speaking world.




Take this Ring


Book Description

Rings are at once the most intimate forms of jewelry and personal forms of art. This book focuses on approximately fifty rings from a distinguished private collection, tracing the ways that rings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance came to be meaningful. From the mine to the modern collection and through the forge, the goldsmith's shop, and the hands of successive generations of owners, these rings underwent journeys that lent them multifaceted and often multilayered resonances. This book explores these pathways and examines how people throughout history have interacted with multiple aspects of these small but remarkably complex objects. An introduction by Diana Scarisbrick supplements this biography of rings by investigating five prominent ring enthusiasts whose lives, interests, and collections have played prominent roles in the development of the modern appraisal of rings, while providing a chronological sequence for the rings in this book. A catalog of the rings, including their technical details, accompanies the text.




Ancient Rings


Book Description

Ancient finger rings made of base metals and low-grade silver alloys are increasingly being unearthed and sold through a growing assortment of marketplaces worldwide. Reference material on ancient rings has focused mainly on historic and "high-end" pieces--the precious metals and stones of royalty and the wealthy--while little has been written on the evaluation of common rings. This guide describes their composition, structure and imagery, thus providing merchants, collectors and researchers with a comprehensive reference on these ancient artifacts that, until now, have gone unexamined.




Toward a Global Middle Ages


Book Description

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.




Speculum Lapidum


Book Description

In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Philip II of Spain, and Popes Leo X and Clement VII were all treated with expensive potions incorporating ground gems such as rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. Medical and magical/astrological lapidaries, texts describing the stones’ occult and medical qualities as well as their abilities to ward off demons and incantations, were essential resources for their use. First published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithotherapy. In describing the natural, manifest, and occult properties of precious and semiprecious stones as well as their graven images and applications, the Speculum Lapidum provides tremendous insight into the role that medical astrology and astral magic played in the life of an Italian court in the early modern period. Liliana Leopardi’s English translation, complete with critical apparatuses, gives unprecedented access to this key text within the magical lapidary genre. A vital addition to the existing canon of lapidaria in translation, Leopardi’s work will be of special importance for students and scholars of the history of magic, medicine, religion, and Renaissance humanism, and it will fascinate anyone interested in the occult properties of precious and semiprecious stones.




Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives


Book Description

Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion. The volume also addresses the afterlives of objects and buildings in their temporal journeys from the Middle Ages to the present day. Written by the participants of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded seminar held in York, U.K., in 2014, the chapters incorporate site-specific research with the insights of scholars of visual art, literature, music, liturgy, ritual, and church history. Interdisciplinarity is a central feature of this volume, which celebrates interactivity as a working method between its authors as much as a subject of inquiry. Contributors are Lisa Colton, Elizabeth Dachowski, Angie Estes, Gregory Erickson, Jennifer M. Feltman, Elisa A. Foster Laura D. Gelfand, Louise Hampson, Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Heather S. Mitchell-Buck, Julia Perratore, Steven Rozenski, Carolyn Twomey, and Laura J. Whatley.




Rings Through the Ages


Book Description

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.




Illuminations


Book Description

The twenty-seven illuminations catalogued in this volume-part of a series cataloguing the more than two thousand works of art in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art-include illustrations for manuscripts and early instances of small paintings on parchment conceived as independent works of art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.