Medieval Europe offers a pageant of almost incredible richness: King Arthur and his round table, demons and cathedrals, Charlemagne and his paladins. The Carolingian culture of the late eighth to late tenth centuries (in what is now France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and northern Italy) offers more than its fair share of achievements. This heavily illustrated study examines one revealing legacy of Charlemagne's heirs and his people--the Carolingian gems of rock crystal, jet, and agate engraved with complex figural scenes, which have never before been studied as a group. These objects have been largely ignored in the scholarship of medieval art, partly because of the difficulty of access. Genevra Kornbluth assembles for the first time all twenty surviving gems, from small seal matrices to the forty-one-figure "Susanna crystal" in London, along with information about lost works. The unique features of each gem are made visible in over 200 detailed black-and-white photographs, often highly magnified and produced using new techniques developed to record transparent engraving. Kornbluth fully analyzes the techniques of manufacture, style, chronology, iconography, and patronage of each gem and examines their social functions, the organization and status of the artisans who created them, and relations between media. The gems are presented as evidence of the rich diversity of the Carolingian culture, rather than as reflections of an artistic program dictated by the imperial courts; they are also seen to be essentially new creations, drawing on earlier visual traditions but adapting their sources to address contemporary concerns.

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.

Between the middle of the eighth century and the late ninth century in western Europe, the course of legal history was shaped by interaction with religious ideas, especially with regard to the meaning of confession, suffering, and the balance of protections for an accused individual and the welfare of the community. This book traces those themes through a selection of Carolingian texts, such as archbishop Hincmar's legal analysis of a royal divorce, the decrees of church councils, the biography of a Saxon holy woman, anti-Judaic treatises, and Hrotswitha's dramatisation of the legend of Thaïs, in order to make audible the lively debates over the boundaries of clerical and lay authority, the nature and extent of permissible intervention in the spiritual condition of the empire's inhabitants, and distinctions between the private and public domains. This work thus reveals the profound relation between law and penitential ideologies promoted by the Carolingian imperial court.

This book is not a conventional political narrative of Carolingian history shaped by narrative sources, capitularies, and charter material. It is structured, instead, by numismatic, diplomatic, liturgical, and iconographic sources and deals with political signs, images, and fixed formulas in them as interconnected elements in a symbolic language that was used in the indirect negotiation and maintenance of Carolingian authority. Building on the comprehensive analysis of royal liturgy, intitulature, iconography, and graphic signs and responding to recent interpretations of early medieval politics, this book offers a fresh view of Carolingian political culture and of corresponding roles that royal/imperial courts, larger monasteries, and human agents played there.

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose. By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, this book advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis.