Essays on aspects of iconography as manifested in the material culture of medieval England.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays examining Irish and Anglo-Saxon art in the early medieval period.

This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world. The essays collected here aim to highlight human encounters with the forest and its trees at the time of the European Middle Ages, when, whether symbol and metaphor, or actual and real, their lofty boughs were weighted with meaning. The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.

Ground-breaking study of the enigmatic and unique tabernacles from fourteenth-century Italy, which for the first time combined relics and images.Images and relics were central tools in the process of devotional practice in medieval Europe. The reliquary tabernacles that emerged in the 1340s, in the area of Central Italy surrounding the city of Siena, combined images and relics, presented visibly together, within painted and decorated wooden frames. In these tabernacles the various media and materials worked together to create a powerful and captivating ensemble, usable in several contexts, both in procession and static, as the centre of focussed, prayerful attention. This book looks at Siena and Central Italy as environments of artistic invention, and at Sienese painters in particular as experts in experimentation whose ingenuity encouraged the development of this new form of devotional technology. It is the first full-length study to focus in depth on the materiality of these tabernacles, investigating the connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.

Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side: demonstrating, as in the words of Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb, their "stone fidelity". This is the first book to address the phenomenon of the "double tomb", drawing the rich history of tomb sculpture into dialogue with discourses of power, marriage, gender and emotion, and placing them in the context of ecclesastical material culture of the time more broadly. It offers new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval monuments, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, as well as drawing attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe. In turn, these monuments provide a vantage point from which to reconsider the culture of medieval marriage, from wedding rings and dresses, to the sacramental symbolism of matrimony, and embodied ritual practices. Whilst it is tempting to read these sculptures as straightforward expressions of romantic feeling, the author argues that a closer look reveals the artifice behind the emotion: the artistic, religious, political and legal agenda underlying the rhetoric of married love.

New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual, material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and complexity.