Fresh examinations of one of the most important church furnishings of the middle ages. The churches of medieval Europe contained richly carved and painted screens, placed between the altar and the congregation; they survive in particularly high numbers in England, despite being partly dismantled during the Reformation. While these screens divided "lay" from "priestly" jurisdiction, it has also been argued that they served to unify architectural space. This volume brings together the latest scholarship on the subject, exploring in detail numerous aspects of the construction and painting of screens, it aims in particular to unite perspectives from science and art history. Examples are drawn from a wide geographical range, from Scandinavia to Italy. Spike Bucklow is Director of Research at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge; Richard Marks is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of York and currently a member of the History of Art Department, University of Cambridge; Lucy Wrapson is Assistant to the Director at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. Contributors: Paul Binski, Spike Bucklow, Donal Cooper, David Griffith, Hugh Harrison, JacquelineJung, Justin Kroesen, Julian Luxford, Richard Marks, Ebbe Nyborg, Eddie Sinclair, Jeffrey West, Lucy Wrapson.

With little scholarly attention having been given to the late medieval iconography that features on rood screens in the southwest of England, the significance of the figures painted at Berry Pomeroy has long been underappreciated. The unlocking of their meaning by the author has led to the discovery of a unique iconographic program. The gestures adopted by many of these figures belong to a common visual culture in the art and drama of the medieval church. The iconography, which reflects a Gothic Mannerist style of the early sixteenth century, displays a marked theatricality giving expression to the mysteries of the faith in the form of a drama. The narrative recorded has notable similarities to that found in a dramatic trilogy which was once performed in Cornwall called the Ordinalia. This book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the genre of mysticism in art and to our understanding of popular devotional practices on the eve of the Reformation.

This book explores the issue of ecclesiastical authority in Romanesque sculpture on the portals and other sculpted “gateways” of churches in the north Italian region of Lombardy. Gillian B. Elliott examines the liturgical connection between the ciborium over the altar (the most sacred threshold inside the church), and the sculpted portals that appeared on church exteriors in medieval Lombardy. In cities such as Milan, Civate, Como, and Pavia, the liturgy of Saint Ambrose was practiced as an alternative to the Roman liturgy and the churches were constructed to respond to the needs of Ambrosian liturgy. Not only do the Romanesque churches in these places correspond stylistically and iconographically, but they were also linked politically in an era of intense struggle for ultimate regional authority. The book considers liturgical and artistic links between interior church furnishings and exterior church sculptural programs, and also applies new spatial methodologies to the interior and exterior of churches in Lombardy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, architectural history, and religious studies.

Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.

In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new. In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Merci? and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.

The early 16th-century baptismal font canopy of the church of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, is one of only three such structures to survive anywhere in the British Isles. This study, inspired by the recent rediscovery of four attributable panels at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, offers a trans-temporal account of the canopy’s initial creation and subsequent use, mutilation, and modification. Written by a team of scholars in art/architectural history, art conservation, heritage documentation, literary studies, and museum curation, it explores the installation’s multiple artistic, ritual, and cultural contexts, from late medieval and early modern Europe to modern-day North America. Contributors are Benjamin Baaske, Sarah Blick, Kate Duffy, Brent R. Fortenberry, Amy Gillette, Jack Hinton, Lesley Milner, Peggy Olley, Ellen K. Rentz, Behrooz Salimnejad, Zachary Stewart, Achim Timmermann, Charles Tracy, Kim Woods, and Lucy Wrapson.

A Cultural History of Color in the Medieval Age covers the period 500 to 1400. The medieval age saw an extraordinary burst of color - from illuminated manuscripts and polychrome sculpture to architecture and interiors, and from enamelled and jewelled metalwork to colored glass and the exquisite decoration of artefacts. Color was used to denote affiliation in heraldry and social status in medieval clothes. Color names were created in various languages and their resonance explored in poems, romances, epics, and plays. And, whilst medieval philosophers began to explain the rainbow, theologians and artists developed a color symbolism for both virtues and vices. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Carole P. Biggam is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. Kirsten Wolf is Professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Color is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com .