Table of Contents: 00I. The origins of the fame of the Roman Veronica0Herbert L. Kessler ? Introduction: The Literary Warp and Artistic Weft of Veronica?s Cloth0Zbigniew Izydorczyk ? The Cura Sanitatis Tiberii a Century after Ernst von Dobschütz0Rémi Gounelle & Céline Urlacher-Becht ? Veronica in the Vindicta Salvatoris0Barry Windeatt ? ?Vera Icon?? The Variable Veronica of Medieval England0Federico Gallo ?De sacrosanto sudario Veronicae by Giacomo Grimaldi. Preliminary Investigations0Nigel Morgan ? ?Veronica? Images and the Office of the Holy Face in Thirteenth-Century England00II. The devotion and cult of the Veronica0Aden Kumler ? Signatis? vultus tui: (Re) impressing the Holy Face before and after the European Cult of the Veronica0Rebecca Rist ? Innocent III and the Roman Veronica: Papal pr or Eucharistic Icon?0Guido Milanese ? Quaesivi vultum tuum. Liturgy, figura and Christ?s Presence0Jörg Bölling ? Face to Face with Christ in Late Medieval Rome. The Veil of Veronica in Papal Liturgy and Ceremony0Uwe Michael Lang ? Origins of the Liturgical Veneration of the Roman Veronica00III. The promotion of the Veronica cult0Gisela Drossbach ? The Roman Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia and the Cult of the Vera Icon0Kathryn M. Rudy ? Eating the Face of Christ. Philip the Good and his Physical Relationship with Veronicas0Étienne Doublier ? Sui pretiossisimi vultus Imago: Veronica e prassi indulgenziale nel XIII e all?inizio del XIV secolo0Marc Sureda i Jubany ? From Holy Images to Liturgical Devices. Models, Objects and Rituals around the Veronicae of Christ and Mary in the Crown of Aragon (1300?1550)0Chiara Di Fruscia ? Datum Avenioni. The Avignon Papacy and the Custody of the Veronica00IV. The spread of the Veronica cult.

In The Legend of Veronica in Early Modern Art, Katherine T. Brown explores the lore of the apocryphal character of Veronica and the history of the “true image” relic as factors in the Franciscans’ placement of her character into the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) as the Sixth Station, in both Jerusalem and Western Europe, around the turn of the fifteenth century. Katherine T. Brown examines how the Franciscans adopted and adapted the legend of Veronica to meet their own evangelical goals by intervening in the fabric of Jerusalem to incorporate her narrative − which is not found in the Gospels − into an urban path constructed for pilgrims, as well as in similar participatory installations in churchyards and naves across Western Europe. This book proposes plausible reasons for the subsequent proliferation of works of art depicting Veronica, both within and independent of the Stations of the Cross, from the early fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, theology, and medieval and Renaissance studies.

Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler authors a love song to medieval art inviting students, teachers, and professional medievalists to experience the wondrous, complex art of the Middle Ages.

Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in 1294. How could one work have generated such different physical forms? Through examining the work's transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations, Eisner reconceives of the relationship between the work and its reception. Dante's New Life of the Book investigates how these different material manifestations participate in the work, drawing attention to its distinctive elements. Dante framed his book as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, and later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their interpretations of Dante's collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary. Traveling from Boccaccio's Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson's Cambridge, Rossetti's London, Nerval's Paris, Mandelstam's Russia, De Campos's Brazil, and Pamuk's Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante's strange poetic forms, including incomplete canzoni and sonnets with two beginnings, continue to challenge readers. Each chapter focuses on how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante's love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman. Numerous illustrations show the entanglement of the work's poetic form and its material survival. Eisner provides a fresh reading of Dante's innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work's survival in the world.

In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment. This second volume, Social Encounters with the Book, delves into the physical interaction with books in various social settings, including education, courtly assemblies, and confraternal gatherings. Looking at acts such as pointing, scratching, and ‘wet-touching’, the author zooms in on smudges and abrasions on medieval manuscripts as testimonials of readers’ interaction with the book and its contents. In so doing, she dissects the function of books in oaths, confraternal groups, education, and courtly settings, illuminating how books were used as teaching aids and tools for conveying political messages. The narrative paints a vivid picture of medieval reading, emphasizing bodily engagement, from page-turning to the intimate act of kissing pages. Overall, this text offers a captivating exploration of the tactile and social dimensions of book use in late medieval Europe broadening our perspective on the role of objects in rituals during the middle ages. Social Encounters with the Book provides a fundamental resource to anybody interested in medieval history and book materiality more widely.

The book is a collection of papers – now up-dated – on the most important relics of Christianity: (a) the Veil of Manoppello, on which the face of Jesus of Nazareth alive is impressed; (b) the Shroud of Turin, on which the full body of Jesus dead is impressed. Nobody knows how the images were impressed 2000 years ago. The reader may not agree that they relate to Jesus of Nazareth – known to Christians as Jesus Christ – and that they are 2000 years old, just like biased scholars continue to deny, despite the overwhelming, largely documented proof found on the Shroud and now also on the Veil, which is scientifically examined here for the first time. Based on these papers, we dare to conclude that the man depicted in both relics is Jesus of Nazareth, who was born, very likely, on 6 January 1 AD and died on Good Friday 23 April 34 AD.