The Image and the Book is a richly documented and provocative collection of studies and essays dealing with the historical background of biblical ban on religious images. It describes the role and theology of the divine image in the civilizations surrounding Israel, and shows that there has been long-standing worship of images in Israel. Though the Bible intimates that Israelite religion was aniconic from the very beginning, the archaeological evidence and the dispassionate analysis of the available texts shows otherwise. The iconographical remains yield a fascinating view of the development and varieties in the cult of religious images. The iconoclasm of influential currents in the late Israelite and early Judaic religion went in tandem with the promotion of the Book of the Law as a substitute of the image. In the case of the Bible, the rise of book religion must be seen in conjunction with the battle against images.

Inspired by Genesis 1:27, "Image Bearer" is a Christian children's book that teaches how God wonderfully created every child in his image. "Image Bearer" is meant to be a resource to help churches and families celebrate differences. It features illustrations inspired by real kids who have an array of diagnoses including Down syndrome, autism, Williams syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy, osteogenesis imperfecta, lymphatic malformation, port-wine stain, Kniest syndrome, epilepsy, and more.

"Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, postcolonial theorists, and curators to ask how images, pictures, and paintings are conceptualized. Issues discussed include concepts such as "image" and "picture" in and outside the West; semiotics; whether images are products of discourse; religious meanings; and the ethics of viewing"--Provided by publisher.

"[The Book of Kells' contains almost 2000 decorated initials, the majority of which are formed by human figures, beasts, birds and fish. This title offers an in-depth examination of the smaller decorated initials, script layout, and marginalia of this book]"--Jacket cover.

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy. Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.