(Peeters 1996)

This fascinating study reconstructs the tradition of the Legend of the True Cross in text and image, from its tentative beginnings in 4th-century Jerusalem to the culminating expression of its multi-layered cosmic content in 14th and 15th-century monumental cycles in Germany and Italy.

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.

Explores the importance of stories about Adam and Eve in sixteenth-century German Lutheran areas.

The late medieval and early modern period is a particularly interesting chapter in the development of meditation and self-reflection. Meditation may best be described as a self-imposed disciplinary regime, consisting of mental and physical exercises that allowed the practitioner to engender and evaluate his self-image, and thence to emend and refashion it. The volume aims at examining the forms and functions, ways and means of meditation from c. 1300 to c. 1600. It tries to analyze the internal exercises that mobilized the sensitive faculties of motion, emotion, and sense (both external and internal) and the intellective faculties of reason, memory, and will, with a view to reforming the soul, and the techniques of visualization that were frequently utilized to engage the soul’s mediating function as vinculum mundi, its pivotal position in the great chain of being between heaven and earth, temporal and spiritual experience. Contributors include Barbara Baert, Wietse de Boer, Feike Dietz, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Karl Enenkel, Jan de Jong, Walter Melion, Wolfgang Neuber, Hilmar Pabel, Jan Papy, Paul Smith, Diana Stanciu, Nikolaus Staubach, Jacob Vance, and Geert Warnar.

The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job's Wife investigates the fleeting appearance in the Bible of Job's wife and its impact on the imaginations of readers throughout history. It begins by presenting key interpretive gaps in the biblical text concerning Job and his wife, explaining the way gender studies offers guiding principles with which the author engages a reception history of their marriage. After analyzing Job and his wife within medieval Christian theology of Eden, the author identifies ways in which Job's wife visually aligns with medieval images of Satan. The volume explores portrayals of Job and his wife in publications on marriage and gender roles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, moving onto an investigation of William Blake's sharp artistic divergence from the common tradition in his representation of Job's wife as a shrew. In the exploration of societal portrayals of Job and his Wife throughout history, this book discovers how arguments about marriage intertwine with not only gender roles, but also, with political, social, and historical movements.

The doctrine of the Incarnation was wellspring and catalyst for theories of images verbal, material, and spiritual. Section I, “Representing the Mystery of the Incarnation”, takes up questions about the representability of the mystery. Section II, “Imago Dei and the Incarnate Word”, investigates how Christ’s status as the image of God was seen to license images material and spiritual. Section III, “Literary Figurations of the Incarnation”, considers the verbal production of images contemplating the divine and human nature of Christ. Section IV, “Tranformative Analogies of Matter and Spirit”, delves into ways that material properties and processes, in their effects on the beholder, were analogized to Christ’s hypostasis. Section V, “Visualizing the Flesh of Christ”, considers the relation between the Incarnation and the Passion.