Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts PDF Download

Author: Alixe Bovey
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802085122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
Images of monstrosities pervade art and culture in the Middle Ages, and for medieval people they must have been a tantalizing suggestion of unknown worlds and unthinkable dangers.

Author: Damien Kempf
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780712357906
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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From satyrs and sea creatures to griffins and dragons, monsters lay at the heart of the medieval world. Believed to dwell in exotic, remote areas, these inexplicable parts of God's creation aroused fear, curiosity, and wonder in equal measure. Powerfully captured in the illustrations of manuscripts, such as bestiaries, travel books, and devotional works, they continue to delight audiences today with their vitality and humor. Medieval Monsters shows how strange creatures sparked artists' imaginations to remarkable heights. Half-human hybrids of land and sea mingle with bewitching demons, blemmyae, cyclops, and multi-headed beasts of nightmare and comic grotesques. Over 100 wondrous and terrifying images offer a fascinating insight into the medieval mind.

Author: Alex Woodcock
Publisher: Shire Publications
ISBN: 9780747808312
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Gargoyles are an architectural feature designed to throw rainwater clear of the walls of a building. Widely used on medieval churches, these water spouts were often richly decorated, and fashioned as serpents' heads and other fanciful shapes. Today, the term gargoyle is also popularly applied to any carved decorative head or creature high up on a building and this book is an exploration of all of these enchanting features. Written by an academic and stonecarver, it is the perfect introduction to this fascinating subject. Gargoyles aims to provide a concise introduction to the stone carvings often found on religious and secular buildings in Britain from the medieval period to the modern. It will explore the typical imagery, some of the theories put forward to explain them, as well as consider the carvings within their architectural and social contexts. Incorporating recent and current research, the book will nevertheless be accessible to the general reader.

Author: Michael E. Heyes
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498550770
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.

Author: Iris Idelson-Shein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350052167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This is the first study of monstrosity in Jewish history from the Middle Ages to modernity. Drawing on Jewish history, literary studies, folklore, art history and the history of science, it examines both the historical depiction of Jews as monsters and the creative use of monstrous beings in Jewish culture. Jews have occupied a liminal position within European society and culture, being deeply immersed yet outsiders to it. For this reason, they were perceived in terms of otherness and were often represented as monstrous beings. However, at the same time, European Jews invoked, with tantalizing ubiquity, images of magical, terrifying and hybrid beings in their texts, art and folktales. These images were used by Jewish authors and artists to push back against their own identification as monstrous or diabolical and to tackle concerns about religious persecution, assimilation and acculturation, gender and sexuality, science and technology and the rise of antisemitism. Bringing together an impressive cast of contributors from around the world, this fascinating volume is an invaluable resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in Jewish studies, as well as the history of monsters.

Author: Janet Backhouse
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802083999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
Attractive marginal illustrations in this celebrated psalter show scenes of life in medieval England: the annual cycle of growing crops, domestic animals, sports, pastimes, entertainers and musicians.

Author: Janetta Rebold Benton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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"Featuring incredible creatures and grotesque gargoyles, "The Medieval Menagerie" takes us from the improbable to the impossible as it traces the depiction and the meaning of real and imaginary animals in medieval art. From unicorns and dragons to elephants, lions, and monkeys, medieval society was fascinated with animals, whether they actually existed or not. The more fantastic the creature, the greater its hold seems to have been on the fertile imaginations of the Middle Ages. Both art and literature abound with vividly concocted examples of Gothic monsters (gargoyles and griffins), bizarre ideas about real if exotic beasts (lions were believed to be born dead and resurrected by the father lion three days later), and strange visions of composite creatures (such as a widely accepted animal believed to be a cross between an ant and a lion). Featuring the celebrated collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "The Medieval Menagerie" is illustrated with the splendid and amusing beasts found in medieval painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts, as wello as in bestiaries and manuscripts. The text explores the depiction and the meaning of real and imaginary animals in medieval art. Elegant, lively and intelligent, "The Medieval Managerie" captures some of the wildest creatures ever to grace a Gothic cathedral."--Amazon.ca product desc.

Author: Thomas Tindall Wildridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Author: Lee Hendrix
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606066587
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Now back in print, “the ultimate book-lover’s gift book” (Los Angeles Times) In 1561–62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay (died 1575), imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) as a demonstration of his own preeminence among scribes. Some thirty years later, Ferdinand’s grandson, the Emperor Rudolf II, commissioned Europe’s last great manuscript illuminator, Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), to embellish the work. The resulting book is at once a treasury of extraordinary beauty and a landmark in the cultural debate between word and image. Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historical scripts for a work that summarized all that had been learned about writing to date—a testament to the universal power of the written word. Hoefnagel, desiring to prove the superiority of his art over Bocskay’s words, employed every resource of illusionism, color, and form to devise all manner of brilliant grotesques, from flowers, fruit, insects, and animals to monsters and masks. Unavailable for nearly a decade, this gorgeous volume features over 180 color illustrations, as well as scholarly commentary and biographies of both artists to inspire scholars, bibliophiles, graphic designers, typographers, and calligraphers.

Author: Thomas Wright
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Caricature
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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