Holy motherhood

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Marie-Pierre Perdrizet

Europe, XIIIème et XIVème siècles, les grandes cathédrales gothiques sortent de terre. Reconstitution de cette aventure architecturale et humaine superbement illustrée.

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Janet Backhouse

Illuminated manuscripts are among the richest and most revealing relics of the pre-print Western world, and are central to our understanding of medieval social and cultural history. The British Library boasts the world's finest collection of medieval manuscripts, and in this new and lavishly illustrated survey, Janet Backhouse draws on these collections to provide a comprehensive introduction to these exciting and colourful materials. The British Library boasts the world's finest collection of medieval manuscripts, due largely to the interest and enterprise of individual bibliophiles and connoisseurs over several centuries whose libraries have made their way, by a variety of routes, into the national collection. The manuscripts featured in this book range in date from the 7th to the 17th century, embrace both devotional and secular material, and span a geographical area bounded by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the east and the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria in the north-west. Some of them, such as the Luttrell Psalter or the Bedford Hours, are already well-known but the majority remain unfamiliar to the general public. Most of the subjects chosen are reproduced here in colour for the first time.

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Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker

A new generation of American medieval art historians explores how sacred images were perceived during the Middle Ages in Byzantium and Europe. Focusing on the relationship between a particular type of medieval art - the sacred image - and its audience, the contributors consider the part played in this relationship by the image's context, whether on the page of a book or on the wall of a building. The book allows the reader to see the fluidity of the sacred image, showing how factors including audience, purpose, and setting affected the form it took. The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial. Also examined are the differences between images produced for a single viewer and those produced for communities; images produced for private contemplation or devotion and those that functioned within a liturgical setting; and the varying ways in which sacred images affected women and men, religious and secular communities, rulers and the ruled.

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Theophilus

The work is divided into three books. The first covers the production and use of painting and drawing materials (painting techniques, paints, and ink), especially for illumination of texts and painting of walls. The second deals with the production of stained glass and techniques of glass painting, while the last deals with various techniques of goldsmithing and other metalwork. It also includes an introduction into the building of organs. Theophilus contains perhaps the earliest reference to oil paint.