The illuminated page

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Elizabeth L'Estrange

"This book brings images of holy motherhood and childbearing into the centre of an art-historical enquiry. By focusing on images of St Anne and the Holy Kinship in Books of Hours made for aristocratic women in relation to the dynastic importance of heirs, it reassesses the role of the female viewer as an active agent in the interpretation of pictures and popular devotional rites." "Holy Motherhood combines an innovative methodology that draws on art-historical and contemporary gender studies with empirical evidence from fifteenth-century manuscripts, to show how images worked, not only to script and maintain gender and social roles within patriarchal society, but also to offer viewers ways of managing those roles." "The book will appeal to advanced students, academics and researchers of Art History, Illuminated Manuscripts, Medieval History and Gender Studies."--Jacket.

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Cynthia Packert Atherton

During the early medieval period, from the seventh to the ninth centuries, the area of western India now known as Rajasthan was transformed from a politically and artistically minor region to one of relative importance. Rajasthan was the homeland of the Gurjara Pratiharas, one of the most powerful dynasties in northern India, and many important temples were produced during their brief tenure there. While these monuments provide rich sources of information about iconographic preferences and artistic styles, this book argues that they further provide, and overlooked, clues to Rajasthan's charged early political history. In analyzing sculptural style and iconographic programs within chronological and regional parameters, the book proposes that the Gurjara Pratihara presence in Rajasthan was energizing but disruptive, particularly to dominant religious and stylistic patterns in the region.

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Jean-Claude Schmitt

This book explores the history of gestures in the West, from late antiquity to the heart of the Middle Ages. Unlike the ethnologist or sociologist, the historian has no direct access to the gestures of the past, but must deal with texts or images only, the representations of gestures, which rely on the interpretation of gestures made by the culture that created the representations. Thus the historian's investigation is driven by these questions: What does it mean to "make a gesture" in medieval Christian society? How was the body, its movement, and its attitudes understood in that era? Did a theory of gesture exist?

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Gordon Corrigan

In this succinct history of a conflict that raged for over a century, Gordon Corrigan reveals the horrors of battle and the machinations of power that have shaped a millennium of Anglo-French relationships.