Search Results (35)

Early modern engravings of the tattooed arms of pilgrims such as Ratger Stubbe and Otto Friedrich von der Gröben preserve rare visual evidence of a devotional tradition whose origins lie in medieval pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While these tattoos have often been interpreted as souvenirs, marks of travel, or signs of religious identity, this paper argues that they functioned as living devotional images whose efficacy depended upon their permanent inscription within the living body. Rather than merely representing Jerusalem, pilgrimage tattoos transformed the Christian body into a devotional medium through which sacred place remained materially and visually present long after the journey had ended. Drawing upon seventeenth-century pilgrimage imagery, travel accounts, and the tattoo traditions of the Razzouk family, this paper examines how pilgrimage tattoos materialized memory, sacred geography, and Christian identity. It examines the engraved arms of Ratger Stubbe and Otto Friedrich von der Gröben, whose tattoo programs reveal sophisticated visual narratives that merge sacred history with sacred geography. These images demonstrate that pilgrimage tattoos operated simultaneously as indexical traces of bodily inscription, iconographic representations of holy places, and symbolic affirmations of Christian devotion. Building upon theories of embodiment, materiality, and image studies, I propose the concept of the living devotional image to describe images inseparable from the bodies that bear them. By foregrounding early modern visual evidence, this paper demonstrates how pilgrimage tattoos collapse conventional distinctions between body and image, relic and representation, and memory and place. In doing so, it offers a new framework for understanding devotional imagery, embodiment, and sacred geography in both medieval and early modern visual culture. Full article

Medieval liturgical exegesis presents a striking interpretative paradox: Advent, the opening season of the liturgical year, falls within the autumn–winter period and yet is frequently understood as a tempus renovationis, a time of renewal analogous to spring. This study argues that such an association is not merely a poetic metaphor, but the result of a liturgical and theological reconfiguration of time grounded in the adventus Domini. Focusing especially on the liturgical commentaries of Prepositinus of Cremona and related exegetical traditions, the article examines how the symbolic code of spring, widely attested in medieval cultural and poetic sources, is assumed and transformed within the liturgical sphere. It then considers chant as one of the principal media through which this renewed temporal condition becomes perceptible in ecclesial practice. Particular attention is given to the introit Ad te levavi, read as the sung threshold of the liturgical year, in which prophetic promise, ecclesial response, renewed breath, and ascensional movement converge. The analysis is finally extended to manuscript culture, where enlarged initials, figural programs, and the notated shaping of the incipit contribute to the visual and aural articulation of the same theological logic. The study concludes that the “spring” of Advent is best understood not as a merely seasonal analogy, but as a coordinated symbolic and liturgical phenomenon articulated across exegesis, chant, and manuscript mediation. Full article

Although the figure of Salome has received much attention from artists and critics alike in the last century and a half, the sources of the legend of her death by ice remain little known. This article traces the origin, development, and transmission of the legend from late antiquity through the early modern period, highlighting its rich presence in medieval Eastern and near total neglect in medieval Western Christian traditions. Drawing on Syriac, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Slavic sources, it demonstrates that the legend emerged before the sixth century in the Christian East, where it circulated widely in apocryphal, hagiographical, and historiographical texts. Early attestations, such as the Epistle of Herod to Pilate, already contain core narrative motifs, which later Byzantine authors elaborated into a sophisticated typological narrative of divine retributive justice. In Greek and Slavic traditions especially, the legend achieves rhetorical refinement through the image of decapitation “not by iron but by ice,” while Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic retellings amplify the punitive dimension through the accumulation of often extravagant forms of divine punishment. In contrast, the medieval Latin West preserves only faint and fragmentary echoes of the legend, typically reducing it to brief notices of drowning and largely stripping it of its typological force. Instead, an alternative motif—Salome swallowed by the earth—gains prominence in Western textual and visual culture, possibly facilitated by the conflation of Salome with her mother. The article argues that the fully developed Eastern narrative entered Western Europe only in the sixteenth century through printed Latin translations of Byzantine historiography, particularly the works of Symeon Metaphrastes and Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos. This print-mediated transmission enabled the legend’s broader reception in early modern Europe and its eventual transformation into a folkloric and literary motif, culminating in the nineteenth-century Decadent literature and art. Full article

This paper examines the iconography of the Mother of God holding a book in Early Christian and Medieval art, focusing on representations in which a book or scroll functions as an attribute of the Virgin Mary. Particular attention is given to scenes depicting Mary in relation to the Christ Child, Christ Pantocrator, and the Magnificat. The study explores the symbolic significance of the book and scroll through the textual tradition of the Church Fathers. Adopting the methodological approach to the iconographical structure developed by André Grabar, the paper centers on three interconnected case studies. First, it offers a close re-examination of a Marian scene on the ivory relief of the Werden casket (9th c.) of which the meaning is hard to understand. Second, it analyzes the depiction of the Mother of God in the vault of the crypt of Epiphanius at San Vincenzo al Volturno (9th c.), with particular emphasis on motifs that associate the image with the theme of Mary’s Triumph. Finally, it considers a fresco of Mary and Christ enthroned from the Egyptian monastery of Deir al-Suryan (10th c.), treating these works as semantically and conceptually related. Through this comparative analysis, the paper advances several interpretations of the Magnificat as articulated in Early Christian visual culture and developed in later periods with the contribution of the Byzantine theology. Given the well-established influence of Early Christian art on both the Carolingian Renaissance in the West and the Byzantine East, the shared iconographical details identified here—both formal and conceptual—are understood as deriving from a common visual tradition rooted in Antiquity. Full article

This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture. Full article

This article examines the visual reception of the woman of Endor (1 Sam 28) and her gradual integration into the Western imaginary of the witch. In the first section, it offers a concise overview of the formation of witchcraft in late medieval and early modern visual culture, when iconographic and discursive registers contributed to the consolidation of a demonological and persecutory repertoire associated with the female body. Against this background, the study analyzes how the figure of Endor came to be interpreted and represented through increasingly negative categories—eventually becoming a conventionalized motif in the history of art—despite the fact that the biblical narrative originally presents her as a ritual mediator whose role in Saul’s episode is not constructed as a paradigmatic case of “witchcraft” in a strict sense. Drawing on a methodology of visual exegesis that brings together cultural biblical studies, art history, and gender studies, this article examines a range of artworks depicting the episode in order to show how visual culture negotiates the boundary between the legitimate and the forbidden, and how the later demonization of Endor reveals persistent tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy across different historical contexts. Full article

Manuscript 50 (46) from the library of the monastery of Putna contains a text entitled “Discourse on the appropriate manner of standing in the church.” The first part explains the Eucharistic liturgy, from the vesting of the priest to the moment before the epiclesis. The service is dramatized as an interaction between the priest and an angel of God, who later enters a battle with a demon that distracts the congregation. The second part of the text consists of the vision of the monk who lost his faith in the Eucharist. At the prayers of the community, he receives a revelation of the reality of the liturgical mystery, in which he is shown a child slaughtered on the altar table. The visionary text in the first section is part of a tradition attested in the Slavonic environment of the Balkans, which later became popular in the Russian world. These Slavonic versions are based on a similar visionary text attested in Greek manuscripts, but the similarities are only partial. The present study places the text from the Putna manuscript in relation to the iconography of the liturgical space and highlights the relevance of this type of literature for understanding the local monastic culture. Full article

This study examines, within the broader context of historical and cultural influences from Byzantine and Western canonical traditions, the canonical and theological treatment of physical disabilities as impediments to the priesthood within modern Orthodox Canon Law. It shows how traditional Orthodox Canon Law, particularly influenced by medieval Roman Catholic canonical understanding, has historically emphasised physical integrity as a requirement for ordination. The study critically examines historical and contemporary canonical attitudes towards candidates with hearing, speech, or visual impairments or with locomotor disability through the analysis of Apostolic canons, Canons of Ecumenical Councils, and later canonical sources. The methods include a critical canonical and historical analysis of primary sources such as the Canons, patristic writings, and synodal legislation, with particular reference to the initiatives of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the modern cultural and pastoral context. The study observes that, although such impairments continue to be recognised as canonical impediments according to traditional Orthodox law, contemporary ecclesial practice increasingly reflects a pastoral sensitivity that allows, in certain contexts, for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in ordained ministry. This is typically achieved through adaptations that preserve the integrity of liturgical function, such as assistance from co-ministers or specialised training. These developments, while not amounting to a formal canonical revision, signal a broader pastoral and ecclesiological openness toward the integration of persons with disabilities within the life of the Church. Full article

This paper explores the possibility of counteracting the crisis of culture and institutions by investing in the identity values of the user-actor within digital spaces built for the purpose. The strategy is applied to the analysis of three Catalan cloisters (Spain), with a focus on the representation of the cloister of Sant Cugat (Barcelona). Heuristic picklocks are found in the semantic richness proposed by Marius Schneider exclusively on the verbal level. The authors interpret the contents and transcribe them into graphic signs and digital denotations of sounds and colors. They organize proprietary ontologies, or syntagmatic lines, to be entrusted to the management of computer algorithms. The syncretic culture that characterized the medieval era allowed the ability to mediate science and faith to be entrusted to the mind of the praying monk alone in every canonical hour. The hypothesis that a careful direction has programmed the ways in which to orient souls to “navigate by sight” urges the authors to find the criteria that advanced statistics imitates to make automatic data processing “Intelligent”. In step with the times and in line with the most recent directions for the Safeguarding of Heritage, the musical, astral, and narrative rhythms feared by Schneider are used to inform representative models, to increase not only the visual perception of the user (XR Extended Reality) but also to solicit new analogies and illuminating associations. The results return a vision of the culture of the time suitable for shortening the distances between present and past, attracting the visitor and, with him, the resources necessary to protect and enhance the spaces of the Romanesque era. The methodology goes beyond the contingent aspect by encouraging the ‘remediation’ of contents with the help of machine learning. Full article

The persistence of anti-Jewish and antisemitic stereotypes throughout history, from medieval times to the present, reveals the enduring power of visual and cultural narratives in shaping public perceptions of Jews. This paper examines how Yvan Attal’s film Ils sont partout effectively satirizes these stereotypes, exposing their absurdity and the dangers of such ingrained prejudices. By connecting modern satire to historical instances of antisemitism, this study emphasizes the necessity of challenging and critically analyzing these harmful depictions. While the forms of anti-Jewish and antisemitism evolve over time, the underlying biases remain disturbingly consistent across cultures and eras. Full article

This article examines a single figure from Christian history, the reformed sinner known as Musa of Rome (d.c. 593). Tracing the evolution of Musa from Gregory the Great’s Dialogues to early modern pastoral texts, this study explores processes of condemnation, recalibration, and negotiation regarding dance in premodern Christianity. The first section analyzes medieval portrayals of Musa as expressions of “choreophobia,” a term borrowed from dance studies scholar Anthony Shay that denotes cultural anxiety surrounding dance. Here, I argue that choreophobic renditions of Musa sedimented medieval misogyny and conceptualized sin. The second section turns to late medieval sources that assess dance differently vis-à-vis dance studies scholar André Lepecki’s concept of “choreopolice” or “choreopolicing”. For this study, choreopolicing highlights how ecclesiastical authorities refashioned Musa as a moralizing vehicle to articulate and implement clerical agendas. The third and final section explores Musa’s inspiring aura as a sacred muse. In this vein, her kinesthetic afterlives helped Christian laity apprehend Marian piety, visualize the resurrected body, and communicate hope for redemption. Methodologically, this study embraces the frameworks of religious studies, medieval studies, and dance studies. However fictional and embellished retellings of the Musa story were, this article—the first in-depth scholarly study dedicated to Musa of Rome—demonstrates how the medieval dancing body manifested a site of political contestation, ecclesiastical control, and individual redemption. Full article

Much scholarly attention has been paid to The Visitation group housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sculpture, dated between 1310 and 1320 and attributed to Master Heinrich of Constance, comes from the Dominican convent of St. Katherinental, in present-day Switzerland, and is notable for its two rock crystal cabochons embedded in the wombs of the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. In this paper, I support and substantiate the original inclusion of the two stones in the artwork, arguing that it was conceived in close connection with the mystical doctrine on inner vision and the Eternal Birth of God within the soul, as theorized by the Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart (1260–1328). Considering the role of vision in medieval spirituality, the rock crystals, as symbols of purity and divine illumination, functioned as pivotal tools in the mystical experience of Katherinental nuns, fostering their profound spiritual connection with the divine. This article provides a fresh and in-depth analysis of the iconological essence of The Visitation in the Met, incorporating notions established in the field of sensory studies together with methods developed in visual and material culture studies. Full article

This study focuses on the problem of reconstruction and immersive visualization of cultural heritage objects such as medieval strongholds. Geomatics-specific methods were applied, based on the use of reference data such as maps, topographic databases, LIDAR, aerial photography, and three-dimensional modeling. Search and transformation of reconstructed historical data were also carried out according to various historical–geographical–archaeological theories. The result of the work was the creation of a desktop application that presents the interactive landscape reconstruction as an immersive geovisualization of a typical medieval Eastern European earth-and-timber stronghold in two time periods and in its current state. Conclusions include the changes in land topographical levels, demonstrating how the topographical level has changed over time, and data identification to categorize and process it in order to visualize cultural heritage objects such as medieval strongholds in today’s landscape. Full article

Wedding rituals and ceremonies have been depicted in various forms of literature, art, and illuminated manuscripts in medieval times. These representations offer valuable insights into the cultural, religious, and social aspects of weddings during that period. This article considers the state of research on visual representations of the wedding ceremony in the Middle Ages and how these pictures reflect legal, religious, and cultural/social aspects of medieval life in Europe. Using examples from various religious, literary, and legal texts, several questions will be addressed: In which contexts were the pictures of wedding ceremonies created? What is depicted and what is not? Which legal, religious, and cultural aspects are reflected in the medieval visualizations of the wedding ritual and how do the visualizations correspond to the religious, legal, and cultural setting of the wedding ritual in the Middle Ages? Illuminated legal manuscripts, particularly the Liber Extra, the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, reveal much about the rituals that signified the essence of the medieval wedding ceremony: the exchange of consent, the joining of the right hands (dextrarum iunctio), and the blessing of the union by a priest. Since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, marriage was considered a sacrament by the Church, making the ritual a fulcrum of religious life. However, only the consummation of a marriage was able to bring the property-related effects of marriage into effect, and some pictures from a secular context refer to this part of the wedding ceremony. The primary function of these visual representations of marriage was the illustration of the text, in both canon law manuscripts and medieval literature. Therefore, they are, besides the textual transmission, valuable sources and crucial interpretive keys for understanding the legal and socio-cultural dimensions that shaped the institution of marriage in medieval Europe. Full article

This study focuses on the material characterisation of a collection of 19th-century watercolour replicas that reproduce ancient Egyptian mural paintings and illuminated decorations from medieval manuscripts. Non-contact analyses, including macro-X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and fibre-optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), were employed to examine the composition of the painting materials, particularly the pigments. The findings are contextualised through archival research into 19th-century technical sources on historical painting and illuminating practices, as well as contemporaneous pigment catalogues that reported commercial prices. Ultimately, this research aimed to explore whether 19th-century artists engaged with historical material practices beyond mere visual representation in their depictions of historical subjects. The results obtained from the replicas of medieval illuminations are groundbreaking, as they challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions. Notably, the use of pigments such as minium and ultramarine blue, which were held in high regard during the Middle Ages, along with the use of chalk in the preparation of the support, suggest that, in an industrialised world where engagement with material culture was increasingly driven by commercial profit, some academic circles still sought to explore and preserve selected historical material practices in the art of painting. Full article