BiblioVault - Books by Reyerson, Kathryn

City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe

Barbara Hanawalt

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Medieval Europe is known for its sense of ceremony and drama. Knightings, tournaments, coronations, religious processions, and even private celebrations such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals were occasions for ritual, feasting, and public display. This volume is the first to take a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. Bringing together leading scholars in history, art history, and literature, this interdisciplinary collection sets new standards for the study of medieval popular culture.

Drawing examples from Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, most of them in the fifteenth century, the authors explore the uses of ceremony as statements of political power, as pleas for divine intercession, and as expressions of popular culture. Their essays show us spectacles meant to confirm events such as victories, the signing of a city charter, or the coronation of a king. In other circumstances, the spectacle acts as a battleground where a struggle for the control of the metaphors of power is played out between factions within cities or between cities and kings. Still other ceremonies called upon divine spiritual powers in the hope that their intervention might save the urban inhabitants. We see here a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements, a society reaching the height of sophistication in its manipulation of popular and elite culture for grand shows.

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The Medieval Castle

Romance and Reality

Kathryn L. Reyerson and Faye Powe, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1991

The Medieval Castle was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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The Medieval Mediterranean

Cross-Cultural Contacts

Marilyn J. Chiat and Kathryn L. Reyerson, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1991

The Medieval Mediterranean was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Three faiths—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—became the dominant religions of western civilization in the course of the Middle Ages. Within each, there is and was great cultural and ethnic diversity. The complex relationships today among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean, the tensions and attempts at resolution of conflicts among these groups, have their roots in the Middle Ages."

Contributors: Oleg Grabar, The Meaning of the Dome of the Rock; Oliver Nicholson, Golden Age and the End of the World: Myths of Mediterranean Life from Lactantius to Joshua the Stylite; Ivan Havener, OSB, Two Early Anecdotes Concerning Gregory the Great from the Greek Tradition; Catherine B. Asher, The Public Baths of Medieval Spain: An Architectural Study; Jonathan M. Bloom, The Revival of Early Islamic Architecture by the Umayyads of Spain; Marvin Mills, Scenario for a Roman Provenance for the Mosque of Cordoba; Sybil H. Mintz, The Carpet Pages of the Spanish-Hebrew Farhi Bible; Ann Thorson Walton, The Three Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace: A Study of Christian Iconography; W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Pre-Carolingian Concepts of Architectural Planning; Clara Estow, Iberia and North Africa: A Comparative View of Religious and Sexual Discrimination in a Medieval Plural Society; Moshe Sokolow, Arabic Books in Jewish Libraries: The Evidence of Genizah Booklist; Leslie S. B. MacCoull, Coptic Alchemy and Craft Technology in Islamic Egypt: The Papyrological Evidence; Thomas S. Noonan, Technology Transfer Between Byzantium and Eastern Europe: A Case Study of the Glass Industry in Early Russia; Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden, Black and White: Contact with the Mediterranean World in Medieval German Narrative; Gerhard Weiss, The Pilgrim as Tourist: Travels to the Holy Land as Reflected in the Published Accounts of German Pilgrims Between 1450 and 1550

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