2010  ~ Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy. Penn. State Press, 2009.

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The emergence of modern Western artwork is sometimes cast as a slow process of secularization, with the devotional charge of images giving way in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to a focus on the beauty and innovation of the artwork itself. Our understanding of art in this pivotal age is badly distorted, focused almost exclusively on religious and civic images. Even many Renaissance specialists believe that little secular painting survives before the late fifteenth century, and its appearance becomes a further argument for the secularizing of art.

This book asks how history changes when a longer record of secular art is explored. It is the first study in any language of the decoration of Italian palaces and homes between 1300 and the mid-Quattrocento, and it argues that early secular painting was crucial to the development of modern ideas of art. Of the cycles discussed, some have been studied and published, but most are essentially unknown. A first aim is to enrich understanding of the early Renaissance by introducing a whole corpus of secular painting that has been too long overlooked. Yet Painted Palaces is not a study of iconography. In examining the prehistory of painted rooms like Mantegna s Camera Picta, the larger goal is to rethink the history of early Renaissance art.

2009 ~  Siân Echard Printing the Middle Ages. U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings.

Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

2008 ~ Fiona J. Griffiths The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.  

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In The Garden of Delights, Griffiths offers the first major study of the Hortus deliciarum, a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law written both by and explicitly for women at the end of the twelfth century. In so doing she provides a brilliantly persuasive new reading of female monastic culture. Through careful analysis of the contents, structure, and organization of the Hortus, Griffiths argues for women's profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the period on a level previously thought unimaginable, overturning the assumption that women were largely excluded from the "renaissance" and "reform" of this period. As a work of scholarship that drew from a wide range of sources, both monastic and scholastic, the Hortusprovides a witness to the richness of women's reading practices within the cloister, demonstrating that it was possible, even late into the twelfth century, for communities of religious women to pursue an educational program that rivaled that available to men. At the same time, the manuscript's reformist agenda reveals how women engaged the pressing spiritual questions of the day, even going so far as to criticize priests and other churchmen who fell short of their reformist ideals. Through her wide-ranging examination of the texts and images of the Hortus, their sources, composition, and function, Griffiths offers an integrated understanding of the whole manuscript, one which highlights women's Latin learning and orthodox spirituality. The Garden of Delights contributes to some of the most urgent questions concerning medieval religious women, the interplay of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement, to discussions concerning women scribes and writers, women readers, female authorship and authority, and the visual culture of female communities. It will be of interest to art historians, scholars of women's and gender studies, historians of medieval religion, education, and theology, and literary scholars studying questions of female authorship and models of women's reading.

2006  ~ Cynthia Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earltoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140-1365. Four Courts Press, 2005.

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In the century or so after 1125 significant numbers of Anglo-Norman and European noblemen settled in Scotland at the invitation of the crown, chiefly in the lowlands. North of the Forth, however, lay large provincial lordships ruled on behalf of the king by hereditary lords known as ‘mormaers’. Even after the arrival of the newcomers, the native rulers of this area, Gaelic speakers for the most part, remained a small, powerful, and largely independent group. Using the lordships of Strathearn and Lennox as focal points, this book explores the complex nature of the encounter between the cultures of the Gaels and the Europeans, and shows how important were native customs and practices in the making of the later medieval kingdom.

2005  ~  Paul Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

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Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age presents the reader with seven engaging studies of cultural life and thought in the Carolingian world: Why did Charlemagne have a mustache and why did hair matter? Why did the king own peacocks and other exotic animals? Why was he writing in bed and could he write at all? How did medieval kings become stars? How were secrets kept and conveyed in the early Middle Ages? Does the world age with the aged? And why did early medieval peoples believe in storm- and hailmakers? The answers, Dutton finds, are often surprising.