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Tag: manuscript culture

Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Melissa Herman, eds. The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy

Published by CI on March 15, 2017

Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Melissa Herman, eds. The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015. xiii, 334p., ill. ISBN 9781846825613. £65.00 (hardcover).

This collected volume brings together 19 essays and explorations of cultural expressions in the medieval world. Its material presentation is enhanced by a beautiful design and numerous black-and-white and full-color images that support each chapter. From a purely aesthetic perspective, the book is both breathtaking and immediately appealing.

Echoing the subtitle of the book, the essays in the book are tied together by their focused discussion on transitions, transformations, and taxonomies of the Middle Ages.

Continue readingMeg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Melissa Herman, eds. The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy

Wendy Wall. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen

Published by CI on November 11, 2016

Wendy Wall. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. xii, 312p., black and white ill. ISBN 9780812247589. US $69.95 (hardcover).

Umberto Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space takes that simple, domestic form and explodes it geometrically into a complex structure quite unlike a bottle, yet derived from it. In Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, Wendy Wall does something very like this for early modern English recipes, expanding these domestic artifacts into every implication of their structure and context.

Continue readingWendy Wall. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen

Emily Steiner and Lynn Ransom, eds. Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts

Published by CI on November 11, 2016

Emily Steiner and Lynn Ransom, eds. Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts. Philadelphia: Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies / University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. x, 162 p., 18 colour plates, 9 b/w ill. ISBN 9780812247596. US $45.00; UK £29.50 (hardback).

This book assembles a short collection of essays broadly relating to the different ways in which knowledge in the medieval world was organised and classified in and by manuscripts and book-collecting culture. Starting life as papers presented at an annual Schoenberg symposium on manuscript studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the volume functions as something of a festschrift for the founder of Penn Libraries’ Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, the late Lawrence J. Schoenberg, and it offers six complementary approaches to how manuscript evidence may be used to provide insights on the ways in which literary, scientific, geographic, devotional, and hagiographic knowledge was categorised and interpreted in the later Middle Ages.

Continue readingEmily Steiner and Lynn Ransom, eds. Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts

Thomas Haye and Johannes Helmrath, eds. Codex im Diskurs

Published by CI on July 3, 2016

Thomas Haye and Johannes Helmrath, eds. Codex im Diskurs. Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 25. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014. 272 p., ill. ISBN 9783447102551. €62.00 (hardcover).

This volume of tightly focused essays in German consists of papers that were originally presented at the second of three conferences on the history and theory of the medieval manuscript book at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. As a whole, it addresses the question of how medieval and early modern scholars and authorities thought and expressed themselves about codices.

Continue readingThomas Haye and Johannes Helmrath, eds. Codex im Diskurs