To appreciate England’s earliest Gothic buildings and artthe great cathedrals at Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Wells and contemporary Gothic texts and imagesit is necessary to understand the religious and ethical ideals of the individuals and communities who sponsored them. Paul Binski’s fascinating new book offers a radical new perspective on English art, architecture, social formation, and religious imagination during this pivotal period.
Binski reveals that the Church, although authoritarian and undergoing reform, was able to come to terms with new developments in society and technology as well as with the fact of social and religious diversity. He explains how varying ideals of personal sanctity were bound up with radical new notions of leadership, personal ethics, and styles of religious devotion and how ideas of reform of worship, personal conduct, and art affected the community at large.

Becket s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300

Arts & Photography

Binski, Paul

History & Criticism

Paul Mellon Centre BA

In this wide-ranging, eloquent book, Paul Binski sheds new light on one of the greatest periods of English art and architecture, offering ground-breaking arguments about the role of invention and the powers of Gothic art. His richly documented study locates what became known as the Decorated Style within patterns of commissioning, designing, and imagining whose origins lay in pre-Gothic art. By examining notions of what was extraordinary, re-evaluating medieval ideas of authorship, and restoring economic considerations to the debate, Binski sets English visual art of the early 14th century in a broad European context and also within the aesthetic discourses of the medieval period. The author, stressing the continuum between art and architecture, challenges understandings about agency, modernity, hierarchy, and marginality. His book makes a powerful case for the restoration of the category of the aesthetic to the understanding of medieval art. Generously illustrated with hundreds of images, Gothic Wonder traces the impact of English art in Continental Europe, ending with the Black Death and the literary uses of the architectural in works by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers.

Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Paul Mellon Centre

In this beautifully illustrated study, Paul Binski offers a new account of sculpture in England and northwestern Europe between c. 1000 and 1500, examining Romanesque and Gothic art as a form of persuasion. Binski applies rhetorical analysis to a wide variety of stone and wood sculpture from such places as Wells, Westminster, Compostela, Reims, Chartres, and Naumberg. He argues that medieval sculpture not only conveyed information but also created experiences for the subjects who formed its audience. Without rejecting the intellectual ambitions of Gothic art, Binski suggests that surface effects, ornament, color, variety, and discord served a variety of purposes. In a critique of recent affective and materialist accounts of sculpture and allied arts, he proposes that all materials are shaped by human intentionality and artifice, and have a “poetic.” Exploring the imagery of growth, change, and decay, as well as the powers of fear and pleasure, Binski allows us to use the language and ideas of the Middle Ages in the close reading of artifacts.

Gothic Sculpture (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Detailed study and discussion of the pivotal thirteenth century wall-painting.

The Painted Chamber at Westminster

History

Europe

Society of Antiquaries

Cambridge University Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts is of international significance. It originates in the medieval university and stands alongside the holdings of the colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The University Library contains major European examples of medieval illumination from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, with acknowledged masterpieces of Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance book art, as well as illuminated literary texts, including the first complete Chaucer manuscript. This catalog provides scholars and researchers easy access to the University Library's illuminated manuscripts, evaluating the importance of many of them for the very first time. It contains descriptions of famous manuscripts, for example the Life of Edward the Confessor attributed to Matthew Paris, as well as hundreds of lesser-known items. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the catalog contains descriptions of individual manuscripts with up-to-date assessments of their style, origins and importance, together with bibliographical references.

Western Illuminated Manuscripts: A Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library

Zutshi, Patrick

Cambridge University Press

, 224 pages, with 11 colour and 89 black &amp; white illustrations

MEDIEVAL DEATH

Historical Study & Educational Resources

BRITISH MUSEUM

Physical description: 72p. : illus. (some col.). Summary: From the MEDIEVAL CRAFTSMEN series, an illustrated account of medieval painting, with an analysis of each stage of fresco and stucco painting, which also examines the social origins, careers, and status of the painters. Subject: Painting & paintings. Art/ General. Panel painting - Mural painting and decoration - Medieval. Painters. Artists - Painting - Workshops - Mediaeval - Middle Ages. Materials & techniques - Styles and periods - history. Series: Medieval craftsmen. Other names: British Museum. Genre: Illustrated, text.

Painters

Medieval Death is an absorbing study of the social, theological, and cultural issues involved in death and dying in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the early sixteenth century. Drawing on both archaeological and art historical sources, Paul Binski examines pagan and Christian attitudes towards the dead, the aesthetics of death and the body, burial ritual and mortuary practice. The evidence is accumulated from a wide variety of medieval thinkers and images, including the macabre illustrations of the Dance of Death and other popular themes in art and literature, which reflect the medieval obsession with notions of humility, penitence, and the dangers of bodily corruption. The author discusses the impact of the Black Death on late medieval art and examines the development of the medieval tomb, showing the changing attitudes towards the commemoration of the dead between late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. In the final chapter the progress of the soul after death is studied through the powerful descriptions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Dante and other writers and through portrayals of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse in sculpture and large-scale painting.

Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

NCROL

(East Anglian) The 14th-century panel painting discovered in 1927 in a stable at Thornham Hall in Suffolk was one of the most remarkable finds this century in the field of medieval English painting. This detailed study of the retable, now in the church at Thornham Parva, and an unprovenanced panel painting in the Museé de Cluny, proves that they are the table and frontal of the same altar —the only such survival anywhere in north-west Europe. Further analysis of the iconography and style of the panels shows that they are East Anglian works datable to the second quarter of the 14th century.

Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornham Parva Retable and the Musee de Cluny Frontal

Norton, Christopher

Park, David

World

Boydell Press

If you have only the slightest of interest in the decoration of Medieval Manuscripts you should be planning a visit to Cambridge before the end of the year; actually before December 11th, for that is when this most fantastic of exhibitions closes. Prompted perhaps by the recent acquisition of the newly discovered Macclesfield Psalter, the University has assembled the best of its manuscripts and those of its colleges in a double exhibition, partly in the Fitzwilliam Museum and partly in the University Library. There, in suitably subdued lighting, the Illuminations of the Middle Ages shine brightly forth - the skilful handiwork of master craftsmen-artists spanning a thousand years. The manuscripts range from the Gospels that Augustine brought with him to Canterbury at the end of the sixth century to the letters patent, writs and charters issued to the University and its Colleges by the later Medieval and Tudor monarchs. It is a breathtaking collection. The manuscripts and the catalogue are cleverly arranged thematically according to their contents and function: The Coming of Christianity, The Bible and its Study, Liturgy and the Offices, Private Devotion, Humanistic manuscripts, and so on, and chronologically within each section. What do I mention next? Will my favourites be yours? The vivid coloured drawings in the Eadwine Psalter, the intense blues and greens of the Bury Bible, countless lively and intricate miniatures in Books of Hours and Psalters, many with floriated backgrounds to inspire William Morris, or Athelstan presenting a book to Saint Cuthbert; and there are musical and scientific and zoological illuminations; and a fine picture of Tully; and, of course, the Macclesfield Psalter itself. The Macclesfield Psalter is Cambridge's latest spectacular acquisition; and it has a room to itself. Described as "the most important medieval illuminated manuscript found in Britain in living memory" it was written and illuminated in East Anglia about 1330. Its illumination is a combination of refined beauty and ribald humour, all depicted in glowing gold and rare pigments. The Psalter has been taken apart which allows the leaves to be displayed separately, and a large number of illuminations to be viewed in the exhibition hence the gallery to itself. It is a once-in-lifetime opportunity to see so much of this spectacular manuscript at one time. This catalogue is filled with authoritative descriptions by Paul Binski, Rosamund McKitterick, Teresa Webber, Nigel Morgan, Jonathan Alexander, Christopher de Hamel, Nicolas Rogers and Stella Panayotova.

The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Medieval Book Production (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History)

Panayotova, Stella

Harvey Miller

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