New forms of art, culture and theory have recently emerged through engagements with the realities of the social world and everyday life which are not primarily about representation but rather about participation and narration. These new forms are based on viewer responses and engagement, thus performatively creating open-ended situations rather than autonomous works with closure. Performative theory, drawing mostly on studies of speech acts, proves adequate to describe and analyse these new forms of art and culture and their engagement with the real. Performative Realism scrutinizes a range of contemporary works that experiment with audience participation and processuality within art and culture, as well as it takes issue with theories of performativity and performance. Performative Realism contains contributions from leading Danish scholars working within a broad range of academic fields such as Media Studies, Art History, Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies. The issues addressed covers Scandinavian as well as international installation art, performance art, theatre, photography, movies, literature and role-playing.

Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Museum Tusculanum Press

This book is the first detailed analysis of an exquisitely illuminated thirteenth-century Parisian manuscript (The Royal Library, Copenhagen) which was owned by Christina of Norway (1234-1262), daughter of Håkon IV and wife of Philip of Castile and León. New information is provided about the Psalter?'s medieval and later components, its liturgical and other functions, missing illuminations and texts, as well as its provenance and date. Furthermore, the stylistic and iconographic similarities between the Psalter and some of the most important manuscripts illuminated in Paris in the Period, like the three-volume Moralized Bibles, are discussed. Suggestions also are made about the meanings the texts and images might have had for their intended audience.

The Christina Psalter: A Study of the Images and Texts in a French Early Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscript

Vidas, Marina

Religion & Spirituality

Visual Authorship is a collection of essays which offers a new approach to the study of authorship. The contributors point out that individual creativity is essential in the richly faceted media landscape of today. The individual creativity and the role of authorship are discussed in relation to film, television, computer games and the Internet. Theories of cognition and emotion offer new tools for the understanding of visual aesthetics; they explain why works of art are created by individuals and not by discourses and ideologies. Several contributors analyse in detail the works of Lars von Trier.

Visual Authorship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

 Rosenborg Castle houses one of the finest treasure collections in Europe. The castle, which was built as a summer residence in Copenhagen, Denmark, by Christian IV of Denmark-Norway in the period 1606–1634, contains, among other things, the coronation regalia, jewelry, weapons, and objects of rock crystal, hardstones, ivory, and narwhal tusk. With Rosenborg’s two oldest inventories from 1696 and 1718 as the point of departure, the present work charts the making of the treasure collection and its contents and offers a unique insight into the items of the collection in words and images. The Treasure Collection at Rosenborg Castle is the result of years of laborious research. The author, Jørgen Hein, combines his immense knowledge about the items and the historical facts of the treasure collection with a vivid and engrossing narrative, and with its three exclusive volumes the work offers a fascinating foray into the world of pomp and circumstance that surrounded the Danish-Norwegian kings in the period between 1500 and 1900.

The Treasure Collection at Rosenborg Castle: The Inventories of 1696 and 1718

Hein, Jørgen

As the locus of the Christian ritual, the altar has often been the object of artistic attention. Decorating the Lord’s Table treats the profusion of sumptuously ornate altars produced in various media during the European Middle Ages. Many of the altars display images of Christ, the saints, and Biblical personages, often in conjunction with narrative cycles depicting the lives of Christ and various saints. Investigating interrelationships between image and altar in the light of important recent methodological developments in the field of art history, the essays in this book treat themes such as the human body, materiality, pictorial narrative, and liturgy, and focus on evidence from Italian, German, and Scandinavian contexts.

Decorating the Lord's Table: On the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle Ages

Partly because of alchemy’s dismissal from the Parnassus of rational sciences, the interplay between this esoteric knowledge and the visual arts is still a surprisingly neglected area. This collection of articles, covering the time span from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century, challenges the current neglect. The contributors cast new light on a range or related topics, including alchemical gender symbolism in renaissance, mannerist, and modernist art; alchemical ideas of transformation in Italian fifteenth-century landscape imagery; Netherlandish seventeenth-century portrayals of alchemists; and alchemy’s tortured status as a forerunner of photography.

Art and Alchemy

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390) is one of the three Greek church fathers from Cappadocia. This book explores both his theology – which earned him the honorary title ”the Theologian” – and his general importance as an independent thinker, prolific writer, orator, and poet.
 Gregory has often been in the shadow of the other Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. This book demonstrates his central position in the formation of a hellenized Christian culture as well as his topicality today. More than any other ancient personality, save perhaps for Cicero and Augustine, Gregory recreates his inner life in his writings, and allows us to participate directly in the exciting intellectual and emotional climate of late antiquity. 
The reader is offered illuminating discussions of Gregory’s exposition of the Trinity, his doctrine of deification, his theory of mental images, and his view of the ideal human self. Other contributions take his funeral orations, letters, and autobiographical poetry as points of departure for the study of family relations, gender attitudes, educational ideals, and literary accomplishments. In addition, light is shed on Gregory’s seldom-studied poetical oeuvre and his impact on Byzantine theology and literature. 
The contributors are international specialists in patristics, church history, philosophy, Classical and Byzantine studies, and literary rhetoric.

Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections

Literature & Fiction

This volume contains the edition of a new manuscript with Petese Stories from the Tebtunis temple library, dating to the period around 100 AD. The Petese Stories is a compilation of seventy stories about the virtues and vices of women. The numerous stories were compiled on the orders of the prophet Petese of Heliopolis that they may serve as a literary testament by which he would be remembered. Petese was, according to literary tradition, Plato?s Egyptian instructor in astrology. The composition seems to have been modeled on the fundamental Myth of the Sun's Eye. The overall structural pattern of the text is very similar to the Arabian Nights; a frame story forms the introduction as well as the fabric into which the long series of shorter tales are woven. Among the stories preserved in the new manuscript one is particularly remarkable in that it is known from a translation by Herodotus, the so-called Pheros Story (Book II, chap. 111).

The Petese Stories II (CNI Publications 29: The Carlsberg Papyri, 6)

Ryholt, Kim

Politics & Social Sciences

This volume is mainly dedicated to hieratic texts from the Tebtunis temple library. It begins with a survey of this large body of material, which, for convenience, also includes the much more sparse hieroglyphic material from the library. The survey is followed by editions of the Opening of the Mouth Ritual, the Sokar Ritual, the Votive Cubit, an Osiris liturgy and a list of book titles. German text.

Hieratic Texts from the Collection (Carlsberg Papyri 7) (The Carlsberg Papyri)

Mythology is usually reserved for non-Christian religions. However, the adoption of Christianity in northern and east-central Europe between ca. 1000 and 1300 can be adequately described as a myth-making process: local saints were added to the Christian pantheon in all regions entering Latin Europe. The present collection explores the links between local sanctity and the making of national myths in medieval historical writing. By bringing together specialists in history and literature of the European periphery in question, The contributions convincingly argue that the writing of history and saints’ lives from this pioneering period are attempts at creating cultural foundation myths.

The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000-1300)

History

Europe

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