New Distributed Titles Fall 2009 - Oxbow Books

Behaving Like Fools
Voice, Gesture, and Laughter in Texts, Manuscripts, and Early Books
edited by L Perry and A Schwartz
manuscript studies medieval studies
Pindar Press – Newly distributed by DBBC!
Studies in Manuscript Illumination, 1200–1400
by Lucy Freeman Sandler
This volume brings together twenty-eight of Professor Sandler’s studies,
focusing on illustrated manuscripts produced in England in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, particularly on the illuminated psalters. They are
arranged under four headings, ‘Marginalia and Word Imagery,’ ‘Devotional,
Visionary and Self-Images,’ ‘Illustrated Encyclopedias and Scholarly Texts,’
and ‘Studies of Individual Manuscripts, Artists and Themes.’ The marginal
illustrations in the psalters are a topic of particular interest, and there are
a number of iconographic studies derived from this material. A second
section features essays that look at the effect of manuscript imagery on
its viewing, reading, and meditating audience. The third section deals with the illustrated encyclopedias of the
period. A final section deals with a number of manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in
particular East Anglian works such as the Peterborough and Ramsey Psalters.
806p, 218 illus, hardback, 9781904597391, $300.00(s), Pindar Press, December 2008.
Lombard Legacy
Cultural Strategies and the Visual Arts in Early Medieval Italy
by John Mitchell
Using the great south-Italian monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, one of the best preserved
monasteries of the earliest Middle Ages, as a case-study and heuristic paradigm, John Mitchell has
engaged in a wide-ranging examination of the ways in which visual culture was developed and deployed
by ambitious states and institutions in early medieval Europe. The present volume includes
studies on the cultural dynamics of Italy and its contribution to the visual complexion of Europe in
the period, as well as essays on many aspects of the artistic culture of San Vincenzo, including a
series of papers on the display of script in the physical fabric of the monastery and the prominent
role it played in its self-image.
644p, 294 illus, hardback, 9781904597346, $300.00(s), Pindar Press, September 2009.
The period from 1200 to 1600 was the golden age of fools. There is almost no Arthurian hero without
a phase of madness, and almost no gothic church without mocking misericords, not to speak of
the spread of the literature and iconography of the fool around 1500. But can we read them appropriately?
Is it possible to reconstruct the fascination that fools exerted on (almost) everyone’s mind
in medieval and early modern Europe? While modern theories give us the analytical tools to explore
this subject, we are faced with the paradox that by striving to understand fools and foolishness we
no longer accept their ways but impose rational categories on them. Together these essays propose
one way out of this dilemma.
350p, 2 col & 40 b/w illus, hardback, 9782503531571, $116.00, Brepols Publishers, December 2009,
International Medieval Research 17.
Studies in Late Medieval
Illumination and Art
by Robert G Calkins
This volume brings together eighteen of the author’s papers, concentrating
on late medieval manuscript illumination.
Contents: I. Workshop Practices revealed by Codicology: The
Brussels Hours Reevaluated; An Italian in Paris: The Master of the
Brussels Initials and His Participation in the French Book Industry;
Stages of Execution: Procedures of Illumination as Revealed in
an Unfinished Book of Hours; Traditions of Dutch Illumination;
Distribution of Labor -The Illuminators of the Hours of Catherine
of Cleves and their Workshop; Additional Lacunae in the Lambeth
Bible; Gerard Horenbout and His Associates: Illuminating Activities
in Ghent 1480-1521. II. Sequence and Emphasis: Microforms and
the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript; Pictorial Emphasis in Early
Biblical Manuscripts; Decorative Sequence and Liturgical Crescendo
in the Drogo Sacramentary; Narrative in Image and Text in Medieval
Illuminated Manuscripts. III. Interpretations: The Master of the
Franciscan Breviary; Parallels between Incunabula and Manuscripts
from the Circle of the Master of Catherine of Cleves; The Question of
the Origin of the Master of Catherine of Cleves; Sacred Image and
Illusion in Late Flemish Manuscripts; Secular Objects and Their implications
in Early Netherlandish Painting; Piero de’ Crescenzi and
the Medieval Garden; The Cathedral as Text.
538p, 250 illus, hardback, 9781904597407, $300.00(s),
Pindar Press, September 2009.
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