Icon and Devotion offers the first extensive presentation in English of the making and meaning of Russian icons. The craft of icon-making is set into the context of forms of worship that emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. Oleg Tarasov shows how icons have held a special place in Russian consciousness because they represented idealized images of Holy Russia. He also looks closely at how and why icons were made. Wonder-working saints and the leaders of such religious schisms as the Old Believers appear in these pages, which are illustrated in halftones with miniature paintings, lithographs and engravings never before published in the English-speaking world. By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.

The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense," the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviors, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion’s sensory and material practice. Sensational Religion refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity’s metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviors, affects, and beliefs.

Unrivalled Influence explores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Written by one of the world's foremost historians of the Byzantine millennium, this landmark book evokes the complex and exotic world of Byzantium's women, from empresses and saints to uneducated rural widows. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, Judith Herrin sheds light on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters. She looks at women's interactions with eunuchs, the in-between gender in Byzantine society, and shows how women defended their rights to hold land. Herrin describes how they controlled their inheritances, participated in urban crowds demanding the dismissal of corrupt officials, followed the processions of holy icons and relics, and marked religious feasts with liturgical celebrations, market activity, and holiday pleasures. The vivid portraits that emerge here reveal how women exerted an unrivalled influence on the patriarchal society of Byzantium, and remained active participants in the many changes that occurred throughout the empire's millennial history. Unrivalled Influence brings together Herrin's finest essays on women and gender written throughout the long span of her esteemed career. This volume includes three new essays published here for the very first time and a new general introduction by Herrin. She also provides a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader views about women and Byzantium.

This book explores the liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the liturgy carries can produce. Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

The volume Paradigms of Pilgrimage: FromDevotional Journey to (Religious)Tourism endeavours to present someinsights into the multi-layered significance of pilgrimage, starting from a theoretical approach and then addressing specific situations. The first two parts deal chronologically with instances of traditional images of pilgrimage and the last two parts move towards analysing modern and post-modern examples of journeys with a spiritual purpose. Each chapter is independent and provides an original rendering of the concept of pilgrimage. The authors use various approaches to discuss the notion of pilgrimage and the images interconnect creating an irregular, but harmonious mosaic. Le volume Paradigmes du pèlerinage : du voyage dévotionnel au tourisme (religieux) vise à présenter les différentes facettes du pèlerinage, en partant d'une approche théorique et en proposant ensuite des situations spéciiques. Les deux premières parti esexaminent, chronologiquement, les exemples d'images traditionnelles de pèlerinage tandis que les deux dernières parties s'orientent vers l'analyse d'exemples modernes et postmodernes des voyages à travers la spiritualité. Chaque chapitre est indépendant et montre une interprétation originale de la notion de pèlerinage. Les auteurs utilisent diverses approches pour discuter de la notion de pèlerinage et les images s'interconnectent en créant une mosaı̈que irrégulière, mais harmonieuse.

This book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can produce. The conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion, cosmology and art. Aidan Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture. A groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of eco–art history, the book examines architecture, paintings, photography, and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers, temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in environmental humanities and South Asian art history. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/climate-change-and-the-art-of-devotion

Focuses on one of the most attractive features of late medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her prayer-book.

Using epigrammatic poetry as a framework, investigates the interplay between art and religious devotion in the later Byzantine period.