Author: Richard Hodges
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Author: Richard Hodges
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 13

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Author: Richard Hodges
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801434167
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Beginning in 1981, Richard Hodges supervised the excavation of the Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, one of the great centers of Dark Age Europe, situated in spectacular mountain country in central Italy. The existence of the monastery had long been known from a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript and the excavations threw vivid light on its epic history. This richly illustrated book tells of the discoveries made by Hodges's team, with the Samnite and Roman origins of the site charted in detail, and the magnificence of the monastery's early medieval period fully elaborated. Built around a modest eighth-century monastery, the ninth-century monastic city was grandiose, remarkable for its architecture and the wealth of its artistic culture. Hodges documents the excavations of the great ninth-century abbey church of San Vincenzo Maggiore, part of the cloisters, the distinguished guests? palace, the workshops, cemeteries, and many smaller buildings. San Vincenzo, with its rich decor and opulent material culture, is revealed as a model Carolingian monastery, a unique monument to the Carolingian Renaissance in Europe. Light in the Dark Ages traces the history of San Vincenzo from the monastery's spectacular rise as a result of Charlemagne's patronage to its cataclysmic sack by Arab marauders in 881, demonstrating the relation between the treasures unearthed and their political context.

Author: John Mitchell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, Italian
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Author: Richard Hodges
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christian antiquities
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Author: Neil Christie
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178570236X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 970

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Twenty-three contributions by leading archaeologists from across Europe explore the varied forms, functions and significances of fortified settlements in the 8th to 10th centuries AD. These could be sites of strongly martial nature, upland retreats, monastic enclosures, rural seats, island bases, or urban nuclei. But they were all expressions of control - of states, frontiers, lands, materials, communities - and ones defined by walls, ramparts or enclosing banks. Papers run from Irish cashels to Welsh and Pictish strongholds, Saxon burhs, Viking fortresses, Byzantine castra, Carolingian creations, Venetian barricades, Slavic strongholds, and Bulgarian central places, and coverage extends fully from northwest Europe, to central Europe, the northern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Strongly informed by recent fieldwork and excavations, but drawing also where available on the documentary record, this important collection provides fully up-to-date reviews and analyses of the archaeology of the distinctive settlement forms that characterized Europe in the Early Middle Ages.

Author: John Mitchell
Publisher: Pindar Press
ISBN: 1915837111
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 765

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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.

Author: John Howe
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Historians typically single out the hundred-year period from about 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal moment in the history of the Latin Church, for it was then that the Gregorian Reform movement established the ecclesiastical structure that would ensure Rome’s dominance throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In Before the Gregorian Reform John Howe challenges this familiar narrative by examining earlier, "pre-Gregorian" reform efforts within the Church. He finds that they were more extensive and widespread than previously thought and that they actually established a foundation for the subsequent Gregorian Reform movement. The low point in the history of Christendom came in the late ninth and early tenth centuries—a period when much of Europe was overwhelmed by barbarian raids and widespread civil disorder, which left the Church in a state of disarray. As Howe shows, however, the destruction gave rise to creativity. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt churches and constructed new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum. Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were constructed to staff the new churches. Moreover, Howe shows that these reform efforts paralleled broader economic, social, and cultural trends in Western Europe including the revival of long-distance trade, the rise of technology, and the emergence of feudal lordship. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world. Before the Gregorian Reform challenges us to rethink the history of the Church and its place in the broader narrative of European history. Compellingly written and generously illustrated, it is a book for all medievalists as well as general readers interested in the Middle Ages and Church history.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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