Full Description
This book explores the ways in which medieval Christians sought to memorialize the deceased: with tombs, cenotaphs, altars and other furnishings connected to a real or symbolic burial site.
Reverent memorial for the dead was the inspiration for the production of a significant category of artworks during the Middle Ages - artworks aimed as much at the laity as at the clergy, and intended to maintain, symbolically, the presence of the dead. Memoria, the term that describes the formal, liturgical memory of the dead, also includes artworks intended to house and honour the deceased.
A dozen essays analyze strategies for commemoration from the 4th - 15th century: the means by which human memory could be activated or manipulated through the interaction between monuments, their setting, and the visitor. Building upon from the growing body of literature on memory in the Middle Ages, the collection focuses on the tomb monument and its context as a complex to define what is to be remembered, to fix memory, and to facilitate recollection.
The papers were originally presented at the 1994 meetings of the College Art Association, the International Congresses of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the University of Leeds, England, in 1995.
Contents
The editors, List of contributors, List of figures, List of abbreviations, Acknowledgments, Introduction by Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast, I. The tomb: between the living and the dead, 1. Souvenir, synaesthesia, and the sepulcrum Domini: sensory stimuli as memory stratagems, 2. Lament for a lost Queen: the sarcophagus of Doña Blanca in Nájera, 3. The tomb as prompter for the chantry: four examples from Late Medieval England, 4. Activating the effigy: Donatello's Pecci Tomb in Siena Cathedral, 5. Commemorating a real bastard: the chapel of Alvaro de Luna, II. Shaping communal memory, 6. The font is a kind of grave: remembrance in the Via Latina catacombs, 7. Memory and the social landscape in eleventh-century Upplandic commemorative practice, 8. Stolen property: St Mark's first Venetian tomb and the politics of communal memory, 9. Dream images, memoria, and the Heribert Shrine, 10. The Queen's body and institutional memory: the tomb of Adelaide of Maurienne, 11. Monumenta et memoriae: the thirteenth-century episcopal pantheon of Léon Cathedral, Index
