Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural histor... more Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe.
This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.
In our electronic age, we are accustomed to the use of icons, symbols, graphs, charts, diagrams a... more In our electronic age, we are accustomed to the use of icons, symbols, graphs, charts, diagrams and visualisations as part of the vocabulary of communication. But this rich ecosystem is far from a modern phenomenon. Early medieval manuscripts demonstrate that their makers and readers achieved very sophisticated levels of “graphicacy”. When considered from this perspective, many elements familiar to students of manuscript decoration - embellished characters in scripts, decorated initials, monograms, graphic symbols, assembly marks, diagrammatic structures, frames, symbolic ornaments, musical notation - are revealed to be not minor, incidental marks but crucial elements within the larger sign systems of manuscripts.
This interdisciplinary volume is the first to discuss the conflation of text and image with a specific focus on the appearance of various graphic devices in manuscript culture. By looking at their many forms as they appear from the fourth century to their full maturity in the long ninth century, its contributors demonstrate the importance of these symbols to understanding medieval culture.
Contributors: Tina Bawden, Michelle P. Brown, Leslie Brubaker, David Ganz, Ildar H. Garipzanov, Cynthia Hahn, Catherine E. Karkov, Herbert L. Kessler, Beatrice Kitzinger, Kallirroe Linardou, Lawrence Nees, Eric Palazzo, Benjamin C. Tilghman.
This paper provides the first edition and thorough examination of marginal notes added to a ninth... more This paper provides the first edition and thorough examination of marginal notes added to a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript (Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 424). A detailed paleographic, codicological, linguistic, and historical analysis of these additions allows us not only to trace their provenance to the early tenth-century see of Laon but also to show that their anonymous author was a high-status cleric on the episcopal staff. The range of his practical marginaliawhich included polyptych notes, lists of payments, and a list of namespoints at various accounting practices he was involved in and indicates that he played an important role in facilitating the social power of ecclesiastical lordship over its localities. * I would like to thank John Contreni, Stefan Esders, and the anonymous readers for this journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This publication has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101018645).
... Age Scandina-via, which has recently become the subject of an international research project ... more ... Age Scandina-via, which has recently become the subject of an international research project led by ... 1): the Black Earth area at Kau-pang (Skaare 1976, 4546; Skre and Stylegar 2004, 29 ... Ninth-century Kaupang was the main trading settlement in the region similar in role to ...
Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mod... more Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mode of communication, graphicacy, typical of the modern age with its ever-increasing role of visual media in social life. This essay questions this tendency to see graphicacy as a by-product of modernity by surveying various forms of representational graphic signs and systems that were placed on various media in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and it suggests that this graphic material should be seen as expressions of the very same mode of communication rising at the time of the sociocultural—and more specifically, religious—transformation of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. With reference to this graphic evidence, early graphicacy is defined as a mode of visual communication of conceptual information and abstract ideas by means of non-figural graphic devices, which may comprise inscribed letters, words, and isolated decorative symbols.
Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been ... more Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been generally accepted. His dating was based not only on numismatic evidence but also on his attempt to set this event in the context of Charlemagne's activities from 792 to 794. This traditional date of the reform does not, however, take into account evidence provided by Codex Sangallensis 731, in which the scribe Wandalgarius drew the image of a post-reform coin around mid-October 793. Based on this evidence as well as the historical contextualization of Charlemagne's stay in Regensburg in 791–3, this paper attributes the introduction of the novi denarii to the period between the autumn of 792 and the early autumn of 793, when his court was located in Regensburg.
From Goths to Varangians. Communication and Cultural Exchange between the Baltic and the Black Sea, ed. Line Bjerg, John H. Lind, and Søren M. Sindbæk, 2013
This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and No... more This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and Northern Rus' as processes separated by established confessional and institutional boundaries. Surviving narrative sources mention a number of clerical peregrinators crossing confessional borders in northern Europe in the post-conversion period, and some contemporaneous baptismal rites from Scandinavia and northern Rus' testify to their ability to influence the basic Christian rituals in both regions. These phenomena suggest that differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were in no way preventing contacts across the early Christian north in the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth century.
Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural histor... more Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe.
This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.
In our electronic age, we are accustomed to the use of icons, symbols, graphs, charts, diagrams a... more In our electronic age, we are accustomed to the use of icons, symbols, graphs, charts, diagrams and visualisations as part of the vocabulary of communication. But this rich ecosystem is far from a modern phenomenon. Early medieval manuscripts demonstrate that their makers and readers achieved very sophisticated levels of “graphicacy”. When considered from this perspective, many elements familiar to students of manuscript decoration - embellished characters in scripts, decorated initials, monograms, graphic symbols, assembly marks, diagrammatic structures, frames, symbolic ornaments, musical notation - are revealed to be not minor, incidental marks but crucial elements within the larger sign systems of manuscripts.
This interdisciplinary volume is the first to discuss the conflation of text and image with a specific focus on the appearance of various graphic devices in manuscript culture. By looking at their many forms as they appear from the fourth century to their full maturity in the long ninth century, its contributors demonstrate the importance of these symbols to understanding medieval culture.
Contributors: Tina Bawden, Michelle P. Brown, Leslie Brubaker, David Ganz, Ildar H. Garipzanov, Cynthia Hahn, Catherine E. Karkov, Herbert L. Kessler, Beatrice Kitzinger, Kallirroe Linardou, Lawrence Nees, Eric Palazzo, Benjamin C. Tilghman.
This paper provides the first edition and thorough examination of marginal notes added to a ninth... more This paper provides the first edition and thorough examination of marginal notes added to a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript (Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 424). A detailed paleographic, codicological, linguistic, and historical analysis of these additions allows us not only to trace their provenance to the early tenth-century see of Laon but also to show that their anonymous author was a high-status cleric on the episcopal staff. The range of his practical marginaliawhich included polyptych notes, lists of payments, and a list of namespoints at various accounting practices he was involved in and indicates that he played an important role in facilitating the social power of ecclesiastical lordship over its localities. * I would like to thank John Contreni, Stefan Esders, and the anonymous readers for this journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This publication has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101018645).
... Age Scandina-via, which has recently become the subject of an international research project ... more ... Age Scandina-via, which has recently become the subject of an international research project led by ... 1): the Black Earth area at Kau-pang (Skaare 1976, 4546; Skre and Stylegar 2004, 29 ... Ninth-century Kaupang was the main trading settlement in the region similar in role to ...
Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mod... more Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mode of communication, graphicacy, typical of the modern age with its ever-increasing role of visual media in social life. This essay questions this tendency to see graphicacy as a by-product of modernity by surveying various forms of representational graphic signs and systems that were placed on various media in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and it suggests that this graphic material should be seen as expressions of the very same mode of communication rising at the time of the sociocultural—and more specifically, religious—transformation of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. With reference to this graphic evidence, early graphicacy is defined as a mode of visual communication of conceptual information and abstract ideas by means of non-figural graphic devices, which may comprise inscribed letters, words, and isolated decorative symbols.
Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been ... more Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been generally accepted. His dating was based not only on numismatic evidence but also on his attempt to set this event in the context of Charlemagne's activities from 792 to 794. This traditional date of the reform does not, however, take into account evidence provided by Codex Sangallensis 731, in which the scribe Wandalgarius drew the image of a post-reform coin around mid-October 793. Based on this evidence as well as the historical contextualization of Charlemagne's stay in Regensburg in 791–3, this paper attributes the introduction of the novi denarii to the period between the autumn of 792 and the early autumn of 793, when his court was located in Regensburg.
From Goths to Varangians. Communication and Cultural Exchange between the Baltic and the Black Sea, ed. Line Bjerg, John H. Lind, and Søren M. Sindbæk, 2013
This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and No... more This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and Northern Rus' as processes separated by established confessional and institutional boundaries. Surviving narrative sources mention a number of clerical peregrinators crossing confessional borders in northern Europe in the post-conversion period, and some contemporaneous baptismal rites from Scandinavia and northern Rus' testify to their ability to influence the basic Christian rituals in both regions. These phenomena suggest that differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were in no way preventing contacts across the early Christian north in the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth century.
This article discusses the adaptation of Christian symbols derived from Anglo-Saxon, German, and ... more This article discusses the adaptation of Christian symbols derived from Anglo-Saxon, German, and Byzantine numismatic traditions in early Scandinavian coins produced in the first half of the eleventh century. It analyzes a few particular cases of such borrowings (the Agnus Dei, triquetra, and enthroned Christ) by placing them in specific political, religious, and cultural contexts that made foreign symbols both expected and meaningful in early Christian Scandinavian society. These case studies of numismatic imita- tions demonstrate that the people involved in the production of such coins were able not only to appropriate numismatic prototypes coming from abroad but also to adapt them to specific local contexts. Such thought- ful adaptation allowed Christian numismatic imagery to communicate effectively political and religious messages significant for Scandinavian kings and their bishops.
The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period,... more The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period, namely in the last decades of the 11th and the first decades of the 12th centuries. In spite of such a correspondence, the dissemination of the cult in the two adjacent regions has been treated as two separate phenomena. Consequently, the growing popularity of the cult in Scandinavia has traditionally been dealt with as an immanent part of the transmission of the Catholic tradition, and a similar phenomenon in northern Rus' has been discussed with reference to the establishment of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, the evidence analysed in this article shows that the establishment of the cult of St Nicholas in the two regions was an intertwined process, in which the difference between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy played a minor role. The early spread of this particular cult thus suggests that, as far as some aspects of the cult of saints are concerned, the division between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Northern Europe was less abrupt in the 11th and 12th centuries than has been traditionally assumed. This was due to the fact that the medieval cult of saints was not limited to the liturgy of saints, but was a wider social phenomenon in which political and dynastic links and cultural and trading contacts across Northern Europe often mattered more than confessional differences. When we leave the liturgy aside and turn to kings, princes, traders and other folk interacting across the early Christian North, then the confessional borders are less useful for our understanding of how some aspects of Christian culture were communicated across Northern Europe in the first two centuries after conversion.
This article by the late Aron Gurevich was translated from Russian to English in 2006 for the col... more This article by the late Aron Gurevich was translated from Russian to English in 2006 for the collective volume Feudalism: New Landscapes of Debate (ed. by Sverre Bagge and others, 2011), but it was excluded from the volume's final version.
The final program of the first annual series of Lectures (2019-2020) organized by the ERC-2017-Ad... more The final program of the first annual series of Lectures (2019-2020) organized by the ERC-2017-AdG project NOTAE.
Location: Sapienza-University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, Rome, CU003 (Faculty of “Lettere e Filosofia”), Third Floor, Department of “Storia Religioni Arte Spettacolo“, Room “A di Studi storico religiosi".
Lecture by Ildar Garipzanov on Friday, 29 May 05:00 pm on Google Meet.
For information and regist... more Lecture by Ildar Garipzanov on Friday, 29 May 05:00 pm on Google Meet. For information and registration: antonella.ghignoli@uniroma1.it
PROject NOTAE Lectures Series is organized by the ERC-2017-ADG NOTAE, a 5-years project funded by European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Advanced Grant, grant agreement n° 786572) and hosted by Sapienza University of Rome.
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This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.
initials, monograms, graphic symbols, assembly marks, diagrammatic structures, frames, symbolic ornaments, musical notation - are revealed to be not minor, incidental marks but crucial elements within the larger sign systems of manuscripts.
This interdisciplinary volume is the first to discuss the conflation of text and image with a specific focus on the appearance of various graphic devices in manuscript culture. By looking at their many forms as they appear from the fourth century to their full maturity in the long ninth century, its contributors demonstrate the importance of these symbols to understanding medieval culture.
Contributors: Tina Bawden, Michelle P. Brown, Leslie Brubaker, David Ganz, Ildar H. Garipzanov, Cynthia Hahn, Catherine E. Karkov, Herbert L. Kessler, Beatrice Kitzinger, Kallirroe Linardou, Lawrence Nees, Eric Palazzo, Benjamin C. Tilghman.
This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.
initials, monograms, graphic symbols, assembly marks, diagrammatic structures, frames, symbolic ornaments, musical notation - are revealed to be not minor, incidental marks but crucial elements within the larger sign systems of manuscripts.
This interdisciplinary volume is the first to discuss the conflation of text and image with a specific focus on the appearance of various graphic devices in manuscript culture. By looking at their many forms as they appear from the fourth century to their full maturity in the long ninth century, its contributors demonstrate the importance of these symbols to understanding medieval culture.
Contributors: Tina Bawden, Michelle P. Brown, Leslie Brubaker, David Ganz, Ildar H. Garipzanov, Cynthia Hahn, Catherine E. Karkov, Herbert L. Kessler, Beatrice Kitzinger, Kallirroe Linardou, Lawrence Nees, Eric Palazzo, Benjamin C. Tilghman.
Location: Sapienza-University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, Rome, CU003 (Faculty of “Lettere e Filosofia”), Third Floor, Department of “Storia Religioni Arte Spettacolo“, Room “A di Studi storico religiosi".
For information and registration: antonella.ghignoli@uniroma1.it
PROject NOTAE Lectures Series is organized by the ERC-2017-ADG NOTAE, a 5-years project funded by European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Advanced Grant, grant agreement n° 786572) and hosted by Sapienza University of Rome.