Edited by Bruce Kapferer (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) and Angela Hobart In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion … Continued
By Marcia Kupfer (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) A single, monumental mappa mundi (world map), made around 1300 for Hereford Cathedral, survives intact from the Middle Ages. As Marcia Kupfer reveals in her arresting new study, this celebrated testament to medieval learning has long been profoundly misunderstood. Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are … Continued
By Peter T. Struck (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the … Continued
By Irena Kossowska (NHC Fellow, 2009–10)
Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) and Michal Kobialka The contributors to this volume cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries to read the words, metaphors, images, signs, poetic illusions, and identities with which medieval men and women used space and place to add meaning to the world.
While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive and recognizable in Western culture, she realized, are not as simple and self-contained as they may seem to some of us. The experience helped her to see … Continued