La importancia que tiene el relato de la creación del mundo (Gen 1-2) para judíos, cristianos y musulmanes, se refleja en diferentes manifestaciones artísticas medievales. Este artículo analiza algunas de las representaciones a que dio lugar dicho relato, y al uso diverso del lenguaje artístico –figurativo y no figurativo– a que recurrieron los artistas. La segunda parte del artículo se centra en el examen de la Sinagoga del Tránsito de Toledo y propone, a través del estudio conjunto de decoración y (...) epigrafía, y de algunos referentes culturales judíos, una interpretación que descubre en sus muros una representación no figurativa y simbólica del capítulo primero del Génesis. (shrink)

This paper is focused on one of the key questions constituting the medieval debate about the ontological status of artefacts, which has to do with the productivity of art. We ordinarily speak about artefacts, such as statues or chairs, as produced by their artificers, and Aristotle describes art in general as a productive habit. In the first part of the paper, I look at how the proponents of the realist view of artefacts argue that the productivity of art can (...) only be explained if we endorse their view, on which by producing an artefact an artificer brings about a new thing in the world, which is distinct from the natural things used in its production. I then turn to the reductionist account of artefacts and examine how its proponents want to show that the productivity of art can be preserved without positing that an artefact must be a new thing in the world, distinct from its natural components. In the final part of the paper, I look at one of the further corollaries of this debate, which has to do with the connection between the productivity of art and natural change. (shrink)

The meaning of the noun 'creation', and the verb 'to create', range from the traditional theological idea of God creating ex nihilo to a more recent sense of the process of artistic conception. This collection of thirteen essays, written by scholars of music, literature, the visual arts, and theology, explores the complicated relationship between medieval rituals and theology, and the development of an idea of human artistic creation, which came to the fore in the sixteenth century. The volume concentrates (...) on the period from the Carolingians to the Counter-Reformation but also includes some twentieth-century musicians. Each essay is dedicated to a particular topic concerned with ritual or artistic beginnings, inventions, harmony and disharmony, as well as representations or celebrations of creation. Central themes include the interplay of the ideas of God as creator, of God acting and recreating in medieval liturgy, of God as artist - the deus artifex of the Pythagorean cosmology, which was occasionally referred to as recently as the early nineteenth century -and, finally, of the homo creator, a concept in which man reflected (and eventually replaced) God in his artistic creativity. This book therefore features new, significant, individual contributions from a range of scholarly disciplines, but, taken as a whole, it also constitutes a complex interdisciplinary study, with large-scale historical constructions. (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and (...) Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam By GravesMargaret S., xi + 339 pp. Price HB £55.00. EAN 978–0190695910.

This article deals with the first Latin reception of Pseudo-Aristotle’s On Indivisible Lines and its impact on the medieval debate about the continuum. Robert Grosseteste’s and Albert the Great’s references to this pseudo-Aristotelian text show that it could be regarded as a source for where to find information about the indivisibilist tenet, as well as an expansion of Aristotle’s anti-atomistic critiques scattered throughout his authentic works. The use of On Indivisible Lines made by Henry of Harclay and Adam of (...) Wodeham confirms this trend: the reading of this text could be twofold according to the tenet defended. While Henry argues against Pseudo-Aristotle to defend indivisibilism, Adam expands on pseudo-Aristotelian arguments to show the incongruities implied by indivisibilism. (shrink)

These essays recover the lively discussions on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following, and apply them to the Middle Ages to draw exciting new conlusions"--Provided by publisher.

The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamluk Cairo. By Li Guo. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 93. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii + 240. $136.

Authentic Replicas: Buddhist Art in Medieval China by Hsueh-man Shen. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 2019. 352 pp.; 132 illustrations, 113 in colour. Hb $72 ISBN-13: 9780824867058.

Man is a "homo theologicus." The dominion of the cyberculture is determining the oblivion of the Sacred in a new fashion, creating fictional transcendences that replace traditional reality with cyberconstructions. We aim to show how man is essentially a theologal being and how the Byzantine notion of ϑέωσις (deification) as expressed in sacred arts can be a way of preserving human essence from its alienation in the fictional transcendences of cyberbeing. We approach cyberculture as a process of ontological desubstantiation via (...) artificial "intelligence" and virtual reproductions. We explain the dual phenomenon of the implanting of a decentered, networked techno-hedonism and the spread of the "avatar syndrome" as a cyber-disease that inhibits in man his responsibility to be real. By contrast, we underscore the importance of the fact that in cyberbeing the "enchantment before beings" as anticipation of radical freedom is especially safeguarded. While the modern aesthetic is mostly deprived of mystic origin and transcendental telos and proves useless against cyberbeing's desubstantiating power, Byzantine aesthetic as an ontological healing way can contribute to the de-oblivion of human essence. This implies that sacred Byzantine arts as aesthetic therapy open the horizon in which man experiences his essence as perpetual bliss in the meaning of Being. (shrink)

Among the literary arts of the Middle Ages, the creation of texts within strict parameters held a fascination for many poets. Acrostic poems, tricky meters, frequent rhyme, and other limitations often spurred those who sought expression in words.

From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decameron and Canterbury Tales to Monty Python’s televisual riffs on Arthurian legend in the 1970s and role-playing games like Pendragon or Hidden Kingdom, a fascination...