Images and Objects in Ritual Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Northern and Central Europe

Krista Kodres · Anu Mänd

ліп 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions, meanings and use of images and objects in various late Medieval and Early Modern social practices, which were linked by their ritual character. The book approaches ‘ritual’ as an action which is discussed under the general umbrella term “performative practice”, and is characterised by a synthesis between the repetitive and the extraordinary that carries an intense symbolic meaning and is emotionally charged.

Images, spaces and rituals were closely interconnected in both the religious and the secular spheres, and played a relevant role in the symbolic communication of the time. The essays in this volume are devoted to a complex study of these phenomena in Northern and Central Europe, including regions which, due to linguistic or cultural barriers, have thus far received comparatively little attention in Anglo-American scholarship, including Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic states.

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Krista Kodres is Professor at the Institute of Art History of the Estonian Academy of the Arts, and Senior Researcher at the Institute of History of Tallinn University. She has published widely on Early Modern art and architecture in Estonia and in the Baltic region. Her monograph Presenting Oneself. Architecture, Décor and Furnishings of Dwelling Houses in Early Modern Reval/Tallinn will be published in 2013. Her research interests include the theory and methodology of art history. She is editor-in-chief of the ongoing project of the six-volume History of Estonian Art.

Anu Mänd is Senior Researcher at the Institute of History of Tallinn University. She has published several monographs, including Urban Carnival: Festive Culture in the Hanseatic Cities of the Eastern Baltic, 1350–1550 (Brepols, 2005), based on her PhD thesis. Recently she edited Art, Cult and Patronage: Die visuelle Kultur im Ostseeraum zu Zeit Bernt Notkes, with Uwe Albrecht (2013). Her main research interests are the social and cultural history of Medieval Livonian towns. She is currently working on guilds, gender and memoria.