- Medieval Europe in Motion: The Circulation of Artists, Images, Patterns and Ideas from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Coast (6th–15th centuries) ed. by Maria Alessandra Bilotta
This conference volume, published by the Officina di Studi Medievali in Sicily, collects papers on Western medieval cultural exchange from an eponymous 2013 conference at the Institute of Medieval Studies at the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. Abstracts, acknowledgments, three indexes (of names, places, and manuscripts), and five papers are in English. A Spanish introduction by Gerardo Boto Varela, a French conclusion by Xavier Barral i Altet, and eighteen papers are in Portuguese (eleven), Italian (three), or French (four). The table of contents with authors and titles is on the publisher's website. The papers contribute broadly to research on circulation, mobility, and conceptions of art, artisans and hence culture in the later Middle Ages in Western Europe, with six thematic sub-sections. The research of the editor and other hosts supports several contributions on the circulation of manuscripts and artistic models between Portugal and elsewhere in Western Europe. The majority of all papers concern the later end of the time scale, the early modern era and Renaissance from the later twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and relations between travelling artisans and patrons on the Iberian Peninsula.
The first section, 'The Phenomenon of Circulation and Mobility in Medieval Europe', considers how Western European medieval communities and courts were shaped by the circulation of books, music, fashion, and other tangible and intangible cultural goods via royal marriages, migrant artisans, or itinerant troubadours. Under 'Patrons and Promoters' are more royal women, Petrarch, and a thirteenth-century French illuminated Bible in Portugal. 'Artists and Material Authors' spans Gothic and Romanesque architectural elements, while 'Circulation of Works' includes Afro-Portuguese ivories, Romanesque sculpture and mobile manuscripts. 'Causes and Driving Forces of Artistic and Cultural Movement in the Middle Ages' has one paper on Aristotelian and medieval philosophical theories of movement, and another on thirteenth-century manuscript images of Great Britain, itineraries, and medieval perceptions of space. 'The Circulation of Models' includes theoretical approaches to models; Catalonian, French, and onevolume Latin Bibles; and legal manuscripts, draftsmen's travel sketchbooks and twelfth-century apse sculpture in northeastern Spain. Scholars of all these areas with a reading knowledge of the relevant languages will doubtless find current research of interest among these papers. [End Page 274]