The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843845989
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary by : Liz Herbert McAvoy

Download or read book The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary written by Liz Herbert McAvoy and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners" the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.

Middle English Biblical Poetry

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846055
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Middle English Biblical Poetry by : Cathy Hume

Download or read book Middle English Biblical Poetry written by Cathy Hume and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry.Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that retell episodes from the Old Testament: the ballad-like Iacob and Iosep, two lives of Adam and Eve; an alliterative version of the Susanna story, the Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet's Patience and Cleanness. Each chapter identifies new sources and influences for the poems, including from biblical glosses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.nder of their household audiences.

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages

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Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846624
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages by : Cate Gunn

Download or read book Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages written by Cate Gunn and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

Women and Medieval Literary Culture

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108876919
Total Pages : 880 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Women and Medieval Literary Culture by : Corinne Saunders

Download or read book Women and Medieval Literary Culture written by Corinne Saunders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on England but covering a wide range of European and global traditions and influences, this authoritative volume examines the central role of medieval women in the production and circulation of books and considers their representation in medieval literary texts, as authors, readers and subjects, assessing how these change over time. Engaging with Latin, French, German, Welsh and Gaelic literary culture, it places British writing in wider European contexts while also considering more distant influences such as Arabic. Essays span topics including book production and authorship; reception; linguistic, literary, and cultural contexts and influences; women's education and spheres of knowledge; women as writers, scribes and translators; women as patrons, readers and book owners; and women as subjects. Reflecting recent trends in scholarship, the volume spans the early Middle Ages through to the eve of the Reformation and emphasises the multilingual, multicultural and international contexts of women's literary culture.

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 184384656X
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages by : Kathryn Loveridge

Download or read book Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages written by Kathryn Loveridge and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.

Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846438
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland by : Harriet Jean Evans Tang

Download or read book Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland written by Harriet Jean Evans Tang and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domestic animals played a range of roles in the imaginative world of medieval Icelanders: from partners in settlement and household allies, to violent offenders, foster-kin and surrogate wives, they were vital and effective members of the multispecies communities established from the ninth century onwards. This book examines the domestic animals of early Iceland in their physical and textual contexts, through detailed analysis of the spaces and places of the Icelandic farm and farming landscape, and textual sources such as The Book of Settlements, the earliest Icelandic laws, and various episodes from the Sagas and Tales of Icelanders. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to animal-human relationships, it sees animals not solely as symbols, metaphors, or objects, but as subjects in affective relationships with their human co-settlers who become the focus of intense exploration, delight, anxiety and condemnation in later textual narratives. By inviting readers to question how these sources form, embrace, or reject animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.

Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846640
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages by : Michael Bintley

Download or read book Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages written by Michael Bintley and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world. The essays collected here aim to highlight human encounters with the forest and its trees at the time of the European Middle Ages, when, whether symbol and metaphor, or actual and real, their lofty boughs were weighted with meaning. The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.

Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen

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Publisher : Amsterdam University Press
ISBN 13 : 9789463720724
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (27 download)

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Book Synopsis Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen by : Lieve Watteeuw

Download or read book Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen written by Lieve Watteeuw and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first full survey of rare late medieval masterpieces, the enclosed gardens of Mechelen, the result of year-long academic research.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846225
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts by : Liam Lewis

Download or read book Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts written by Liam Lewis and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A redefinition of the animal's relationship to sound and language in French texts from medieval England. The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, aiming to reconceptualize and reinterpret animal soundscapes. It argues that they draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, this book provides an important resource for theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal's role in the interpretation of the natural world.

Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846403
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts by : Elizabeth Marshall

Download or read book Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts written by Elizabeth Marshall and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation.

Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe

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Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526146606
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe by : Laura Kalas

Download or read book Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe written by Laura Kalas and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of ‘encounter’ – textual, internal, external and performative – the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women’s literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.

Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789042932333
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (323 download)

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Book Synopsis Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries by : Barbara Baert

Download or read book Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries written by Barbara Baert and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Late Middle Ages a unique type of 'mixed media' recycled and remnant art arose in houses of religious women in the Low Countries: Enclosed Gardens. These are retables, sometimes with painted side panels, the central section filled not only with narrative sculpture, but also with all sorts of trinkets and hand-worked textiles. Adornments include relics, wax medallions, gemstones set in silver, pilgrimage souvenirs, parchment banderoles, flowers made from textiles with silk thread, semi-precious stones, pearls and quilling (a decorative technique using rolled paper). The ensemble is an impressive and one-of-a-kind display and presents as an intoxicating garden. In this essay the exceptional heritage of such Enclosed Gardens is interpreted from a range of approaches. The Enclosed Garden is studied as a symbol of paradise and mystical union, as the sanctuary of interiority, as the sublimation of the sensorium (in particular the sense of smell), as a typical gendered product, and as a centre of psycho-energetic creative processes.

The Garden as Woman's Space in Twelfth- and Thirteenth Century Literature

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis The Garden as Woman's Space in Twelfth- and Thirteenth Century Literature by : Elizabeth A. Augspach

Download or read book The Garden as Woman's Space in Twelfth- and Thirteenth Century Literature written by Elizabeth A. Augspach and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this study is to examine a few literary gardens of romance from the close of the 12th to the first half of the 13th century in light of the development of the figure of the enclosed garden as a female space that is not owned by a man, but rather by the woman who inhabits it. In this scenario the woman is consistently seen as other, while the narrative directs the reader's attention to the point of view of the man who is confronted with this inverted state of affairs. This unnatural situation sets up a power play between the genders that will be resolved only once the woman and her garden are brought to heel. The exception to this rule is the Virgin Mary, whose wonderful garden possesses no unnaturalness or witchcraft, for its exceptional qualities are a manifestation of the Virgin's perfection.

Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843846128
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature by : Hetta Elizabeth Howes

Download or read book Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature written by Hetta Elizabeth Howes and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351051407
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain by : Patricia Skinner

Download or read book The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain written by Patricia Skinner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was a "garden" in medieval and early modern British culture and how was it imagined? How did it change as Europe opened up to the wider world from the 16th century onwards? In a series of fresh approaches to these questions, the contributors offer chapters that identify and discuss newly-discovered pre-modern garden spaces in archaeology and archival sources, recognize a gendered language of the garden in fictional descriptions ("fictional" here being taken to mean any written text, regardless of its purpose), and offer new analysis of the uses to which gardens - real and imagined - might be put. Chapters investigate the definitions, forms and functions of physical gardens; explore how the material space of the garden was gendered as a secluded space for women, and as a place of recreation; examine the centrality of garden imagery in medieval Christian culture; and trace the development of garden motifs in the literary and artistic imagination to convey the sense of enclosure, transformation and release. The book uniquely underlines the current environmental "turn" in the humanities, and increasingly recognizes the value of exploring human interaction with the landscapes of the past as a route to health and well-being in the present.

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812207289
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Islamic Gardens and Landscapes by : D. Fairchild Ruggles

Download or read book Islamic Gardens and Landscapes written by D. Fairchild Ruggles and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-12-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes immerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India. Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections. Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes is a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Monastic Gardens

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Publisher : ABRAMS
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis Monastic Gardens by : Michael Hales

Download or read book Monastic Gardens written by Michael Hales and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2000 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private worlds glimpsed by a privileged few, monasteries have long maintained an aura of mystery. Mick Hales goes behind the gates for a rare look at the integral role a garden plays in the life of a monastery, and writes about the history of sanctuaries, such as one of the first, tended by Saint Anthony in third-century Egypt. 130 full-color photos of monasteries in the U.S., France, England, and Wales.