Bücher der Reihe AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art

Using an innovative approach to evidence for the medieval hospital and medical practice, this collection of essays presents new research by leading international scholars in creating a holistic look at the hospital as an environment within a social and intellectual context.

Focuses on the study of medieval limestone. This title collects the papers that address such methodological approaches to the study of limestone as the use of neutron activation analysis to determine quarries of origin, issues of labor and transportation, as well as issues faced in the cleaning and conservation of limestone.

Explores medieval travel from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, placing the physical practice of transportation into the larger context of medieval thought about the world and its meaning. This book includes a section that discusses the history of navigational instruments in the Middle Ages.

Images in medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, pharmacy, and natural history often confound our expectations about the functions of medical and scientific illustrations. This work addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century.

A collection of essays that presents the exciting and innovative work being done in the field of medieval architectural history by scholars affiliated with AVISTA, one of the most active sponsors of such research in the Anglo-American scholarly community. It includes studies that constitute a snapshot of the range of interpretive strategies.

De Re Metallica brings together a wide variety of perspectives on metal use in the Middle Ages, a topic that has received less systematic scholarly attention than it deserves, given its central importance for medieval culture. Because of its strength, beauty, and prestige, metal figured prominently in many medieval contexts, from the military and utilitarian to the architectural and liturgical. Metal was a crucial ingredient in weapons and waterpipes, rose windows and reliquaries, coinage and jewelry. The 23 essays presented here, from an international team of scholars, explore the production and use of such objects, from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, and from the British Isles, Iceland, and Scandinavia, to France, Germany, Spain and Italy. This thematic, chronological, and geographical scope will make this volume into a valuable resource for historians of art, technology, and culture.

Villard''s Legacy is in memory of the celebrated iconoclastic historian, Jean Gimpel, and represents a fundamental contribution to the new AVISTA series with Ashgate Publishing. AVISTA was the brainchild of Gimpel, a genius at making the right people meet to advance knowledge through a confluence of ideas drawn equally from the practical and scholarly domains. Sixteen papers and a tribute to Gimpel underscore this confluence of technology, science and art within medieval culture. Appropriately, six papers offer new interpretations on aspects of Villard de Honnecourt''s portfolio, which Gimpel rightly recognized and promoted as a unique and precious record of pre-modern technology and culture. This thirteenth-century manuscript is now known to a wider public as the earliest testimony left by a master builder in Gothic Europe. Of particular significance, for the first time in eight centuries, a Compagnon du Devoir, initiated in the same oral tradition as Villard, opens the door to interpreting these remarkable drawings. Three papers address previously ignored aspects in the construction of French and English Gothic churches, from the engineering of aerodynamic spires, to the elastic materials of vault webbing, to the social conventions of formal design. Three other contributors treat essential elements of a broader technological culture, such as the horse harness and the minting of coins, as well as the applicability of medieval technology to the modern world, in particular third world countries, a project pioneered by Gimpel. Four papers conclude the volume by treating the sciences of measure and their cultural expression in medieval Europe, embracing both the concepts of space and time, geometry as a mathematical discipline, and the graphic expression of scientific data. These interdisciplinary studies are comprehensive in chronological and geographic range, extending from the 8th to 15th centuries, from Ireland across Europe.