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This volume examines the intersections between material and metaphorical mirrors in medieval and early modern culture. Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation.

History of civilization --- specular reflection --- mirrors --- Symbolism --- Mirrors --- Mirrors in literature --- History --- Aberration, Chromatic and spherical --- Looking-glasses --- Furniture --- Optical instruments --- Representation, Symbolic --- Symbolic representation --- Mythology --- Emblems --- Signs and symbols --- 930.85.42 --- 930.85.44 --- 930.85.44 Cultuurgeschiedenis: Renaissance --- Cultuurgeschiedenis: Renaissance --- 930.85.42 Cultuurgeschiedenis: Middeleeuwen --- Cultuurgeschiedenis: Middeleeuwen --- cultuurgeschiedenis

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This study examines the significance and the deployment of fluid imagery in the composition, narration, and recollection of organised thought in the High Middle Ages through a blend of environmental and intellectual history.This volume provides a new contribution to the understanding of twelfth-century monasticism and medieval intellectual culture by exploring the relationship between water and the composition of thought. It provides a fresh insight into twelfth-century monastic philosophies by studying the use of water as an abstract entity in medieval thought to frame and discuss topics such as spirituality, the natural order, knowledge visualization, and metaphysics in various high medieval texts, including Godfrey of Saint-Victor’s Fons Philosophiae, Peter of Celle’s letter corpus, and the Description of Clairvaux.Through case studies of water in poetry, landscape narrative, and epistolary communication, this work traces the role of water as a uniquely medieval instrument of thought. Theoretical chapters of this book use water to explore the shaping of the medieval metaphor. Further case studies examine the differing and complex uses of water as a metaphor in various monastic texts. Focussing on the changeable power and material properties of water, this volume assesses the significance and deployment of environmental imagery in the composition, narration, and recollection of organized thought within the twelfth-century monastic community.

History of civilization --- Thematology --- History of Europe --- anno 1100-1199 --- Monasticism and religious orders --- Eau --- Littérature médiévale --- Vie intellectuelle --- Case studies --- Dans la littérature --- Études de cas --- Histoire et critique

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Liturgics --- History --- Byzantine chants