Medieval art, architecture and material culture by Vitrearum
This is a first in a series of brief articles on late medieval western liturgical dress and vestments. It is intended to provide a brief introduction to the terminology used to describe medieval vestments, for those who are unfamiliar with them. My intention is to provide a guide that will help fellow art historians describe... Continue Reading →
Rogier van der Weyden's Seven Sacraments is an extraordinary painting. In this post I explore the depictions of the Mass within and what it might say about the lay experience of the Eucharist in medieval Europe.
Late medieval gospel lecterns are wonderful things and I have blogged about them and their purpose before. There are quite a number of 15th-century latten lecterns in Norfolk and Suffolk, but the example from Oxborough in Norfolk, dating from the 1480s, is particularly impressive. Not only is it a delightful object visually, with its eagle... Continue Reading →
Buckinghamshire is a wealthy and pleasant county in the south east of England, rather too pleasant for churches to be kept open. The day I visited Chearsley, only half of the churches I visited were open - which is not a very good record. Anyway it was a delight to get into this charming little... Continue Reading →
I had a trip into Berkshire a few months ago and to Childrey, where the church is a complex building of extraordinary interest, with lots of medieval glass and numerous late medieval monumental brasses. In the south transept, there is a fine early sixteenth-century monument of Purbeck marble which is built up against the north... Continue Reading →
Not all medieval missals were luxury items, this article looks at the fragmentary remains of a more ordinary medieval missal.
The parish church of St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury in Wymondham in Norfolk, is all that is remains of a Benedictine Priory founded in 1107 by Wiliam d'Aubigny, which was raised to abbey status in 1448. When Wymondham Abbey was dissolved in 1538 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the people of Wymondham... Continue Reading →
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.jsSt Michael's, Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, is a treasure house, a fine cruciform church of Norman origin, containing a wonderful array of monuments and important fittings. The Early English chancel, built around 1250, is a space of breathtaking purity and beauty. It's triple lancets are divided by clusters of slender shafts, topped with stiff leaf... Continue Reading →
The object illustrated below is in the collection of the British Museum. It is a wax candle-stock, an artificial candle. It's one of a pair and it's identically decorated fellow, is now in the possession of Jesus College Cambridge. At fifty four (54) centimetres tall, these stocks when they were first made, would have fitted... Continue Reading →
In 1903 Percy Dearmer edited for the Alcuin Club, a facsimile of an extraordinary early sixteenth century treatise. Dat Boexken Vander Missen or the Booklet of the Mass, is a treatise on the purpose of the Mass and of its ceremonial. Written in Old Dutch, it was said to have been written by an Observant... Continue Reading →
