Best of
Material-Culture

1997

Traditional Jewelry Of India


Oppi Untracht - 1997
    The book encompasses every area of the country, from sophisticated urban enclaves to isolated ethnic communities. Beginning with Paleothic body ornaments, the author goes on to identify the emergence of major traditional forms, such as amulets, rosaries, marriage ornaments, temple jewelry, theatrical jewelry, and adornment for animals. The illustrations are drawn from public and private collections around the world, and line drawings depict traditional design forms and techniques. 870 illustrations, 220 in color.

Generation React


Danny Seo - 1997
    Danny shares his hard-won skills and years of experience in a step-by-step guide that makes changing the world a little bit easier. In Generation React he teaches you how to start your own activist group, reenergize an existing, activist group, brainstorm creative fund-raising techniques, win media exposure, reform school policy, launch boycotts, make legislators listen, organize a protest, tap the wealth of free information on the Internet and much more!

Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent


Jeffrey F. Hamburger - 1997
    Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagery—manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork—within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.