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Michelle P. Brown
Bodleian Library Publishing
The Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking peoples who inhabited the British Isles and Ireland from late prehistory to the Normal Conquest left behind a rich visual heritage that continues to be felt today. The traditions of each of these peoples has been studied separately, but rarely has the historical interaction of these cultures been adequately considered.
           
Michelle P. Brown remedies this oversight, presenting an extensively illustrated art historical overview of this formative period in the region’s history. Describing the interactions between the region’s inhabitants, she also explores the formation of national and regional identities. Brown ranges across works as diverse as the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the Aberlemno Stone, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Alfred Jewel, and the Benedictional of St. Ethelwold, showing how their complex imagery can be best interpreted. She also considers the impact of the art of this period upon the history of art in general, exploring how it has influenced many movements since, from the Carolingian Renaissance and the Romanesque style to the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement.
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Bede and the Theory of Everything
Michelle P. Brown
Reaktion Books, 2023
An accessible biography of the venerable Bede, regarded as the father of English history.
A 2023 History Today Book of the Year

 
This book investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673–735), the foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and the “father of English history.” It examines his notable feats, including calculating the first tide tables, creating the Ceolfrith Bibles and the Lindisfarne Gospels, writing the earliest extant Old English poetry, and composing his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In addition to providing an accessible overview of Bede’s life and work, Michelle P. Brown describes new discoveries regarding Bede’s handwriting, his historical research, and his previously lost Old English translation of St John’s Gospel, dictated on his deathbed.
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The Punitive Imagination
Law, Justice, and Responsibility
Austin Sarat
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Presents a thought-provoking collection of five essays that explore the purposes and meanings of legal punishment in the United States, both culturally and socially

From the Gospel of Matthew to numerous US Supreme Court justices, many literary and legal sources have observed that how a society metes out punishment reveals core truths about its character. The Punitive Imagination is a collection of essays that engages and contributes to debates about the purposes and meanings of punishment in the United States.
 
The Punitive Imagination examines some of the critical assumptions that frame America's approach to punishment. It explores questions such as:
·         What is the place of concern for human dignity in our prevailing ideologies of punishment?
·         Can we justly punish the socially disadvantaged?
·         What assumptions about persons, social institutions, and the ordering of social space provide the basis for American punitiveness?
·         Who, if anyone, can be held responsible for excessively punitive criminal sentences?
·         How does punishment depend on prevailing views of free will, responsibility, desert, blameworthiness?
·         Where/how are those views subject to challenge in our punitive practices?
 
As Sarat posits in his introduction, the way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, its understandings of mercy and forgiveness, and its particular ways of responding to evil. He goes on to discuss the history of punishment in the United States and what it reveals about assumptions made about persons that “undergird” the American system of punishment.
 
The five additional contributors to The Punitive Imagination seek to illuminate what American practices of punishment tell us about who we are as a nation. Synthesizing cultural, sociological, philosophical, and legal perspectives, they offer a distinctive take on the meaning of punishment in America.
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Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts
A Guide to Technical Terms, Revised Edition
Michelle Brown
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2018
What is a historiated initial? What are canon tables? What is a drollery? This revised edition of Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms offers definitions of the key elements of illuminated manuscripts, demystifying the techniques, processes, materials, nomenclature, and styles used in the making of these precious books.
 
Updated to reflect current research and technologies, this beautifully illustrated guide includes images of important manuscript illuminations from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and beyond. Concise, readable explanations of the technical terms most frequently encountered in manuscript studies make this portable volume an essential resource for students, scholars, and readers who wish a deeper understanding and enjoyment of illuminated manuscripts and medieval book production.
 
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