Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Ildar Garipzanov is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oslo. He received a PhD in classical history from Kazan State University (1991) and a PhD in medieval history from Fordham University, New York (2004). He was an Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford (2012), a visiting fellow at Clare Hall College, Cambridge (2015/16), and a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2016). He has authored and edited a number ofbooks in late antique and medieval history, including the monograph The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World (2008).

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the lateGraeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe.This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages offers a cultural history of the graphic monogrammatic tools from antiquity to the Middle Ages. It examines the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other similar devices, and how they were used during a time of great socio-political and religious change.

Introduction