Related Papers
Closed Doors as Bearers and Constructors of Images. Santa Sabina in Rome and Notre Dame du Puy
Ivan Foletti
The current, vigorous debate about the significance and liminal attributes of doors, thresholds, or other entrance spaces prompts consideration of how closed doors construct images. This paper offers a new interpretation of two examples of wooden doors decorated with figurative scenes, preserved from the fifth and twelfth centuries: the main doors of Rome's Basilica of Santa Sabina and the pair of porch doors at Notre Dame du Puy. Using their context consisting of local liturgical praxis, physical limits and placement, or specific functions rooted in the intermediary character of narthexes and porticos in general, the paper analyzes not only the two physical objects per se and their imagery, but also, and more significant, their two possible statuses. It seems that these elaborately decorated story-telling doors, conceived for the eyes of specific viewers, might somehow have served as their own functional properties were suppressed for the sake of their symbolic value. While being shut, these examples offer formal and iconological parallels explainable by the archetypal understanding of a door as the materialization of the potential of a passage.
'General Introduction', in E.M. van Opstall (ed.), Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity (Leiden, Brill 2018) 1-27
2018 •
Emilie M. van Opstall
How close can one get to religious experiences from the past? The present book aims to elucidate the transition from the worldly to the divine by focusing on doors leading to spaces considered to be holy in Late Antiquity. In ‘pagan’ as well as in Christian sanctuaries, doors on different levels marked boundaries, whether physical or symbolic: gateways in a precinct; outer doors of a temple or church; inner doors of a cella or holy of holies. Some were plain and simple, others were monumental and lavishly decorated. Both pagans and Christians have recorded their experiences of these liminal spaces in literature, giving us a glimpse of how they perceived them. Late Antiquity is a crossroad of traditional and new religious ideas and experiences. Its pluriformity requires an interdisciplinary as well as a diachronic approach. The present introductory chapter serves as a methodological introduction to the volume.
Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic
Bernhard Siegert
The Journal of Modern History
Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror. By Jörg Baberowski. Translated by Steven Gilbert, Ivo Komljen, and Samantha Jeanne Taber. The Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xii+500. $40.00
2018 •
Robert Thurston
Warrior Churchmen of Medieval England, 1000-1250
2016 •
Craig M Nakashian
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 by Craig Spence
2017 •
Jonathan Reinarz
Part III:3. "... in between are doors!" Porta caeli in Italian medieval liturgy
Brian Møller Jensen
The English Historical Review
Perceptions of Femininity in Early Irish Society, by Helen Oxenham
2019 •
Mary T Condren
ARYS. Antigüedad: Religiones y Sociedades
Van Opstall, E.M. (2019). Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity
Beatrice Caseau
VAN OPSTALL, EMILIE M. (ed.) (2018). Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 185. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 376 pp., 252,00€ [ISBN 978- 9-0043-6859-0] [Reseña]
Honorato, D. (in press). Doors and Other Passages: a Semiotics of Space. In Matthew Melia (ed). Working title: Navigating Space and Place (Chapter 1). Oxfordshire: Inter-Disciplinary Press.
Doors and Other Passages: a Semiotics of Space
Dalila Honorato
The intention in this chapter is to explore the various meanings of doors and other places of passage by referring not only to a mechanism that opens and closes but to a net of different interior images within the universal concept of The Door. In its initial form, the door might have had its shape improvised by use of simple material without the stability of material that characterizes a modern door. Today’s idea of a door seems to have its origin at the exact moment humans abandon nomadic life and the round shelters that characterize food collectors’ communities (such as a tent, a cave or an igloo), to become specialized in a labor activity and permanently inhabit a specific place within a square house. Is there a different perception of things if someone lives in the desert, the mountain, the wood or the seaside, in the city or in the countryside? Does it make any difference the choice of method of transportation to cover distances? Whatever the object one finds along the way, whatever the road one chooses to connect the starting point with the location of destination, it contributes to shape one’s perception of reality. The place from which we originate, the place where we grew up and the place where we chose to live, leaves its mark daily whether we passively accept it or dynamically deny it. Transportation, roads and places are passages are doors into different paths in life. This chapter aims at to match societies and doors, to track dead end passages and generally open doors towards human development.
