Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography

A classic of medieval scholarship, Romanesque Signs is a model of new medievalism. It demonstrates how artists, architects, chroniclers, and writers created a new artistic style-the Romanesque-in the 11th and 12th centuries. This art form blurs the boundaries between secular and sacred to show how spirituality guided the representation of history in the world, while portraying contemporary events as repeating and thus confirming biblical accounts. Exploring the social role of the century's increasingly public and monumental art forms, Stephen Nichols sees a shaping influence in the perception of life as a divine plan, a perception that revitalized the world of learning by interpreting events in current history as recapitulations of significant events in the past.