A Small Door: Recognizing Ruth in the Psalter-Hours ‘of Yolande of Soissons’

Long the subject of iconographic speculation, the miniature that currently opens the luxurious late-thirteenth-century Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.729) can now be securely identified as a depiction of the opening scene of the book of Ruth. The identification rests on an iconographic peculiarity shared with two roughly contemporary vernacular Bibles, a connection that in itself gives some sense of the textual and pictorial environment in which the Yolande manuscript was conceived. The choice of this extremely rare subject for a pictorial preface to a devotional book created for an aristocratic laywoman indicates the interpenetration of devotional concerns with ideas about marriage, lineage, and the particular role of women in both sacred and family history. Recent research into the origins of the manuscript complements the argument that in selecting a subject from Ruth, the book\u27s creators focused on the female protagonists of the story as idealized models for the book owner\u27s own identity. The iconographic link to vernacular works suggests further that the viewer was intended to approach the illustration from a position of literate familiarity with the text, albeit in French rather than Latin, complemented by interpretative tools drawn from the oral culture of preaching and religious instruction. As such, the miniature challenges medieval and modern categories of literacy and illiteracy and reveals the integral role of pictorial representation in both articulating and formulating varieties of religious and social experience

La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall\u27Isola d\u27Alcina (The Rescue of Ruggiero from the Island of Alcina) - Francesca Caccini

The Performance Practice Institute (PPI) at the Caine College of the Arts embodies a project-based approach to the study of the history of performance, which enriches the intellectual and artistic life of the students involved while making accessible to Utah audiences exciting concerts of lesser known repertoires, especially chose from the pre-1750 period. Events in this series are held in the spring, with a yearly alternation between larger projects and more modest events that build upon the previous year\u27s activities.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1051/thumbnail.jp

Low-density star cluster formation: Discovery of a young faint fuzzy on the outskirts of the low-mass spiral galaxy NGC 247

The classical globular clusters found in all galaxy types have half-light radii of rh ~2-4 pc, which have been tied to formation in the dense cores of giant molecular clouds. Some old star clusters have larger sizes, and it is unclear if these represent a fundamentally different mode of low-density star cluster formation. We report the discovery of a rare, young \u27faint fuzzy\u27 star cluster, NGC 247-SC1, on the outskirts of the low-mass spiral galaxy NGC 247 in the nearby Sculptor group, and measure its radial velocity using Keck spectroscopy. We use Hubble Space Telescope imaging to measure the cluster half-light radius of rh ≃ 12 pc and a luminosity of LV ≃ 4 × 105Lθ. We produce a colour-magnitude diagram of cluster stars and compare to theoretical isochrones, finding an age of ≃300 Myr, a metallicity of [Z/H] ~-0.6 and an inferred mass of M∗ ≃ 9 × 104Mθ. The narrow width of blue-loop star magnitudes implies an age spread of ≲50 Myr, while no old red-giant branch stars are found, so SC1 is consistent with hosting a single stellar population, modulo several unexplained bright \u27red straggler\u27 stars. SC1 appears to be surrounded by tidal debris, at the end of an ∼2 kpc long stellar filament that also hosts two low-mass, low-density clusters of a similar age. We explore a link between the formation of these unusual clusters and an external perturbation of their host galaxy, illuminating a possible channel by which some clusters are born with large sizes