Of all the early Flemish paintings, few are as famous as Jan Van Eyck's "The Betrothal of Arnolfini." Its unsurpassed solemnity and painstaking details have epitomized the essence of the early traditions of Netherlandish art. Completed in 1434, the painting stands 85 cm x 63 cm and is painted o...

Different cultures, different customs very different traditions. That's the way of weddings. Every religion, region and country has different wedding traditions. There are close similarities, yet they are still very different. I am most familiar with the traditional Catholic wedding but ...

Nineteen hundred and sixty was the year that ushered in a decade of great historical change; during this decade, man walked on the moon, watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and waited for nuclear war. As a decade that saw the Cuban Missile Crisis, the creation of the Berlin Wall and the Un...

The word marriage means a socially recognized and approved union between two individuals of the opposite sex with the expectation of permanence and usually with the aim of producing offspring (Bahr, 1995). This definition of the word marriage is known throughout the world, but the rituals behind the...

Norman Cantor (1999) has noted that the lives of medieval women were as diverse as those of men, and that women in this era contributed to all the major movements that spelled success for an emerging European civilization. Nevertheless, women in the Middle Ages were, regardless of their p...

Early treatment of women in Athenian society can be best described as servitude. Women were treated differently from city to city but the basic premise of that treatment never changed. A woman's main purpose was to establish a bloodline that could carry on the husband's name and give the proper la...

Arguing For Romantic Love One of the biggest debates at the turn of the seventeenth century was determining who was responsible for choosing a mate and what criteria that mate must possess in order to be suitable for marriage. The Canonization by John Donne continues with the metaphysical style o...