This lecture focusses on representations of the natural world within a particular late-medieval monastic community. I am interested in the juxtaposition of the local and exotic, naturalistic and fantastical: carefully-observed oak leaves concealing a brood of baby dragons. I will argue that representations of beasts and foliage at Norwich figure disorder, unruliness, and contingency: concerns that were particularly acute within the context of popular unrest, pandemic, and extreme storms that affected the community in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And— not only were these images symbols of disorder, but foliate carvings, in their three-dimensionality, were also able to embody the effects of unruliness in the viewer.
Jessica Barker is a senior lecturer in medieval art at The Courtauld in London. She is a specialist in monumental sculpture in northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula. She is curating a major exhibition on monastic art at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, The Rule: Shaping Lives, Medieval and Modern, which will open in May 2026.
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