Conference: Courtauld Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium: ‘Memory and Medieval Material Culture’, Friday 6 March 2026

In our digital age, memory is both permanent and fleeting: forever enshrined on the internet, and yet easily forgotten amid the endless scroll of new information. In the Middle Ages, however, memory was more consciously articulated by medieval makers, patrons and viewers, and was appropriated to serve carefully crafted political, devotional and cultural agendas. Far from being passive repositories of remembrance, medieval artworks, buildings and objects played active roles in constructing, shaping and transmitting memory, whether personal, collective or institutional. This colloquium will explore the complex and dynamic relationship between memory and the material culture of the Middle Ages. It will consider how images from medieval Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world engaged with the processes of remembering and forgetting, and how they mediated the relationship between the past and the present.

The colloquium will take place on Friday 6th March 2026 at the Courtauld Institute’s Vernon Square campus. The colloquium will be concluded with a drinks reception open to all ticket holders.

Organised by Courtauld PhD students Sophia Dumoulin, Leylim Erenel, Ricardo Mandelbaum Balla. This colloquium is generously supported by Sam Fogg.

Find out more and register here.

Schedule for the day

9.30 – 10.00: Registration Opens

Courtauld Institute, Vernon Square Campus

10.00 – 10.10: Welcome and introduction to the day

10.10 – 11.30: Panel 1 – Layers of Memory

• Marina Forte Cutillas, PhD, Complutense University Madrid, Building Memory on Sacred Ground in San Pelay of Gavín (Aragón, Spain): Cemetery Continuity and Monastic Space in Medieval Iberian Peninsula
• Giulia di Pierro, PhD, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Traces of Destruction: Erasure, Visual Response and the Paradox of Forgetting in Medieval Manuscripts
• Catherine McNally, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Merits of a Sanctity Contested: Fada’il al-Quds and the Commemoration of the Temple Mount in Late Antique Jerusalem

11.30 – 12.00: Refreshment break

12.00 – 13.20: Panel 2 – Illustrating Memory

• Emma Bruckner, PhD, Courtauld Institute, “Return to the courts of the ancients”: Memorialising the Anachronistic Image in Jean Colombe’s Romuléon
• Helena Gracià, MA, University of Barcelona, Tracing Memory: Moral Diagrams and the Visual Logic of Pastoral Education
• Mathilde Mioche, PhD, Courtauld Institute, What’s in a Game? Memento Mori Imagery in Renaissance Tarot

13.20 – 14.20: Lunch

Provided for speakers only

• 14.20 – 15.40: Panel 3 – Urban Memory
  
  Gabriel Christys, PhD, Courtauld Institute, Staging the Past, Shaping the Future: Triumphs, Memory and Power in Middle Byzantine Constantinople, 950-1050
• Bruna Bianco, PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Reshaping Collective Memory in Perugia: The Political Use of Images by the Comune di Popolo between the 13th and 14th Centuries
• Nina Uelpenich, PhD, Ghent University, Visualizing the Past, Negotiating the Present. The Maiden of Ghent as an Urban Symbol during the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Medieval Revival and Nationalism

15.40 – 16.10: Refreshment break

16.10 – 17.50: Panel 4 – Medieval Afterlives

• Emma Iadanza, PhD, Courtauld Institute, Memory of the Crusades in the Pazzi Chapel
• Abigail Glickman, MPhil, University of Cambridge, Clothing a Cairene Synagogue: Origins and Afterlives
• Anja Frisch, PhD, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, Reinterpreting English Alabasters across Continental Europe

17.50 – 18.00: Closing remarks

18.00: Drinks Reception

Open to all