New Publication: Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art by Robert Couzin

Robert Couzin’s Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art is the first in-depth study of handedness, position, and direction in the visual culture of Europe and Byzantium from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Heretofore largely unnoticed or ignored, the pre-eminence of the right and lapses or intentional departures from that norm in medieval imagery are relevant to such major themes as iconography, visuality, reception, narrative, form, gender, production, and patronage. The author’s investigation of right and left in visual culture is informed by modern experimental research on laterality and contextualized within prevailing theological doctrines and socio-cultural practices.

Illustrations in the text are complemented by hundreds more made available on Brill’s Arkyves platform here.

See inside the book.

Readership

Scholars and students of early Christian and medieval art, as well as historians of other periods or of medieval culture generally, and researchers in laterality interested in its artistic manifestations.

Online Lecture: Art in Cathedrals: Norwich Cathedral – New Perspectives in Medieval Sculpture, Rob Hawkins (Zoom, 15th April 2021 7pm)

This is the first in a new series of online lectures, Art in Cathedrals, organised by Art+Christianity. Please follow this link to book your tickets.

All talks are fully illustrated and begin at 7pm fortnightly on Thursday evenings, beginning on April 15th. A full programme of events is listed below.

Rob Hawkin’s will discuss the 15th-century bosses from Norwich Cathedral cloister, posing big questions concerning pictorial space, point of view, and the assumptions we make when we approach pre-modern sculpture.

The elaborately sculpted vault bosses of Norwich Cathedral Cloister (built 1297-1430) are one of the glories of English medieval sculpture. The later bosses (1410-1430) are particularly virtuosic in their distortion of pictorial space: straight lines are rendered as curves; cuboids are radically warped; figures twist through crazy angles, each boss forming a bulbous hemisphere of intricate narrative. Visiting the cloister it becomes obvious that no single viewing position will suffice to make any one boss comprehensible: their curved surfaces demand that the viewer move in iterative orbits, gradually compiling an image of the whole scene in the mind’s eye.  

Most of our art-historical language for discussing ‘perspective’ and ‘pictorial space’ comes from our study of the Italian Renaissance, and is bound up with the supposed norm of rigid, geometric perspective. This paradigm assumes an ideal static observer. We are much less well equipped to discuss sculptural style, which tends to assume an embodied viewer moving in real space. Medieval theologians who discussed point of view and perspective, however, may offer some cognate concepts as we try to engage with these sculptures in less anachronistic ways. 

This talk presents some findings from new research into these fascinating pieces of sculpture. It makes use of photogrammetric modelling undertaken in the cloisters, which offers a way of reproducing the bosses in all their three-dimensionality in order to better communicate the complexity of their forms. We will also consider some theological connections both medieval and modern, using the bosses as a prompt to think about perspective theologically, asking what it might mean to have a notion of perspective fit for discussing our lived experience of the world.  

Rob Hawkins is an ordinand at Westcott House, reading the theology Tripos. Before training for ordination he studied and wrote about art history, completing an MPhil and PhD at King’s College, Cambridge under the supervision of Paul Binski, on questions of sculptural space and style in medieval craftsmanship. He enjoys making things, gardening, and thinking and writing about the place where theology, art, and matter meet.

For information about other events in this cycle, click here.

Programme:

Norwich Cathedral: New perspectives in medieval sculpture
by Rob Hawkins, art historian and ordinand, 15 April, 7pm 
A discussion of the 15th-century bosses from Norwich Cathedral cloister looking closely at sculptural space, point of view and style in medieval craftsmanship.

Coventry Cathedral: Icon and Inspiration 
by Alexandra Epps, art guide and lecturer, 29 April, 7pm 
The extraordinary story of the rebuilding of the Cathedral as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its inspiring commitment to the modern.

Salford RC Cathedral: A Hidden Identity
by James Crowley, architectural historian, 13 May, 7pm 
How modern conservation and a traditional approach to re-ordering might re-establish the splendour of this highly significant building and the identity of the Catholic community.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral: conceived in the round 
by Dominic Wilkinson, Principal Lecturer in Architect at Liverpool John Moores University, 27 May, 7pm 
Exploring the integrated conception of art and architecture envisaged by Sir Frederick Gibberd and the artists he worked with.

St David’s Cathedral: Teiliau Tyddewi – The Tiles of St Davids
by Martin Crampin, artist and art historian, 10 June, 7pm
A journey from the pattern and imagery of the late medieval ceramic tiles at St Davids Cathedral into Gothic Revival reproduction, interpretation and abstraction.

Online Lecture: ‘Auro, argento, aere perennius: Byzantine Art in & through Coins 4th–15th Centuries’ with Dr Cécile Morrisson, 9 April 2021, 12pm (EST)

Join Yale for their up-coming Lectures in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture series. In this online lecture, Dr Cécile Morrisson (CNRS and Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres) presents ‘Auro, argento, aere perennius: Byzantine Art in & through Coins 4th–15th Centuries’.

Respondent: Benjamin Dieter R. Hellings, Yale

This event is free, but you must register in advance here.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship: ‘Demarginalizing Medieval Africa: Images, Texts, and Identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527)’, University of Hamburg, deadline 15 April 2021

The applicant shall conduct research on the manuscript and literary culture of Ethiopia in the frame of the project “Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527)”. The project intends to shed new light on the art, history, and culture of the Ethiopian Empire during a period going from the rise of a new dynasty which claimed to descend from the biblical King Solomon in 1270 to its near collapse in 1527, through a series of collaborations with libraries and institutions across the world, and to set up a platform for exchange between scholars working on the history of manuscript illumination – with a particular focus on the Oriental Orthodox traditions of the Armenian, Coptic, and the Syriac worlds – and on the Christian arts of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

For more details on the project, visit their website. Go to the University of Hamburg website for the specification, applicant requirements, and details of how to apply.

Online Conference: Clarendon Palace Conference 2021, 10-11 April 2021

A two-day free Zoom conference to celebrate recent excavations at the medieval palace of Clarendon, Wiltshire.

Dubbed ‘the most important medieval secular building in Wiltshire’, the medieval royal palace of Clarendon is a unique time capsule, occupied from the Norman Conquest but abandoned by 1500.

This conference will showcase some results of the first truly archaeological and scientific modern exploratory excavations, which took place in June-July 2019 enabled by Historic England & resourced by the Heritage Fund.

This event is free but booking for the conference is essential.
Each day of the conference must be booked separately.

Day 1: Saturday 10 April 2021

Chair: Mandy Richardson

09.30-10.00 Cindy Wood. ‘Weeding and Writing: the work of Friends of Clarendon Palace’

10.00-10.30 Tom James. ‘Clarendon: Why Another Dig?’

10.30-10.40 BREAK

10.40-11.10 James Wright. ‘Parallels at King’s Clipstone’

11.10-11.40 Lorraine Mepham. ‘Clarendon’s Pottery and Other Ceramic Finds’

11.40-12.10 Chris Woolgar. ‘Feasting and the elite in late medieval England’

Booking for Day 1 via Eventbrite

Day 2: Sunday 11 April 2021

Chair: Cindy Wood

09.30-10.00 Jamie Armstrong. ‘Excavations at Clarendon Palace, 2019’

10.00-10.30 Naomi Sykes. ‘Excavations 2019: The animal bones’

10.30-10.40 BREAK

10.40-11.10 Mandy Richardson. ‘Leaps & bounds: hunting in Clarendon Forest and Park’

11.10-11.40 Mary South. ‘Medieval merriment at Clarendon and elsewhere’

11.40-12.00 Tom James. Summing up and close.

Booking for Day 2 via Eventbrite

New Publication: Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, by Verena Krebs

This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Europe appears to have been intimately connected to a local political agenda of building monumental ecclesiastical architecture in the North-East African highlands, and asserted the Ethiopian rulers’ claim of universal kingship and rightful descent from the biblical king Solomon. Shedding new light on the self-identity of a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power, this book challenges conventional narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’.

Verena Krebs is Professor for Medieval Cultural Realms and their Entanglements at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where she also co-directs the Bochum Centre for Mediterranean Studies. She holds a bi-national PhD from the universities of Konstanz, Germany, and Mekelle, Ethiopia; her primary research focus is on the late medieval Solomonic Kingdom of Ethiopia and its connections to the wider Mediterranean region. 

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

PhD Studentship: The Early Medieval Northwest Atlantic Region (Medieval Ireland, Wales, Anglo-Saxon England, or Iceland), University College Dublin, deadline 30 April 2021

The College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin, Ireland, is pleased to announce a generously funded Ph.D. studentship specialising in: The early medieval northwest Atlantic region (medieval Ireland, Wales, Anglo-Saxon England, or Iceland) which will be supervised by Dr Lindy Brady, Assistant Professor in Early Medieval Insular History and recently appointed Ad Astra Fellow at the School of History (https://people.ucd.ie/lindy.brady).

Deadline: 30 April 2021 by email to Lindy.Brady@ucd.ie 

The studentships are open to EU and non-EU candidates and are for a maximum of four years, renewable each year, subject to satisfactory progress. The award includes full tuition fee waiver, a PhD stipend of €18,000 per annum, and €4,000 per annum towards research costs of the Ph.D.  We anticipate that the successful candidate will start in September 2021.

Please submit the following application materials by email:

  • Personal statement and CV as one document
  • Writing sample (e.g. an essay or section of MA dissertation)
  • Two academic references
  • A proposal (1000-1500 words plus indicative bibliography).

The Selection Panel will shortlist candidates for interview, likely to take place in May. Successful applicants will be informed by email.

For the application procedure please see the relevant school guidelines below. The outcome of this competition will be communicated directly to all applicants. 

Specialisation: Early medieval insular history (medieval Ireland, Wales, Anglo-Saxon England, or Iceland)

Proposals for a Ph.D. project in the history of the early medieval northwest Atlantic region are welcomed, specialising in one or more of medieval Ireland, Wales, Anglo-Saxon England, or Iceland; including proposals which take a comparative, transnational or multilingual approach to the history of the region.

The candidate will have access to a €4,000 research budget for archival research in relevant collections abroad or related research expenses.

The UCD School of History is one of Europe’s premier history programs and offers a vibrant research community across junior and senior levels and is well-connected through the School of History’s active engagement with international partners and a broad array of UCD research centres and institutes.

Interdisciplinary work is welcomed, and candidates from all relevant areas of medieval studies are encouraged to apply.

Online Lecture: ‘“Who Was Richer In Glittering Wealth Than Solomon?”: Carolingian Values’ with Aden Kumler, 2021 Martindale Lecture, 13 May 2021, 17.00 BST

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Carolingian rulers, intellectuals, and artists pursued a major experiment in worldly and spiritual economics. This lecture examines how a series of Carolingian works of art and artifacts crafted—often quite polemically—a vision of the economy of salvation, defined by the commensuration of aesthetic, material, and sacred value.

Aden Kumler is Professor in the Department of Künste, Medien, Philosophie at the Universität Basel. Her interdisciplinary research interests and objects of study range widely but are anchored in a deep interest in how the material conditions of life shape possibilities for thought, imagination, and action. Her first book, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (Yale, 2011), was awarded a Medieval Academy of America Book Subvention and short-listed for the ACE/Mercer’s International Book Award. 

The Martindale Lecture, organised in honour of the late Professor Andrew Martindale, has run in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia since 1998, and invites a distinguished speaker in medieval and early modern art history to give a talk on their work. 

We would normally look forward to welcoming attendees in Norwich, but this year the event is going to be held online, followed by a virtual reception using Wonder. A link to access the talk online will be circulated to registered attendees 1 day before the event.

This event is online, free, and all are welcome! Please register here. For further queries please contact: j.hartnell@uea.ac.uk

Call for Journal Submissions: I Quaderni del Mediae Aetatis Sodalicium (M.Ae.S), vol. 19 (2021), deadline 30 July 2021

The journal I Quaderni del Mediae Aetatis Sodalicium (M.Ae.S) is opening a call for scientific contributions in view of the publication of its 19th issue, scheduled for 30 November 2021.

The journal, founded in 1998, is hosted by the AlmaDL Journals service, the digital publication system for peer-reviewed journals of the University of Bologna. It therefore guarantees the utilisation of a double blind peer-review system and of an Open Access policy, which contributes to the dissemination of scientific debate and knowledge.

The main focus of the journal is the period ca. 400-1500 A. D. It is an interdisciplinary publication accepting contributions from a variety of methodological approaches (including, but not limited to history, art history, literary studies, anthropology, philology, gender studies, etc.). Conscious of the importance of a scholarly debate that transcends national boundaries, the journal accepts contributions in Italian, English, French and Spanish.

For the upcoming issue, the Editorial Board and the Scientific Committee are particularly interested in articles that pay special attention to the history of women in the urban environment. Articles that fall into this category will be published in a special section devoted to the “City of Women in the Middle Ages”. However, we would like to stress that the journal has a fully generalist scope and therefore also welcomes contributions on other topics.

We invite you to send your scientific contributions (articles or book reviews) by 30 July 2021.
The procedures and editorial guidelines for sending your proposal can be found at https://maes.unibo.it/about/submissions. Please be aware that contributions that do not respect these guidelines will not be considered.

If you have any questions, contact us at: maes@unibo.it

CFP: ‘Shades of Purple: Purple Ornament in Medieval Manuscripts’, University of Zurich (25-26 November 2021), deadline 30 April 2021

“Textures of Sacred Scripture. Materials and Semantics of Sacred Book Ornament in the Western Middle Ages, 780-1300 (https://textures-of-scripture.ch)” is a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Chair of Medieval Art History at the University of Zurich. We invite paper proposals for a two-day workshop on purple ornament in medieval manuscripts, scheduled to take place in Zurich on 25 and 26 November 2021.

Recent advances in the technical analysis of purple colorants have spurred new interest in the aesthetics of purple ornament in medieval manuscripts. This most prestigious embellishment associated with imperial splendor underwent stunning transformations between the 8th and the 11th century. Purple dyes (mostly produced from lichens) were not only used to color the entire parchment surfaces of sacred books, but purple colorants were also used selectively to highlight specific texts, pages and miniatures corresponding to the content, topology, imagery, and script of individual manuscripts. Various techniques and methods were employed to create multi-sensory purple textures, combining shades of purple from red to dark blue and evoking different purple-colored materials such as silks and porphyry.

The workshop welcomes proposals that consider the whole range of these aesthetic possibilities and analyze their specific contexts and semantics throughout the Middle Ages, with a special focus on Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts. Broader theoretical approaches are also welcome. Topics of particular interest are:

  • Shades of purple: techniques, aesthetics and semantics of different purple hues
  • Purple-ground: images on, in or framed by purple
  • Purple ornament and script
  • The topology of purple ornament in manuscripts
  • Transcultural comparisons and exchange processes (i.e. Byzantine purple manuscripts, documents and silks as well as southern Italian and Spanish purple-colored manuscripts)
  • Material evocations: imitating purple textiles and stones
  • Purple topoi in rhetoric and poetry and their relationship to material ornament
  • Interactions between liturgical use and purple-colored manuscripts
  • Purple manuscripts as gifts: patronage and donations

Speaking time for each paper is 30 minutes (followed by 20 minutes for discussion). The conference languages are English, German, French and Italian. Submissions should include the title and an abstract (max. 300 words) as well as the name, contact information and short CV of the speaker. Proposals should be submitted to thomas.rainer@uzh.ch by 30 April 2021.

The confirmation of accepted papers will be announced by 15 May 2021. The workshop is currently planned as an in-person meeting. Travel expenses and on-site accommodation of all speakers will be covered.