The latest research, news, and reviews from the world of Medieval Art History
Early Science and Medicine Seminar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
Dr Jack Hartnell (University of East Anglia) presents: ‘Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image’
More information can be found here.
Please register here to receive the Zoom link for the session. Organised by Lauren Kassell. All welcome. The Zoom will be open for informal discussion from 4:45-5pm and 6:30-7pm.
The In via Dante Network at the University of Leeds are hosting three colloquia aimed at creating a platform for doctoral and early career researchers working on Dante across different institutions to come together to discuss their work. Our 2021 colloquia will focus on Dante’s relationship to three areas of enquiry: Latin literature (and its medieval reception); medieval religious culture; and medieval conceptions of space and architecture.
The format for each colloquium will be as follows: three PGRS or early-career researchers will present their work to a panel of three established scholars from a range of disciplines who will act as respondents and guide subsequent discussions (20 mins/paper followed by 20 mins of discussion of each paper).
The first colloquium will focus on ‘Dante & Medieval Conceptions of Space and Architecture’ and will be held online on 24 February from 3:00-5:30 GMT.
In all three realms of the afterlife, Dante describes the architecture and spaces he encounters as meaningful. These representations provide clues to how one moves through and experiences space as an individual and/or community in activities like prayer, processions, meditation, and other religious practices. This colloquium seeks to explore how Dante’s Commedia is shaped and informed by medieval conceptions of space and architecture.
Presenters: Caroline Domor (Oxford), Emma Wall (Durham), and Elisabeth Trischler (Leeds) will each present a 20 minute paper.
Respondents: Christopher Kleinhenz (Wisconsin-Madison) and Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame)
Click here to register.
The Saxo Institute, Faculty of Humanities, Copenhagen University (UCPH), Denmark, invites applicants for a tenure-track assistant professorship in Archaeology to be filled by the 1st of September 2021 or as soon as possible thereafter.
We are looking for an outstanding junior researcher with an innovative mind-set and intellectual curiosity to strengthen and complement the research profile of Archaeology at the Saxo Institute. Our research group comprises the fields of Classical, Nordic, and contemporary archaeology, and its research focuses on visual culture, landscape, technology and production, archaeo-metallurgy, textile studies, and archaeological theory and epistemology in the humanities. Methodologically, fieldwork, excavations, surveys, experimental archaeology, and museum studies form an integral part of our research. We aim to attract an international top-talent to our ambitious and collaborative environment.
The Saxo Institute is dedicated to the study of human societies past and present, with degree programs ranging from History to Ethnology, Archeology, Classical Languages and Migration Studies. With some 1400 students and a staff of 100 employees, the Institute offers a variety of research and library facilities, servicing a vibrant community of tenured scholars, graduate students, visiting researchers and externally funded projects. The institute also hosts a range of leading research centres and externally funded research projects.
For more information on this job opening, please visit University of Copenhagen’s website.
Bard Graduate Center (BGC) invites scholars from university, museum, and independent backgrounds with a PhD or equivalent professional experience to apply for non-stipendiary visiting fellowships, to be held during the 2021–22 academic year. BGC Visiting Fellowships, which are intended for scholars who have already secured means of funding, provide scholars with workspace in the BGC Research Center and enable them to join our dynamic intellectual and scholarly community in New York City. Visiting Fellowships represent our commitment to conversation and scholarly communication. We are happy to welcome scholars who similarly seek a serious but informal intellectual environment in which to pursue their work in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Visiting Fellowships may be awarded for anywhere from one month to the full academic year.
Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Devoted to the study of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, the research at the BGC draws on methodologies and approaches from art history, economic and cultural history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology.
For more information, please go here. Applications must be submitted online, and are due March 1st. Please direct questions to the Fellowship Committee via email at fellowships@bgc.bard.edu.
Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society’s attitude toward individuals identified as criminals—by others or themselves—can serve as a window into that society’s mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society’s attitudes toward them.
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner is professor of medieval Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’ersheva Israel, where he is the director of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC). He is the author of On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2014) and the editor of Intricate Interfaith Networks in the Middle Ages: Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts.
Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe can be purchased here.
One’s good name or fama was of great importance in medieval society. Medievalists have long recognised that spin, smear campaigns and other ‘dark arts’ of public relations and propaganda strategies were practised as keenly and carefully in pre-modern politics as they are today. This paper explores the role of art and architecture in these processes of reputation management. It considers the efforts of Isabella of France, her allies and her opponents to steer public opinion on and interpretations of her potentially adulterous, treasonous and regicidal actions in England after 1326.
Dr Laura Slater is a Lecturer in the History of Medieval Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. Her book, Art and Political Thought in Medieval England, c. 1150-1350 was published in 2018. Her research interests centre on the relationships between art, ideas, power and politics in medieval Britain and Europe. She is also interested in medieval responses to antiquity and the Holy Land, particularly in the context of the crusades.
This is a live online event. Register here.
Please register for more details. The platform and log in details will be sent to attendees at least 48 hours before the event. Please note that registration closes 30 minutes before the event start time.
If you have not received the log in details or have any further queries, please contact researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk.
For the third ‘Intermediality’ Graduate Research Seminar, organised by the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, we are joined by art historian Dr Laura Tillery (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) who will be discussing intermedial collaboration in the medieval workshop, focusing on fifteenth-century multimedia winged altarpieces in Lübeck, Germany and Scandinavia.
Dr Laura Tillery is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Department of Art and Media Studies at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is a historian of medieval and early modern art of Northern Europe (ca. 1000-1600), Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea regions. Her current research investigates the mobility of objects across geographies and cultures, the intermediality of altarpieces, and methodological questions concerning medieval viewership.
The series is convened by Anneke de Bont (ad961@cam.ac.uk), Elisabetta Garletti (esg36@cam.ac.uk) and Stella Wisgrill (sw728@cam.ac.uk).
Seminars will take place online via Zoom, hosted by the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge
As the current pandemic is presenting artists and institutions with the challenge to rethink the ways in which art works can be displayed, mediated and circulated, the question of intermediality has returned with new urgency. In the study of art, the concept of intermediality allows us to consider the longstanding history of the arts’ interaction with each other and other disciplines, while challenging the very notion of media specificity that underlies traditional definitions of art historical and academic specialisms, as well as the organisation of museum collections. This seminar series covers a broad time frame, from antiquity to the present day and offers a fresh opportunity to examine and compare the relevance and productivity of this critical concept to the study of art history across different epochs and geographies.
Join Yale for their up-coming Lectures in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture series. In this online lecture, Dr Sean Leatherbury (University College, Dublin) presents: ”From Domestic to Divine: The Mosaics of Late Antique Syria.’
Respondent: Örgü Dalgıç, Yale
This event is free, but you must register in advance here.
The London Medieval Society’s second Medieval Crafts and Guilds Colloquium will be held online, via Zoom, on Saturday 21st February 2021.
The programme of the day is as follows:
10.20 Welcome and Introduction
10.30 Matthew Davies (Birkbeck) – London’s Guilds and Companies: Authority, Regulation, and Community
11.20 Break
11.30 Daniella Gonzalez (University of Kent) – Political Memory in Richard II’s London: The 1388 Guild Petitions, Civic Governance and the Burning of the Jubilee Book
12.15 Mark Whelan (King’s College London) – Wax and Guilds in Late Medieval Baltic and North Sea Communities
1.00 Lunch
1.45 Round Table (all speakers)
2.30 End of Event
Register for free on the official event page here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medieval-crafts-and-guilds-tickets-132943237803
Register and find out more here.
Please register for more details. The platform and log in details will be sent to attendees at least 48 hours before the event. Please note that registration closes 30 minutes before the event start time. If you have not received the log in details or have any further queries, please contact researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk.
From the chalices that glisten behind glass museum cases to the ritual staging of powerful relics, from the architectural fragments of once towering cathedrals to fresco schemes designed to envelope the senses of the viewer, the display and location of medieval art and architecture matter. Though often meticulously designed and executed for specific temporal and physical loci, objects frequently moved – whether purposefully, forcefully or even only imaginatively – into new contexts and topographies. Natural disasters, wars and religious conflicts – the 1202 Syria earthquake, the 1204 Sack of Constantinople, St Lucia’s Flood in 1297, or the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, amongst many others – contributed to the displacement of people, objects and buildings.
Surviving sources – whether written or visual – affirm that the reciprocal relationships between objects and their sites were integral to medieval viewers’ experience of art and architecture. At a time when access to artworks and cultural sites has been largely disrupted by the current pandemic, addressing the question of how medieval art was uprooted and its display reconfigured is especially pertinent. The Courtauld’s 26th Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium has invited speakers from various academic fields (including, but not limited to, art history, archaeology, material culture and conservation studies) to consider various forms of displacement and their visual and experiential implications for medieval art and architecture.
11:00 Welcome
11:10 Session 1: Artworks on the Move
Anna Henningsson (Technical University of Berlin) – Displaced Authenticity: Medieval Wall Paintings in Transformation
Anja Katharina Frisch (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) – English Medieval Alabaster Sculpture in Context: Modes of Reframing and Use across Continental Europe
11:50 Discussion
12:10 Break
12.25 Session 2: Displaying Communities
Elena Lavrentyeva (Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning, Moscow) – “Talking” sculptural decoration of the Church of Resurrection in Jerusalem as the identification of the Christian communities guarding the Holy Sepulchre in the 12th century
Yeidy Rosa (Durham University) – Hidden and Revealed: Jewish-Muslim-Christian Relations, Women’s Power and Family Feuds Through a Recently Uncovered Mural of the Lamentation in the Cathedral of Albarracín, Teruel, Aragon, Spain, XV Century
13:05 Discussion
13:25 Lunch
14:15 Session 3: Accessing Place: Imagination and Proximity
Michele Guida Conte (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) – When Sacred Objects Shape Architecture: Santa Corona in Vicenza
Florian Abe (Bibliotheca Hertziana) – Visualising Measurements – The Problem of ‘Original’ and (Proto)Type in Late Medieval Stations of the Cross
Kevin Vogelaar (Independent Researcher) – Hearts Hard as Flint: Frankish Reception of Chinese Pilgrims and Relic Accessibility in the Late 13th Century
15:15 Discussion
15:45 End of Day 1
11:00 Welcome
11:05 Session 4: Shifting Contexts: Display and Displacement
Julia Faiers (University of St Andrews) – The displacement and re-presentations of the Combefa Entombment sculptures
Jamie Haskell (The Courtauld) – Set in stone? Shifts in the display of sculpture and wall paintings in the cloister of Pamplona Cathedral
Iñigo Salto Santamaría (Technische Universität Berlin) – The power of temporary exhibitions – The Bayeux Tapestry at the Louvre (1803/1944)
12:05 Discussion
12:35 Break
12:50 Session 5: Destroying and Salvaging
Chiara Capulli (University of Cambridge) – Salvaging the Beata Umiltà: Vallombrosan visual identity after the 1529 Guasto of Florence
Julian Wood (Oxford University) – ‘Remnants of Consubstantiality? Shattered images and Immanence in Byzantine Iconoclasm’
13:30 Discussion
13:50 Lunch
14:50 Session 6: Enshrining the Past
Samuel Dawson (The Courtauld) – Reframing Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Badia a Rofeno altarpiece as a work of Olivetan patronage
Claire Jensen (University of Toronto) – The Madonna of the Healed: [Re]framing an Annunciation Panel Painting in Aversa
15:30 Discussion
15:50 Closing Remarks by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld)
16:00 End of Day 2
Medieval Art Research