Medieval Art Research

CFP: ‘Precarious Lives: Loss, Recovery and/or Survival of MSS & Early Printed Books, 1350-1550’, Early Book Society, Bangor University (12-16 July 2021), deadline 15 March 2021

This conference theme may be as narrowly or broadly interpreted as necessary, though always with reference to the history of MSS and books from 1350 to 1550 and their material culture. Why do some texts survive? Who are their readers or makers? Topics might include evidence of borrowed books or lost books, books or libraries reconstructed from mentions in wills, and MSS and books that clearly derive from a lost original, as well as medieval libraries that are still in existence. Other subjects for consideration are texts that exist only in a singular form but seem to refer to a lost source (lost and found?) or the examination of fragments in bindings or elsewhere. Images are also considered texts, and pictures copied from models no longer extant are another theme to be discussed. Scribes, printers and illustrators who survive shifts in the book trade might also be discussed.

Theoretical approaches that engage directly with MSS and books are welcome. Proposals for papers that describe MSS and books owned, made or read by women, along with abstracts that engage with MSS and books from outside Western Europe and/or which place Western European MSS and books in dialogue with those from other parts of the globe and other cultures are especially encouraged.

Proposals for lectures of not more than 15 minutes or groupings of lectures on a similar theme (bring your friends!) are welcome. Topics that consider the transition from script to print, bibliographic issues, or the movement of books within or into Wales are of particular interest.

Because this conference will be online and in order to accommodate scholars in differing time zones, we are extending the number of days (with shorter time slots). Some papers will be pre-recorded with live session times used to discuss the ideas put forward in a paper or a cluster of papers that have been viewed previously by participants. There will also be informal gatherings where scholars can discuss specific topics as well as wine hours and virtual visits to collections of interest. We will attempt to accommodate all time zones as much as possible.

Please send your title and abstract (350 words) to the program committee by March 15 2021. These are: Martha Driver at mdriver@pace.edu, Raluca Radulescu, r.radulescu@bangor.ac.uk, Niamh Pattwell at niamh.pattwell@ucd.ie, and Margaret Connolly at mc29@st-andrews.ac.uk (Please include EBS Conference Abstract VIRTUAL WALES 2021 in the subject line of your email). Those who wish to chair a panel or run an informal discussion are invited to volunteer.

The conference is free to all paid EBS members, but donations of any amount to support graduate student help with IT issues are most welcome. Please send your membership dues or your donation either to Martha Driver (333 East 53 St Apt 12B NY, NY 10022) or to Margaret Connolly (Lauderdale, Cupar Road, Ceres, Fife Scotland, KY15 5LP UK).

Online Lecture: ‘The Art Historian and the Chapter Clerk: the joys and sorrows of ecclesiastical documentary evidence’ by Dr Lesley Milner, Society For Lincolnshire History & Archaeology, 10 February 2021, 19:30 (GMT)

Documents relating to cathedrals and churches are of immense value and are relatively scarce compared with the written evidence available to historians of other periods. During the period of study for my PhD thesis Secret spaces: English sacristies, vestries and treasure rooms, 1066-1300 I became aware of the potential of the rich field of sources housed in the Lincolnshire Archives, St Rumbold Street | Lincoln | LN2 5AB. These are the Chapter Act Books of Lincoln cathedral beginning in 1306 and the Accounts of the Common Fund, beginning in 1304.

This paper will consist of three parts. The first will show how the recorded minutes of a chapter meeting held in 1324 provided proof of the original function of the cathedral’s thirteenth century annex (known as the Song School). The second will show how the same minutes raise questions about the date of St Hugh’s golden shrine. The third part will examine puzzling evidence about the Great Seal of the dean and chapter contained within an early fourteenth-century annual account of chapter expenditure and will discuss the twelfth-century matrix in terms of its replication into seals during the pre-Reformation period, together with its conservation and preservation during that period.

Dr Lesley Milner is an Art and Architectural Historian specializing in the Medieval Period.

Organised by the Society For Lincolnshire History & Archaeology (SLHA).

Online Lecture: ‘Notre Dame of Paris: Past and Present’ with Professor Sandron and Professor Cook, ICMA, 3 February 2021, 1pm (EST)

The Friends of ICMA invites you to an online lecture/webinar on Wednesday, February 3, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. (EST) by Dany Sandron and Lindsay Cook, Notre Dame of Paris: Past and Present.

Professor Sandron co-authored, with the late professor Andrew Tallon, Notre-Dame de Paris: Neuf Siècles d’Histoire (Parigramme, 2013/2019), whose English version, Notre Dame Cathedral, Nine Centuries of History (Penn State University Press, 2020), was translated by Professor Cook, Assistant Teaching Professor of Art History, Ball State University.

Nina Rowe, President of ICMA and Professor of Art History, Fordham University, and Nancy Wu, Friends of ICMA and Educator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will introduce the speakers and moderate the discussion.

To join us on February 3, please RSVP here. A Zoom link will be sent to participants closer to the lecture date.

Attendees will be offered a special discount on the publication.Find out more information here.

Podcast: The Illuminated World Chronicle with Nina Rowe, Les Enluminurers

In this episode Dr. Nina Rowe discusses her latest book The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City with our host Sandra Hindman. They discuss some of the thrilling and often titillating stories found in World Chronicle manuscripts including the tale of the Devil on Noah’s Ark. Dr. Rowe has uncovered the deep connections these texts have to the cities in which they were produced, and has found evidence of racial and ethnic diversity, curiosity, and intermingling in these late medieval German cities. In many ways the World Chronicle was structured like a medieval version of the play Hamilton or even the recently released Netflix drama Bridgerton. All three take the material of history and robe it in the vernacular of the present day, exploring race and place through an historical lens. An innovative literary form in the 14th century, the World Chronicle transformed history into entertainment.

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday January 12, 2021.

Listen to the podcast here.

Book Festival: 1st Online Edinburgh Byzantine Book Festival, 5-7 February 2021

The Edinburgh Byzantine Book Festival is the first of its kind as a way to learn about recently published books on any area of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies (AD ca.300–ca.1500), including literature, history, archaeology, and material culture. The Festival is an online event, allowing attendees from all over the world to join in. The aim is to hold it every two years in order to promote a wider understanding and awareness of Byzantine scholarship in a spirit of collegiality. It is also intended to encourage future collaborations and networking among the various presenters and attendees, especially in these strange times of the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully, it will also inspire similar events in other research fields in the future.

The 1st Online Edinburgh Byzantine Book Festival includes volumes published in 2019 and 2020, and forthcoming books with an estimated publication date no later than June 2021. It features monographs published in English, French, Georgian, German, Modern Greek, Italian, and Romanian.

Find out more information here.

Online Lecture: ‘Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment’ with Dr Fabio Barry, Cambridge Graduate Seminar Series on Intermediality, 3 February 2021, 17:00 – 18:00 (GMT)

For the first ‘Intermediality’ Graduate Research Seminar, organised by the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, we are joined by Fabio Barry (Stanford University) who will be discussing his recently published book Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2020). It tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that coloured marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

Dr Fabio Barry is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Originally trained as an architect, his research and teaching still gravitates to this art form, although he is deeply interested in painting and sculpture of all periods as well as archaeology. Much of his published research has concentrated on artistic production in Rome, particularly Baroque architecture, treating themes from liturgy to light metaphysics. He is also interested in identifying the evocative qualities of materials (the “Material Imagination”) before the era of mass production and standardization distanced materials from the realm of nature and myth.

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.

Online Lecture: ‘Between text and image, between writing and orality’ with Maria Chronopoulou, Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman & Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 4 February 2021, 17:15 – 18:30 (GMT)

In this talk, Maria Chronopoulou (École Pratique des Hautes Études) discusses the ornate letters in the manuscripts of the XVI homilies of saint Gregory of Nazianzus from 11th to 13th century

Online Lecture: ‘What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Colour, Race and Unfreedom in Late Medieval Iberia’ with Dr Pamela Patton, Cambridge Medieval Art Seminars, 1 February 2021, 17:00 (GMT)

Join the upcoming Cambridge Medieval Art Seminar with Dr Pamela Patton (Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University), who will be presenting on: ‘What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Colour, Race and Unfreedom in Late Medieval Iberia’. The talk takes place online at 17:00 pm (GMT).

The British Archaeological Association Digital Tour Competition

Inspired by the difficulties in visiting churches and other historic sites during the pandemic, The British Archaeological Association is looking at ways of promoting the use of digital technology to allow them to be seen even during a lockdown, or for those far distant. The Association is therefore holding a competition to produce a short video/photographic presentation of a Roman or medieval site (a building, ruin, even a town) using remote mapping and imaging systems such as Google Earth, or Google Earth Studio. The prize is £300.

An advantage of the new technologies is the capacity to show a building in the context of its surroundings so the tour might also feature topographical context, if appropriate. This might include both extant and lost Roman or medieval buildings and features, though a comprehensive treatment of a single site is also welcome.

The submission should be the virtual equivalent of a 15-minute tour of a site or building. Ideally the tour would take the viewer to all (interesting) parts of a building, and provide information about the views shown, suitable for a (reasonably) scholarly viewer, including some further reading.

Among the criteria for judging will be the quality of information given, which should reflect reliable and up-to-date thinking, the quality of the visuals, and the use of supplementary images – antiquarian views or maps, other photographs, etc. Ease of use is also important, and it should provide users with the opportunity to explore on their own.

HOW TO SUBMIT: please send a link to your project to: web@thebaa.org (i.e. if you have produced a video, please upload to YouTube and send a link)

Samples of the sort of thing we are looking for can be found on the Association’s website: Digital Resources | British Archaeological Association (thebaa.org), and a tutorial videos, exploring the potential of Google Earth and Google Earth Studio can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XcLcF-huCo&feature=emb_logo (a very simple version 3-minute tutorial from Google) and https://youtu.be/cZ91_arsbdI (a more sophisticated tutorial from James Cameron)

The tour should cover sites within the Association’s areas of interest, which are defined as the study of material culture from the Roman period until the nineteenth century, principally within Europe and the Mediterranean basin, and within that, the core interests of the BAA are Roman to 16th century.

The closing date for competition entries is 1 February 2021 and the result will be announced on 15 February 2021.

Job: Lecturer in Medieval History 1100-1500, University of Lancaster, deadline 22 February 2021

The Department of History at Lancaster University has recently advertised a new post: Lecturer in Medieval History 1100-1500. This is a twenty-four month post, at 0.9 FTE, geared to support the post-holder in developing their research alongside teaching.

The advertisement can be found here: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CDN438/lecturer-in-medieval-history-1100-1500

The deadline for applications is 22 February 2021.

Informal enquiries are welcomed and should be directed to Dr Marco Wyss, at: m.wyss@lancaster.ac.uk.