Lecture: The Other Christians of the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Ethiopian Settlement and Exchange with Latin Europe, c. 1200-1550, 1st October 5:00pm (EST)

The Marco Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) invites you to virtually attend the 17th annual Riggsby Lecture on Thursday, October 1 at 5:00pm EST. Samantha Kelly of Rutgers University will present, The Other Christians of the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Ethiopian Settlement and Exchange with Latin Europe, c. 1200-1550.

Ethiopian Christian settlements, which dotted the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth century, became both a primary source of Latin Christian knowledge about Ethiopia and the springboard for a similar settlement in Rome around 1500. This talk explores the Mediterranean facet of Ethiopian Christianity in these centuries, both as a network for Ethiopian pilgrims and settlers and in the perception of many Latin Christians.

Samantha Kelly is a professor of history at Rutgers University. Her research examines relations between Europe and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in the pre-modern era.  She is the author of The ‘Cronaca di Partenope’: An Introduction to and Critical Edition of the First Vernacular History of Naples (2011) and The New Solomon: Robert of Anjou (1309-1343) and Fourteenth-Century Kingship (2003, winner of the Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association).

The Marco Institute is an internationally acclaimed center for the study of the history and culture of the period from roughly 300 to 1700 C.E. With its rich schedule of lectures, workshops, and symposia; multiple fellowship opportunities for faculty and graduate students; graduate certificate and Summer Latin Program; and undergraduate major and minor, the Institute pursues the research and teaching of the early periods at the highest levels. Thanks to the generous support of donors Stuart and Kate Riggsby, the Marco Institute was able to establish the annual Riggsby Lecture in 2004. This lecture series brings a prestigious scholar of the medieval Mediterranean to the University of Tennessee campus every fall to give a public talk on a medieval Mediterranean topic of the speaker’s choosing.

Registration is required. Please click here to receive the Zoom link.

CFP: Double-Sided Objects in the History of Art, College Art Association Annual Conference 2021, deadline 16 September 2020

College Art Association Annual Conference, New York City, February 10-13, 2021

Chairs: Nicole Pulichene (Harvard University) and Nancy Thebaut (Skidmore College)

Double-sided images are pervasive across art historical time and place, yet they are not always considered in their full physical integrity: one side is often studied, displayed, and photographed more than its counterpart. In the historiography of pre-modern art, for example, privileging one side of a work might reflect methodologies borrowed from the study of easel painting. This approach, however, risks flattening an object’s material complexity and obscuring evidence of making and use.

This panel seeks papers that consider the history and historiography of double-sided objects by attending to their many facets, whether “front” and “back,” oblique angles, or otherwise hidden images. We ask how more holistic approaches to works of art might complicate, or even confirm, long-standing art historical narratives. Topics and questions might include: if makers emphasized or concealed the multi-sidedness of an object; if (and how) one side became dominant over time; emergent iconographic or material patterns within an object corpus; and multifarious or changing viewing conditions. Participants might offer solutions to unsatisfying yet common descriptors like front/back, recto/verso, or obverse/reverse, which so often reinforce material hierarchies. In keeping with this year’s CAA theme of climate crisis, contributors may wish to explore double-sidedness as a solution to material scarcity, namely through reuse and recycling. Proposals dealing with multi-sided works of art are also encouraged to apply. We hope that this panel creates a unique space to confront methodological and visual blind spots within our discipline by revising and challenging one-dimensional modes of looking.

Please submit abstracts via email to Nicole Pulichene (npulichene@gmail.com) and Nancy Thebaut (nancy.thebaut@gmail.com) by September 16 2020.

Online Lecture: ‘The Impostor Sea: Fraud in the Medieval Mediterranean’ by Dr. Hussein Fancy, 29 September 2020, 5:30pm (EST)

The Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University, New York City, sponsors many events throughout the year to encourage increased interest, knowledge, and study of the Middle Ages. In light of covid-19, their Fall 2020 lecture series is now virtual. Join the Center for its first virtual lecture of the semester on Tuesday, September 29 at 5:30pm EST. Dr. Hussein Fancy (University of Michigan) will present, The Impostor Sea: Fraud in the Medieval Mediterranean.

Registration is required for this event. To register, please click here.

The Medieval Studies program at Fordham University was founded in 1971 to promote the interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages. By the late 1970s, the program had grown to include an undergraduate element and was housed in the Center for Medieval Studies, which is now one of the university’s most active and well-known centers of advanced study. The Center has made a significant contribution to the promotion of the study and teaching of medieval Europe. Through its digital workshops and online projects, students have many opportunities to learn more about the digital humanities. The integrated interdisciplinary approach to the Middle Ages is a natural extension of Fordham’s long-standing commitment to the study of this crucial historical period, which has attracted some of the University’s most distinguished faculty and students.

Dr. Hussein Fancy earned his PhD from Princeton University. He is trained as a historian of medieval Europe and the Islamic world. His first book, The Mercenary Mediterranean, examined the service of Muslim soldiers from North Africa to the Christian kings of the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Image credit: Book on Navigation, Turkish, Late 11th century AH / 17th CE — early 12th century AH / 18th CE, folio 64a, The Walters Art Museum. W. 658

Online Lecture: ‘Byzantine Pieces of an Umayyad Puzzle: A Basalt Platform in the Azraq Oasis’, Dr Alexander Brey, 1 October 2020, 4:00–5:00pm (ET)

We are pleased to announce that “Byzantine Pieces of an Umayyad Puzzle: A Basalt Platform in the Azraq Oasis” has been rescheduled. In this lecture, Dr. Alexander Brey, Wellesley College, will discuss an Umayyad-era basalt reservoir platform built within the Azraq oasis in eastern Jordan and places its carved interlocking stones in conservation with early Byzantine zodiac and celestial diagrams.

A basalt reservoir platform built within the Azraq oasis in eastern Jordan features carved stones that fit together like the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Combining Sasanian and Byzantine motifs, the bucolic and mythological imagery that once decorated the platform is typical of the courtly architectural decoration produced for the ruling families of the Umayyad caliphate (661–750 CE).

In this talk I argue that, although the platform does not contain a depiction of the zodiac as such, the logic of its design can be better understood through comparison with a group of Early Byzantine zodiac and celestial diagrams. Situating the platform in the context of the post-Byzantine visual and material culture of Greater Syria during the Umayyad era not only clarifies the composition of the platform, but also the different relationships between image-part and image-whole that were implicit in a variety of late antique media and artistic techniques.

October 1, 2020 | Zoom | 4:00–5:00 pm (Eastern time)

This lecture will take place live on ZOOM, followed by a question and answer period. Please register to receive the ZOOM link. An email with the relevant ZOOM information will be sent 1–2 hours ahead of the lecture. Registration closes at 11:00 AM on October 1, 2020.

REGISTER

Sponsored by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Alexander Brey, Wellesley College

Alexander Brey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College. He received his PhD and MA in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. His research interests include the cross-cultural reception of visual cultures in the Umayyad caliphate and the medieval Mediterranean more generally, ranging from studies of the built environment to the trade and reuse of luxury goods. He is currently working on his book project, “The Caliph’s Prey: Hunting in the Visual Cultures of the Umayyad Empire.” His work has been supported by fellowships at the Social Science Research Council and the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks.

New Publication: The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Marcia Kupfer, Adam Cohen, and J. H. Chajes

This collection of essays by leading scholars reflects new interest in how graphic devices contributed to the production of knowledge during a formative period of European history.

All of us are exposed to graphic means of communication on a daily basis. Our life seems flooded with lists, tables, charts, diagrams, models, maps, and forms of notation. Although we now take such devices for granted, their role in the codification and transmission of knowledge evolved within historical contexts where they performed particular tasks. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, both mental and material, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemic potential of visual strategies have privileged the modern natural sciences. This volume expands the field of research by focusing on the relationship between the arts of memory and modes of graphic mediation through the sixteenth century. Chapters encompass Christian (Greek as well as Latin) production, Jewish (Hebrew) traditions, and the transfer of Arabic learning. The linked essays anthologized here consider the generative power of schemata, cartographic representation, and even the layout of text: more than merely compiling information, visual arrangements formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world.

Pre-order the book here.

Table of Contents

Marcia Kupfer, Introduction

I. Visualization between Mind and Hand

Mary Carruthers, Geometries for Thinking Creatively

Lina Bolzoni, Visualization of a Universal Knowledge: Images and Rhetorical Machines in Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Mindmapping: The Diagram Paradigm in Medieval Art – and Beyond

II. The Iconicity of Text

Beatrice Kitzinger, Framing the Gospels, c. 1000: Iconicity, Textuality, and Knowledge

Lesley Smith, Biblical Gloss and Commentary: the Scaffolding of Scripture

David Stern, The Topography of the Talmudic Page

Ayelet Even-Ezra, Seeing the Forest beyond the Trees: A Preliminary Overview of a Scholastic Habit of Visualization

Yuval Harari, Functional Paratexts and the Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Manuscripts of Magic

A. Mark Smith, More than Meets the Eye: What Made the Printing Revolution Revolutionary

III. Graphic Vehicles of Scientia

Barbara Obrist, The Idea of a Spherical Universe and its Visualization in the Earlier Middle Ages (Seventh–Twelfth Centuries)

Marcia Kupfer, The Rhetoric of World Maps in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Faith Wallis, Visualizing Knowledge in Medieval Calendar Science: a Twelfth-Century Family of ‘Graphic Glosses’ on Bede’s De temporum ratione

John Haines, The Visualization of Music in the Middle Ages: Three Case Studies

Peter Murray Jones, Visualization in Medicine between Script and Print, c. 1375–1550

IV. Diagrammatic Traditions

Linda Safran, A Prolegomenon to Byzantine Diagrams

Adam S. Cohen, Diagramming the Diagrammatic: Twelfth-Century Europe

Madeline H. Caviness, Templates for Knowledge: Geometric Ordering of the Built Environment, Monumental Decoration, Illuminated Page

Lucy Freeman Sandler, Religious Instruction and Devotional Study: The Pictorial and the Textual in Gothic Diagrams

J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree

New Publication: The Library of the Dukes of Burgundy, edited by Bernard Bousmanne and Elena Savini

Very richly illustrated, this volume re-frames this exceptional library within its political, economic, historical and artistic context, examining closely both scholarly literature and more than sixty manuscripts considered to be the jewels of the Library.

Formed under Philip the Bold and passed down to his successors, John the Fearless and Philip the Good, the Library of the Dukes of Burgundy comprised no less than nine hundred manuscripts copied and illuminated by the greatest artists of the Middle Ages by the time of Charles the Bold. This extraordinary and unique library included essential texts of medieval literature such as the works of Christine de Pizan, the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meung and Guillaume de Lorris, the History of Charles Martel, as well as the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle. It was one of the largest collections of books of its time alongside those of the King of France Charles V, the Duke of Berry, the Medici and the papacy.

The two hundred and eighty manuscripts of the collection preserved today in the Royal Library of Belgium cover all fields of medieval thought: literature, ancient history, sciences, morals, religion philosophy, but also law, poetry and chivalric romance. The oldest of these works date back to the fourteenth century while the most recent date from the end of the feudal period. Many of them were transcribed at the express request of the dukes by renowned copyists such as Jean Miélot, Jean Wauquelin, and David Aubert. Many of these codices are absolute masterpieces of the French or Flemish miniature and have been illuminated by Willem Vrelant, Loyset Liédet, Jean le Tavernier, Philippe de Mazerolles, Simon Marmion, and Liévin Van Lathem, miniaturists whose fame and talent competed with Flemish Primitives such as Jan Van Eyck, Rogier Van der Weyden or Hans Memling. In the unanimous opinion of researchers, manuscripts that belong to the collection such as the Chronicles of Hainault by Jacques de Guise, the Hours of the Duke of Berry, the Psalter of Peterborough or the Cronic and Conquest of Charlemagne, are among the fifty most prestigious manuscripts in the world.

Mr Bernard Bousmanne is curator of the Manuscripts Room at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

Find out more and order the book here.

Study Day: British Archaeological Association, Old Sarum Study Day, Saturday 10 October 2020

Programme:

 Meet in front of Salisbury Cathedral at 11.00 (in west walk of cloister if raining). There is a train from Waterloo at 9.20 which arrives at Salisbury station at 10.50 for anyone travelling from London. 

 11:00 – 13:00 Salisbury cathedral and Museum with Tim Tatton-Brown and John McNeill.

 We will look at the material from Old Sarum which survives in the precinct and divide into two groups at 12.00. Tim Tatton-Brown will take group 1 into the cathedral to look at the Osmund shrine base and tomb of Roger; John McNeill will take group 2 into the museum – and then we swop groups at 12.30. 

 13:00 – 14:15 Lunch break 

14:30 – 16:30 Old Sarum with Tim Tatton-Brown and John McNeill 

The study day fee is £20 for members (please bring this with you; cheque or cash) and free for students. All participants will have to book into Old Sarum, for which there is a fee of £5.90 (free for English Heritage Members). The students who have to pay the £5.90 booking fee for Old Sarum will be reimbursed the fee along with their travel expenses. The Study Day is limited to a maximum of 20 people – 10 students and 10 members. Email studydays@thebaa.org to register. 

IMPORTANT: We will ask everyone to make individual online bookings for Old Sarum via the English Heritage booking system. HOWEVER, NUMBERS ARE LIMITED SO PLEASE FIRST CONFIRM YOU HAVE A PLACE AND YOU WILL THEN BE GIVEN DETAILS ON HOW TO PROCEED. 

Current regulations for visits to the Cathedral, Museum and Old Sarum require all visitors to wear face masks 

Lecture Series: British Archaeological Association Programme of Meetings 2020-2021

The British Archaeological Association holds regular monthly lectures on the first Wednesday of each month between October and May in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE.

Please note: However, it may be that precautions against the spread of Covid-19 make this impossible, in which case the lectures will be given online. Details on a lecture-by-lecture basis will be posted on the BAA website.

At the Society of Antiquaries of London: Tea is served from 4.30 p.m. and the Chair is taken at 5.00 p.m. 

The lectures are open to all and provide an opportunity for professionals, students and independent scholars to present research that falls within the BAA’s areas of interest. 

7 October 2020

The Fabric accounts of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster

by Professor Tim Ayers, University of York

4 November 2020

The Medieval Stained Glass at Holy Trinity, Long Melford

by Anna Eavis, English Heritage

2 December 2020

‘The face of one making for Jerusalem’: The Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral and Joy

by Katherine Turely, Birkbeck College

6 January 2021

Three historical oddities, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the BC/AC divide and the continent of Europe

by Professor Eric Fernie, Courtauld Institute of Art

3 February 2021

Living Legends: the art of adventure in English Manuscripts c.1240-1340

by Dr Amy Jeffs, University of Cambridge

3 March 2021

Angels on the edge: constructing sacred space in the art and architecture of early medieval England

by Dr Meg Boulton, Edinburgh College of Art

7 April 2021

Tracing the past: 3-D analysis of medieval vaults

by Dr Alexandrina Buchanan, Dr Nicholas Webb and Dr James Hillson, University of Liverpool

5 May 2021

Women and the built environment in late medieval Scotland

by Dr Rachel Delman, University of York

Call for Submissions: Byzantine and Medieval Art and Architecture, deadline 1 November 2020

Editors: Lech Koscielak, Paschal is Androudis, and Ilkgiil Kaya Zenbilci

Special Issue – volume 2.

Deadline for submissions: 1 November 2020

Topics:

  • Art and Artists
  • Architectural History
  • Church Architecture
  • Conflicts on Art
  • Emperors’ Power on Art
  • Jewellery
  • Icons
  • Ivories
  • Illuminated Manuscripts
  • Interaction between East and West
  • Monastic Art
  • Mosaics
  • Schools and Workshops
  • Wall Paintings
  • Theology and Art

For Submission and information: historiaetorbis@gmail.com

New Journal Issue: Different Vision, ‘Are We Post-Theoretical?’, Issue 6, July 2020

We are excited to present this new issue of Different Visions featuring four essays that engage with the relevance of theory to medieval art history – and to art history in general – today. The essays were inspired by Gerald Guest’s session at the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo entitled “Medieval Art History: Are We Post-Theoretical?” The issue also includes a conversation between the four authors.

View the new issue here.

Contents

Jennifer Borland, Oklahoma State University and Nancy Thompson, St. Olaf College. Introduction: Relaunching Different Visions.

Gerald B. Guest, John Carroll University. Embodiment and Devotion in the Très Riches Heures (or, the Possibilities of a Post-Theoretical Art History). 

Zachary Stewart, Texas A&M University. Other Spaces: Medieval Architectural History Between Theory and Practice.

Marian Bleeke, Cleveland State University.Ivory and Whiteness.

Jessamine Batario, Colby College. History, Theory, and the Risks of Being Wrong.

Are We Post-Theoretical? A Conversation between Gerry Guest, Zachary Stewart, Marian Bleeke, and Jessamine Batario.