This talk is part of a series of Murray Research Seminars on Medieval and Renaissance Art, in which scholars present their current research for discussion. The Italo-Norman nobleman Bohemond I, became Prince of Antioch during the first crusade. He died at home in southern Italy in 1111 and was buried in an opulent chapel at the cathedral of Canosa di Puglia. The chapel is a mysterious building that continues to perplex scholars. This paper will explore the patronage and possible architectural model in the Holy Land, as well as the iconography of the bronze doors and the meaning of the inscriptions.
With 33 colour and 63 black & white illustrations, it’s a beautiful study of “double tomb” effigies in the Middle Ages. Pioneering investigation of the popular “double tomb” effigies in the Middle Ages. Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Phiilip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their “stone fidelity”.
This first full account of the “double tomb” places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the “double tomb” as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love.
Dr Jessica Barker is a Lecturer in Medieval Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Published with the generous financial assistance of the Henry Moore Foundation.
We are pleased to confirm that there will be no charge for the first 1,500 registrations thanks to a discount provided by our registration gateway provider. After this, it will cost £5.00 to register. This small fee covers the costs we incur for processing your registration via our registration provider.
Please note that the registration deadline is 26 June 2020. Any registrations received after this deadline are accepted at the discretion of the IMC organisation and may be subject to additional late fees. Registrations during the virtual Congress will not be possible.
BAA Post-Graduate Conference, Saturday 28th November 2020 The Gallery at Alan Baxter, 77 Cowcross St, Clerkenwell, London, EC1M 6EL / potentially virtual
The BAA invites proposals by postgraduates and early career researchers in the field of medieval history of art, architecture, and archaeology.
Papers can be on any aspect of the medieval period, from antiquity to the later Middle Ages, across all geographical regions.
The BAA postgraduate conference offers an opportunity for postgraduate students and early career researchers at all levels from universities across the UK and abroad to present and discuss their research, and exchange ideas.
Proposals of around 250 words for a 20-minute paper, along with a CV, should be sent by 31st July 2020 to postgradconf@thebaa.org
The Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed Metropolitan Museum Journal invites submissions of original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. There are two sections in the Journal: Articles and Research Notes. Articles contribute extensive and thoroughly-argued scholarship. Research Notes typically present a concise, neatly bounded aspect of ongoing investigation, such as a new acquisition or attribution, or a specific, resonant finding from technical analysis. All texts must take works of art in the collection as the point of departure.
The deadline for submissions for Volume 56 (2021) is September 15, 2020.
The process of review is double-blind. Manuscripts are reviewed by the Journal Editorial Board, composed of members of the curatorial, conservation, and scientific departments, as well as external reviewers.Articles and Research Notes in the Journal appear both in print and online, and are accessible via MetPublications and the Journal‘s home page on the University of Chicago Press website. For more information, please visit these sites:
Speaker(s): Dr Eleanor Jackson is Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. She completed her PhD at the History of Art Department at the University of York in 2017.
In March 2019, the British Library acquired a late 13th-century book of hours of the Use of York known as the Percy Hours. This would be exciting enough on its own, but the British Library also holds its long-separated other half, the Percy Psalter, with which it originally formed a single-volume psalter-hours. This acquisition allowed the Library to reunite the two manuscript halves in the same institution for the first time in around 200 years.
The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a relatively small number of devotional books for the laity surviving from 13th-century England, and probably the only example from York. It provides rare insight into a period of great change in book culture, when devotional books for the laity were growing in popularity and regional workshops for commercial book production were emerging around the country.
Despite its significance, the question of the manuscript’s patronage has never been satisfactorily answered. Scholars have long recognised that the original owners should be identifiable based on the portrait of a knight and lady with coats of arms on the Beatus page. While scholarly opinion has generally settled on Henry de Percy (d. 1314) and his wife Eleanor FitzAlan (d. 1328) as an approximate fit for the heraldry, there are serious problems with this identification. This paper, still a work in progress, presents a new identification of the patrons for your opinions and feedback.
The meeting will be held by Zoom. To join the meeting please sign up on this Google Form. Registration closes at 10am on the day itself. Participants will receive an email containing a link to the meeting once registration has closed. If you have any queries, please email hanna.vorholt@york.ac.uk.
Duke University Press is please to announce that the latest issue of Romanic Review, “Category Crossings: Bruno Latour and Medieval Modes of Existence,” is free to read online for the next three months (beginning May 6, 2020). Published by Columbia University, Romanic Review is a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures that has been in publication since 1910.
Volume 14 in the series Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, this publication provides a comprehensive view of the first generation of monumental crucifixes to appear in medieval Europe, which balances examinations of the history, theology, styles, and material properties of these evocative objects.
The Courtauld has created a new online exhibition of photos from the Conway library, including a set of extraordinary photos taken in the aftermath of WWII. Medievalists will find much of interest here, including this striking photo of Private William Scollie of Chicago examining art works in the Siegen caves near Cologne in April 1945.
Les Enluminures, a gallery specializing in medieval illuminated manuscripts with locations in NYC, Chicago, and Paris, provides several digital resources for specialists, collectors, and the public alike to learn about medieval manuscripts. Here is a list of some of their online offerings:
Begun in 2019, here you can listen to untold stories of medieval and Renaissance artworks, medieval manuscripts and jewelry. Join us for illuminating lectures, gallery talks, recent research, and interviews with collectors and scholars. Les Enluminures podcasts transform the past into the present.
This is the oldest digital initiative of Les Enluminures, launched not quite twenty years ago. The online site dedicated to the description and sale of text manuscripts http://www.textmanuscripts.com first appeared in September 2002. It offers the largest and most wide-ranging inventory of text manuscripts currently on the market. Beginning with Text Manuscript 1 (TM1), manuscripts on the site number well over 1,000. The majority belong to college and university libraries worldwide, and many have been the subject of scholarly study – articles, books, colloquia, and so forth. Fulfilling a service to the larger manuscript community, Les Enluminures maintains an Archive in which all sold manuscripts remain online for citation and study. New items are posted bi-annually, in the Fall and in the Spring.
Begun in 2015, this occasional blog highlights what makes our text manuscripts particularly interesting and appealing to us. Here we explore what these books disclose about how they were made and used. We also share what we know of their most fascinating and unusual contents, makers, and owners. Some of our discoveries are quite significant, some merely amusing, and some bizarre. Some blogs spill over into other areas of our inventory, like Books of Hours and miniatures. All medieval manuscripts have much to reveal to their attentive modern audiences.
To learn more about Les Enluminure’s resources, as well as to see their available artworks, please visit their website.
Medieval Art Research 