New Publication: ‘The Abbey Church of Cluny, The Context and Creation of the Surviving Great Transept’ by C. Edson Armi

At the end of the eleventh century, monks at Cluny commissioned the largest basilica in Christendom. Much has been written about the mother church of the Cluniac Order, with a focus on reconstructing missing parts of the church and making connections between Cluniac architecture and medieval culture. My approach is different in a number of ways — concentrating on the innovative and refined features of the surviving transept and placing them in a complex artistic context. It combines examination of archaeology, architecture and sculpture, interweaves analysis of aesthetics — light, space, articulation and decoration — with analysis of practicalities — function, construction and structure, and uncovers numerous sources of the building, piecing together influences from multiple directions. The photography is inclusive as well, documenting from various angles and distances, under different lighting conditions, the power and nuance of the monument.

Find out more about the publication on the publisher’s website.

New Publication: ‘The Visual Culture of al-Andalus in the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia’, edited by Inés Monteira

This book addresses the reception of Islamic visual culture by the northern Iberian kingdoms, by systematically comparing works of art from both sides and fleshing out their historical context.

This study includes figurative and iconographic motifs, architectural forms, and even the spolia from constructions and Arabic inscriptions that were embedded in Christian buildings. The Islamic visual culture of al-Andalus was often transformed as it was recreated by Christian hands, bringing to the fore various nuances in the relationship between the two religious communities. Artistic transfer was conditioned by social coexistence between Christians and Muslims—both in the caliphate al-Andalus and in the northern realms—and military conflict. To approach the different ways in which Andalusi visual culture was received in the northern kingdoms, while embracing the vast diversity of case studies available, this book is divided into three thematic sections: Reinterpretation, Appropriation, and Artistic Transfers.

Find out more about the book on the publisher’s website.

Fellowship: Jill Franklin Fellowship in Romanesque Architectural History, British Archaeological Association, deadline 31 December 2024

Applications are invited for the inaugural Jill Franklin Fellowship in Romanesque Architectural History at the British School at Rome. The fellowship is tenable for one month and must be taken in June 2025. The fellowship is a joint responsibility of the BSR and British Archaeological Association.

Find out more on the BAA website.

RATIONALE

The fellowship has been established in memory of Jill Franklin (1945-2023), a scholar best known for her work on the architecture of the Augustinian canons, principally of the 11th and 12th centuries, and for her contributions to the study of Anglo-Norman architectural sculpture. Jill was a council member and fieldworker for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, and joint author of the catalogue of paintings in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Though undertaking work at or for various institutions, Jill spent most of her career as an independent scholar.

The aim of the fellowship is to provide an opportunity to spend a month in Rome pursuing research into Romanesque architecture and allied arts (architectural sculpture, fittings and furnishings, monumental painting). Architectural history is here interpreted broadly, to encompass settlement and distribution patterns, institutional and documentary histories (monastic, episcopal, urban), as well as research into specific and/or groups of buildings. Romanesque is similarly interpreted loosely, and although the core chronological range is c. 1000-1200, applications that run into the 10th or 13th centuries will be considered. Proposals do not need to be specific to Rome or central Italy. Indeed, the purpose could be to enjoy a month’s thinking and writing time with access to first-class libraries in pursuit of a research objective whose geographical parameters lie outside Italy.

ELIGIBILITY

Applications are open to British and Commonwealth citizens, and/or those attached to a British or Commonwealth university. The Fellowship is primarily aimed at independent scholars, students undertaking research degrees and early career art/architectural historians. Academics for whom research is a requirement of their employment contract are ineligible.

DURATION AND BENEFITS

The fellowship lasts for the month of June 2025 (30 nights). The British School will provide bed and board at the BSR (Via Gramsci), together with full access to the School’s facilities. A modest pot of spending money (approximately €900) is also provided, though successful applicants are responsible for their own travel to and from Rome.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Applications are assessed by the British Archaeological Association, and are to be sent as email attachments to secretary@thebaa.org All applicants should provide a research proposal, a short CV (no more than one page A4) and the name and contact details of a referee. The closing date for applications is 31 December, 2024. Interviews with applicants will be held by Zoom in January 2025.

Online Lecture: ‘Inscribing Sacred Matter: Reading and Writing Inscriptions on Byzantine Relics’, with Brad Hostetler, 5 December 2024, 12:00 PM (EST)

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the next lecture in our 2024–2025 lecture series.

  • December 5, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EST, UTC -5) | Zoom

Byzantium was replete with inscriptions. Buildings, wall paintings, mosaics, and portable objects alike were adorned with words that labeled iconography, documented patronage, and articulated prayers. Little is known about what the Byzantines did with this rich culture of epigraphy. Did they read these inscriptions once or repeatedly, and in which contexts? This talk brings together literary and material sources that speak to the act of reading and writing inscriptions in situ, focusing on those that were attached to relics and reliquaries. Episodes from saints’ lives, miracle tales, and histories reveal the ways in which the Byzantines engaged with their epigraphic culture. Far from being a passive feature of relics, it is argued that inscriptions were an essential component to the identification and veneration of sacred matter.

Advance registration required. Register: https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/inscribing-sacred-matter

Speaker: Brad Hostetler, Kenyon College

Brad Hostetler is Associate Professor of Art History at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio). He specializes in the art and material culture of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, with a focus on text and image relationships.

Online Conference: ‘Refinement and/or Reduction Revisited: Gothic Art, Architecture and Culture, c. 1250 to 1350’, 6 December 2024, 10am-5pm (GMT)

This one-day conference organised by the Architecture, Space and Society Centre aims at an interdisciplinary reassessment of Gothic art and architecture between c. 1250 and 1350 in a broad European perspective. In this period of increased diversity of patrons and new technical facilities, the design options for artists and architects alike extended to a virtuoso refinement across media. At the same time new modes of reduction emerged, probably originating in economic, technical or programmatic tendencies of the time. The study day – an extension of a larger international conference on his subject held at Halle University in June – will examine this paradox and its cultural context on series of outstanding examples across Europe.

Speakers:

  • Lindy Grant (University of Reading), The Aesthetics of Ascetism: Louis IX and Court Culture after the Return from the 1248-54 Crusade
  • Tim Ayers (University of York), Less is More: The Chapter House of York Minster
  • Tom Nickson (The Courtauld), Two for One: Berenguer de Montagut, Manresa, and Catalan Gothic
  • Jana Gajdošová (Sam Fogg), Transforming Tradition: The Šivetice Rotunda and its Architectural Innovations 
  • Michalis Olympios (University of Cyprus), Architecture and Ritual at the Laon Cathedral Chapels
  • Alexandra Gajewski (Burlington Magazine/Institute for Historical Research), Becoming Papal Residence: Churches and Chapels in Avignon, from John XXII to Clement VI
  • Zoë Opacic (Birkbeck), Erfordia turrita: ‘Reduktionsgotik’ and Urban Refinement in Fourteenth-century Erfurt

CFP: ‘Medieval Communities’, International Medieval Society Annual Conference, deadline 1 December 2024

The International Medieval Society invites paper proposals for their upcoming 18th annual conference (July 3-5, 2025). This year’s theme is “Medieval Communities.” Our keynotes are Sharon Farmer from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of History, and Cécile Voyer from the Centre d’Etudes supérieures de civilisation médiévale, l’Université de Poitiers.

How did people in the Middle Ages define, create, and maintain a sense of community? The International Medieval Society, Paris (IMS-Paris) invites abstracts and session proposals for our 2025 symposium on the theme of Communities in Medieval France.

The word “community” may be defined as a group of people with shared characteristics, emotional values, or interests who perceive themselves as distinct from others. From communes, monasteries, and confraternities to soldiers, lepers, and the blind, medieval people formed close emotional ties and created rituals and other practices that constituted community. This symposium invites new lines of investigation that will deepen our knowledge of the medieval sense of community, broadly defined.

Proposals should focus on France during the Middle Ages, but do not need to be exclusively limited to this period and geographical area. We encourage proposals and papers from all fields of medieval studies, such as anthropology, archeology, history, economic and social history, art history, gender studies, literary studies, musicology, philosophy, etc.

Proposals of 300 words (in English or French) for a 20-minute paper should be e-mailed to imsparissymposium@gmail.com no later than December 1, 2024. Abstracts should be accompanied by full contact information and a short bio.

For more information, please visit: https://imsparis.hypotheses.org/383

The IMS-Paris is an interdisciplinary, bilingual (French/English) organization that fosters exchanges between French and foreign scholars. For more than a decade, the IMS has served as a center for medievalists who travel to France to conduct research, work, or study.

Murray Seminar: ‘The Market for Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts c. 1890-1929 and its Consequences’, with Dr Laura Cleaver, Birkbeck, 4 December 2024 (5-6.30pm GMT)

  • Location: Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online
  • Date and time: 4 December 2024, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

In 1904 Charles Dyson Perrins, whose fortune derived from the Lea & Perrins business that made Worcestershire sauce, bought an illuminated medieval psalter for £5,250. This was an enormous sum at the time (roughly equivalent to £500,000 today) and one of the highest prices paid for a manuscript to that date. The price was justified by the aesthetic qualities of the manuscript and the circumstances of the sale: the book was new to the market, having been in a family collection since the sixteenth century. Another factor may have been the book’s English origin. Sydney Cockerell persuaded Perrins both to buy the book and to employ him to write about it. In 1908 Cockerell included the manuscript in his landmark exhibition of illuminated manuscripts held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. The exhibition was not limited to English manuscripts, but made a ‘special effort’ to showcase English art. This paper will explore how rising prices for some manuscripts in the early twentieth century were intertwined with ideas about books as objects of national heritage, and the impact of this on the development of both scholarship and collections in Britain, Europe and America.

Laura Cleaver is Professor of Manuscript Studies at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. From 2019-2024 she was Principal Investigator of the Cultivate MSS project, funded by the European Research Council, which examined the trade in medieval manuscripts in the first half of the twentieth century. She is currently completing a monograph on the manuscript trade in Britain in the early twentieth century and its impact on the development of collections and scholarship.

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CFP: ‘Medieval Art on the Move’, PhD colloquium on medieval art, Courtauld Institute of Art, deadline 20 January 2025

The event will take place on Friday 28th March 2025 at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The colloquium looks to open new dialogues regarding the movement of medieval artworks, initiating discussions on how it affected an object’s reception.

  • Deadline for abstract submission: Monday 20th January 2025.
  • Submission guidelines: 250-word paper proposal and title, a short CV, together with their complete contact details (full name, email, and institutional affiliation)
  • Contact for inquiries: Sophia Adams (sophia.adams@courtauld.ac.uk) and Natalia Muñoz-Rojas (natalia.munozrojas@courtauld.ac.uk).
  • Find out more on the Courtauld website. 

Now entombed in airless glass vitrines, medieval objects in museums appear static and immovable. But in the Middle Ages artworks were active and mobile: they were manipulated in the hand, processed through towns, and traded or gifted across very large geographic areas. Viewers were also on the move: they carried artworks on their body or processed alongside them in religious ceremonies. Merchants, soldiers, and pilgrims travelled to new places and brought artworks home with them. This colloquium will explore medieval artworks as sites of sophisticated meaning-making through the theme of movement, on small and large scales.  Medieval works of art were often moved during ritual, and many artworks also integrated moving parts, such as wings or other hinged elements. In a broader context, artworks could travel huge distances, acquiring new significances as they transgressed political, cultural and religious borders. The Silk Roads exhibition currently open at the British Museum speaks to such journeys, presenting the people and objects travelling along overlapping and expansive networks of trade, and asking how these movements shaped meanings and cultures both along  the way and at their destinations. To that end, the colloquium looks to open new dialogues regarding the movement of medieval artworks, initiating discussions on how it affected an object’s reception.  

The colloquium will take place on Friday 28th March 2025 at the Courtauld Institute of Art’s  Vernon Square campus in London. Lunch will be provided for speakers, and the event will be followed by drinks at the Courtauld Research Forum and dinner for speakers.

We invite submissions for 20-minute papers that investigate the impact of movement on objects and their audiences. Respondents might consider themes including but by no means  limited to: 

  • The vehicles or mechanisms by which medieval objects moved across geographic and cultural boundaries, such as gifting, trade, theft, or war. 
  • Processions and ritual, versus more informal movements 
  • Distance and proximity.  
  • Motion and stillness.  
  • Intercultural exchanges and movement of ideas. 

We invite PhD candidates to submit an up to 250-word paper proposal and title, a short CV,  together with their complete contact details (full name, email, and institutional affiliation) by  20th January 2025. Please send these to both Sophia Adams (sophia.adams@courtauld.ac.uk)  and Natalia Muñoz-Rojas (natalia.munoz-rojas@courtauld.ac.uk). There may be some limited  funding to support travel and accommodation costs for those without institutional support. If  you would require funding support, please include a brief budget alongside your abstract.

Symposium: ‘Records of Care: informing approaches to the conservation of Britain’s wall paintings’, Courtauld Institute of Art, 31 January 2025 (9.30-18.30 GMT)

Hosted in partnership with colleagues at The Church of England, Icon, and English Heritage, this symposium marks the culmination of the first major phase of a grant-funded digitisation project to make the National Wall Paintings Survey publicly accessible through a dynamic new online database.

Begun by Professor David Park at The Courtauld in 1980, the Survey has grown into a vast and internationally important resource, comprising records of all known British medieval wall paintings as well as extensive material on post-medieval schemes of painted decoration. Encompassing photographic records, conservation reports, annotated publications and previously unpublished research, the archive documents the UK’s most lavish courtly and ecclesiastical murals alongside paintings in more humble contexts. Incorporating material bequeathed from the archives of some of the UK’s earliest pioneering conservators, the Survey constitutes an exceptional record of the condition of Britain’s wall paintings and forms an essential point of reference, both for scholars of art history and for those charged with the ongoing care of these works.

This interdisciplinary study day is an opportunity for those working across the field of British wall paintings to reflect upon the evolution of approaches to their study and conservation, and to explore collaborative endeavours which might better inform their future care. Comprising three sessions of short papers from a diverse and engaging line-up of scholars and heritage professionals, the day will conclude with an informal panel discussion around the theme of collaboration.

Organised by Emily Howe (Project Lead, National Wall Paintings Survey at The Courtauld) with Tracy Manning (Cathedral & Church Buildings Department, Church of England), Sarah Pinchin (Chair, Icon Stone & Wall Paintings Group) and Sophie Stewart (Collections Conservation, English Heritage).

Event information

  • Registration link
  • £15.00, concessions available
  • Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2
    • This event takes place at our Vernon Square campus (WC1X 9EW).

CFP: ‘Who Ruled the World? Queen Urraca and Her Contemporaries in the Early Twelfth Century’, Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid,  3–5 March 2026 (deadline 1 April 2025)

Organizer: Therese Martin, Instituto de Historia, CSIC, Madrid
Research Grant: Intersections of Gender, Transculturalism, and Identity in Medieval Iberia: The Recycling and Long Life of Objects and Textiles (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities, PID2023-151143NA-I00, 2024-2027), PI: Verónica Carla Abenza Soria, Universidad Complutense, Madrid
Place: Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid


This conference marks the 900th anniversary of the death of Queen Urraca of León-Castile (born 1079/80, r. 1109-1126) by investigating issues of ruling power and its material display in the early twelfth century. Previous historiography has tended either to downplay Urraca’s seventeen-year reign or at best to compare it with that of other queens, especially Matilda of England (d. 1167), Melisende of Jerusalem (d. 1161), and to a lesser degree Petronila of Aragón (d. 1173). These reigning queens, while instructive comparisons, were born respectively in 1102, 1105, and 1136; they were from the generations after Urraca, more properly contemporaries of her son Alfonso VII (born 1105, r. 1126-1157). Therefore this conference seeks instead to call attention to rulers – male or female, of any religion – whose reigns were strictly contemporary to Urraca’s in the first quarter of the twelfth century, in order to understand how her rule played out in its day, not in hindsight.

We welcome paper proposals investigating the artworks and material culture that can be associated with early twelfth-century rulership, including coins, seals, textiles, manuscripts, metalworks, sculptures, buildings, etc., as well as written evidence. Of particular interest are studies focused on objects and texts that demonstrate cross-cultural or long-distance networks, as well as analyses of the concepts of gender and religion in the construction of power and authority in the early twelfth century. We encourage both individual case studies and larger inquiries, for Europe and beyond, that consider figures whose rulership, like Urraca’s, made an impact on the social and material culture of this period.

Paper proposals are sought on rulers and the display of rulership from Urraca’s lifetime, especially those that will contribute to clarifying the larger framework of her reign.

Send title with abstract and author bio, in English or Spanish (not more than 500 words each), and any queries, by 1 April 2025 to: Urraca2026@gmail.com