Medieval Art Research

Commemoration of the Dead: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material

Brass_of_Simon_de_Felbrigge_and_wife_St_Margaret's_Church_Felbrigg_Norfolk

Call for Papers for Commemoration of the Dead: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material conference to be held 10.00- 17.00, Saturday 15 November 2014 at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Proposals are invited for papers to be presented at a one-day conference, jointly sponsored by the Monumental Brass Society and the Church Monuments Society. The aim of this event is to showcase the developments in research techniques and approaches that have led to new insights into monumental brasses.

This follows a conference, ‘Fifty Years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Materials’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art on 21 June 2014. Panofsky, in his lavishly illustrated Tomb Sculpture, included the illustration of only a single brass (Pl. 212), that of the hand-holding Sir Edward Cerne and Lady Elyne Cerne, Draycott Cerne, Wilts. The ‘Commemoration of the Dead’ conference will address this imbalance by examining the significance of monumental brasses within the broader context of funerary art, especially the connections and divergences between brasses and other forms of tomb sculpture.

The core period covered by the conference will be Medieval to Early Modern, but papers up to the current day will be considered. The core geographic focus will be Europe.

Papers are invited on a wider range of topics arising from the study of monumental brasses, and could include:

• Individual brasses – style, location, patronage, production

• Groups of brasses united by a common theme

• Materials and their symbolic importance

• Function of brasses- prospective/retrospective, devotional, legal, etc.

• Audience and reception

• Brasses and the liturgy

• Inscriptions, epitaphs, heraldry

• Technical investigation

Logistics:

• Length of paper: 20 minutes

• Expenses: limited funds are available to cover speakers’ expenses

This is an opportunity for doctoral and early post-doctoral students to share their research. It is intended (subject to quality and peer review) to publish a joint collection of edited essays from the two conferences.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words and a brief biography to

tombsculpture@gmail.com by 18 May.

Organised by: Christian Steer, Hon. Secretary, Monumental Brass Society, Ann Adams & Jessica Barker, PhD Candidates, The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Lecture: Fashionable goods in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1700

INAUGURAL LECTURE: PROFESSOR EVELYN WELCH, Fashionable goods in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1700

Great Hall King’s Building Strand Campus

When: 05/03/2014 (18:30)

This event is open to all and free to attend, but booking is required via our Eventbrite page.

Registration URL: http://evelynwelch.eventbrite.co.uk

Thinking through things:

An Inaugural Lecture by Professor Evelyn Welch, Vice Principal (Arts & Sciences)

The Victoria & Albert Museum has two late seventeenth-century dolls known as ‘Lord and Lady Clapham’ on display. Wearing Chinese silks, fine lace head-dresses, kimono-style banyans and carrying full face masks, gaming bags, the two figures represented the height of what was regarded as fashionable in Europe in around 1692. But how did these goods and styles become so desirable and spread so quickly across so many countries?

This lecture looks at a range of fashionable items, goods that took on iconic status in England, France, Holland, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia focusing on what we can learn by studying the things themselves. Drawing on research undertaken as part of a major collaborative research project, ‘Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800’ (www.fashioningtheearlymodern.ac.uk) funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), it looks at ruffs, tippets, muffs, masks and other fashions which spread, disappeared and re-emerged in different guises between 1550 and 1700. Now often dismembered, buried and forgotten, it is only by bringing together the surviving objects and their representations that we can begin to explore how fashion worked in Early Modern Europe.

Professor Welch graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Renaissance History and Literature (Magna cum Laude) and received her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has taught at the Universities of Essex, Birkbeck, Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London, where she served as Dean of Arts and Vice-Principal for Research and International Affairs before taking on the role of Vice-Principal for Arts & Sciences at King’s College London. Professor Welch has led a range of major research programmes including The Material Renaissance which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Getty Foundation and Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects, a £5.5 million AHRC strategic research programme which ran from 2005-2012. She has published extensively on European art and material culture between 1300 and 1700 including books such as Art in Renaissance Italy, (Oxford, 200), Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale, 2005) and Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Rodopi, 2011). Professor Welch currently serves as a trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum where she chairs the collections committee.

Annual Medieval Studies Lecture at the University of Lincoln

The Annual Medieval Studies Lecture at the University of Lincoln will be taking place this year on Thursday 27th March 2014 in the Cargill Lecture Theatre.

Registration from 5.30pm, Lecture starting at 6pm, followed by drinks.

The guest speaker this year is Professor Simon Barton (University of Exeter), who will be speaking on “Damsels in Distress: Interfaith Sex and Power Politics in Medieval Iberia”.

Fuller details on the subject of Professor Barton’s talk and the link for registration are availableon this page

http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/event,name,29653,en.html

UCL Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Seminar

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The next UCL IMARS Seminar will be held on Monday, 3 March with Prof. Peter Mack (Warburg) and Dr Dilwyn Knox (UCL) speaking. Their panel is entitled: ‘Renaissance Philosophy and Rhetoric’.

Please email for further information: alison.ray09@ucl.ac.uk

UCL’s Medieval Interdisciplinary Seminar is a graduate-founded and run seminar which holds holds discussions across disciplines and departments, taking questions of interest to Medievalists (writ large) as its point of departure.

Meetings take place on Mondays at 6.15 in Room G09/10 in UCL’s History Department, 24-25 Gordon Square. All welcome, drinks afterwards.

Please see the following website for more information: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mars/seminars-lectures/imars_13_14

Harlaxton Medieval Symposium 2014 The Plantagenet Empire, 1259-1453

The Plantagenet Empire, 1259-1453

Tuesday 15th – Friday 18th July, 2014, Harlaxton Manor,

A three-day exploration of the Plantagenet Empire with considerations of methodology, historiography, terminology, and the ‘imperial model’.

Please see the attached booking form and provisional programme for more information:

Symposium-2014-Booking-Form1

Symposium-2014-Provisional-Programme

Visualizing Temporality: Modelling Time from the Textual Record

Tuesday 25 March 2014, 6.30, Queen Mary University

ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre,

ArtsTwo Building, Mile End Campus

What does time look like? We are all familiar with the standard timeline that measures out events with neat tick-marks, like the divisions on a ruler. Yet whilst very few of us really think about the past in this sort of methodical way, the tools we use in the digital realm impose an artificial sense of order and regularity to the unfolding of events. Taking an eighteenth-century reference work, Edmund Fry’s Pantographia, as her case study, Professor Drucker will examine the various overlapping frameworks that authors use when assembling and organizing historical events. Her lecture will argue that the development of digital tools must be guided by humanities scholars if we are to represent the human past faithfully.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College London, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Please see the attached flyer: 18_14 Digital Humanities Poster v1 18_14 Digital Humanities public lecture E INVITE

To book: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/events/items/2014/119740.html

Medieval Reading Group, Reading Group, Queen Mary University

Reading Group, 12 – 3:00 pm, Friday 14 March at Queen Mary, when we will look at the introduction and fifth chapter in Cynthia Robinson’s Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: the Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries (University Park, Pa., 2013). This may be useful for anyone interested in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Spanish art and devotional culture, devotional images more generally, and Muslim-Christian encounters. There will be a number of historians of literature/religion in attendance. Discussion will take place over a sandwich lunch, and is followed by a talk by Lluís Ramon i Ferrer: ‘La Vita Christi de Ludolfo de Sajonia y la función empática del arte: la imago pietatis y la devoción a la Sangre de Cristo.’ Both events will take place in room 1.36 of the Arts One Building, Mile End Campus (5 min walk from Mile End tube).

For further information and PDFs of the readings, please contact Dr. Tom Nickson at: Tom.Nickson@courtauld.ac.uk

Medieval Reading Group, Courtauld Institute

6-8pm in Seminar Room 3 on Thursday 13 March at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

The principal text we’ve selected for the Reading Group is the introduction and first chapter of Joanna Cannon’s new book Religious Poverty, Visual Riches (London, 2013).

As this reading is somewhat focused, if the material is unfamiliar it might be helpful to think as much about how it is written/argued/illustrated as about what it contains. Dr. Cannon will join us towards the end and has kindly offered to take part in the discussion from an author’s perspective. By way of contrast in terms of recent publications on architecture/liturgy/images and especially choir screens, you may like to read Jackie Jung, J. E., “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches”, The Art Bulletin, 82/4 (2000) or her recent book, The gothic screen: space, sculpture, and community in the cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge, 2013).

For further information and PDFs of the readings, please contact Dr. Tom Nickson at: Tom.Nickson@courtauld.ac.uk

Workshops: Purbeck stone letter-carving course

W. J. Haysom & Son and Lander’s Quarries Ltd is hosting a stone letter-carving course in June, which will be run this year by Andrew Whittle. This will be an opportunity for students to work Purbeck stone in a quarry environment under the tutelage of a prestigious carver.

Andrew Whittle has an international reputation built up over the course of his career, which has encompassed many major public and private commissions. Andrew works in stone, wood and metal always designing an alphabet specific to the material and situation. He has an extensive knowledge of the history of lettering, which is central to his teaching as well as his design practise.

Andrew will be demonstrating techniques and discussing ideal forms for cutting in stone. He will also be talking about the history of lettering in order to give students a firm footing for their own design work. Each student will be given a tablet of stone and required to set themselves a small project in preparation for the course. Andrew will be happy provide support and receive preparatory drawings ahead of the course to enable each student to be in a position to commence carving on the first day.

To request an application form please call Corinne on

or e-mail haysom@purbeckstone.co.uk

01929 439205

See attached flyer: Letter Carving in a Purbeck Quarry June 2014

Power and Authority: Orthodoxy, Heresy and Dissent in the Middle Ages

London Medieval Society Februrary Colloquium – http://www.the-lms.org/colloquia.html

Saturday, 22 February 2014 from 10:15 to 18:45 (GMT)

Joseph Rotblat Building
Charthouse Square
EC1M6BQ London
United Kingdom

To book your seat, please use the Eventbrite website and click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/power-and-authority-orthodoxy-heresy-and-dissent-in-the-middle-ages-tickets-5367008868