Medieval Art Research

CFP: ‘Carrying Across: Translation as Material Practice in the Pre/Early Modern World,’ AAH 2026 Annual Conference (8–10 April 2026), deadline 2 November 2025

Association for Art History 2026 Annual Conference, University of Cambridge, 8-10 April 2026

This session explores how portable things, such as reliquaries, textiles, books, and tools, are objects of translation. A coconut shell from Ceylon, joined to a Fatimid rock-crystal ewer and refashioned as a Christian reliquary in thirteenth-century Münster, invites us to rethink the concept of ‘translation’ as an act of transgressing linguistic, sociocultural, geospatial, and temporal boundaries. Taking its etymological root, the Latin translatio (‘to carry across’), as our point of departure, we ask how materials move across contexts. We explore how they mediate intercultural traffic, urging a reconceptualisation of translation not as a linguistic but also a material act. Shifting focus from the moment and place of an object’s creation to the networks through which it has travelled, we seek to illuminate pre- and early modern circuits of local and global exchange. Building on scholarship on material agency by Beate Fricke, Finbarr Barry Flood, Tim Ingold, and others, we invite conference papers that explore questions such as: How can translating (e.g., mounting, re-cutting, over-painting) be understood as a form of making? How do deliberate misuses, repairs, or forgeries reveal contested meanings? In what ways do pre-/early modern artefacts act as ‘temporal hinges,’ enabling dialogue between past, present, and future? We welcome papers that consider materials and makers that have been underrepresented in existing scholarship and that stimulate a productive methodological conversation between art history and other adjacent disciplines, including translation studies, cultural heritage preservation studies, and material anthropology.

Submissions instructions

Abstracts (max. 250 words) should be submitted using the 2026 Paper Proposal Form (bit.ly/4mSXjO8) to the Session Convenors, Yupeng Wu (yupeng.wu@yale.edu) and Se Jin Park (sejin.park@yale.edu), by 2 November 2025.

For more information or questions, please contact the Session Convenors.

Call for Contributions: ‘The Medieval in Museums’, deadline 3 November 2025

We invite short abstracts (100-200 words) in response to our call for chapters for an edited volume, ‘The Medieval in Museums’. Please send abstracts by 5pm GMT on Monday 3 November to Fran Allfrey (University of York) and Maia Blumberg (QMUL) fran.allfrey@york.ac.uk; m.blumberg@qmul.ac.uk. Please be in touch with us to discuss your idea more informally should you wish.

Additional information: The book proposal, with chapter abstracts, will be submitted to Arc Humanities Press. First drafts of full chapters will be due by 5pm GMT on Friday 3 April. Chapters will be 7,000-8,000 words in length including references and bibliography. The Arc uses the Chicago Manual of Style (‘Notes and Bibliography’) for presentation of citations. See the Chicago quick guide here: Notes and Bibliography Style, and Arc’s guidance here: Style Guide and Indexing Guides – Arc Humanities.

“The Medieval in Museums” seeks to demonstrate the cultural, aesthetic, political and historical stakes and effects of how medieval objects, texts, and histories are presented in museums. Our interpretation of ‘museum’ is broad, encompassing a range of ‘memory institutions’ including galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and heritage sites both independently and government managed. We invite contributions which address the presentation of the medieval in physical galleries, landscapes, or other visitor-facing spaces in exhibitions and events programming; in behind-the-scenes archive and collections stores; and analogue or digital database or catalogue systems. Similarly, the ‘medieval’ here encompasses Late Antiquity to the Late Medieval, as a temporal marker which shifts according to geo-spatial-political realities across a ‘global Middle Ages’.

We particularly encourage contributions from scholars addressing the construction of ‘the medieval’ as a globalised chronological marker (including academic and practice-informed analyses of the rationales, methods, and consequences of using the ‘Middle Ages’ as a framework beyond Europe), and examining how heritage and identity are shaped in relation to the period in museums in Africa, South America, Asia, Australasia. We welcome approaches which interrogate the ownership, recording, interpretation, and display of non-European objects, texts, and histories identified as ‘medieval’ in non-European and European museums.

We welcome traditional chapters, and will also consider dialogues, interviews, or other creative-critical text-based formats. Contributions may be from individual authors or two or more co-authors. Please be in touch with us to discuss your ideas.

We reiterate and extend William J. Diebold’s contention that grappling with contemporary medievalism is central to the study of visual, material, and textual culture of the Middle Ages (2012): and that museums are vital spaces of medievalism, that is, places in which the medieval is encountered and remade (McLaughlin and Sandy-Hindmarch, 2024). Museums reflect and construct national and local identities, and may perpetuate myths of ethnogenesis or ethnonationalism (Sterling-Hellenbrand, 2021; Karkov, 2022; Jolly, 2022). Scholarly research is shaped by as much as it shapes the medieval in museums, with creative and innovative museum and heritage programming opening up expansive visions of the past and present with reference to the Middle Ages (Davies, 2018; Lees and Overing, 2019; Whalley, 2023).

Contributions may address:

Constructions of heritage or identity through presentations of the medieval in or as a museum or heritage site, including but not limited to: landscapes, cemeteries, or buildings; original and replica medieval material culture; manuscripts and translated texts, narratives, and histories; digital and analogue catalogues, data, or finding aids.
How the medieval is entangled with: institutional or state policies; funding structures or sponsorship; histories of European imperialism; calls for decolonisation and matters of social justice; practices of acquisition, record-keeping, curation, display, and interpretation.
The distinct theoretical and practical challenges posed by medieval material and textual culture to heritage practices, policies, practitioners and institutions.
How museums address questions of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of social or environmental justice through medieval objects, spaces, and topics.
Performances, events, or reenactments in museum spaces or heritage sites.
Educational, creative, and community projects and public engagement events led by museums, or run by academics in collaboration with museums.
How medieval studies research and museum practices may mutually and reciprocally inform one another: from exhibition and display, collections management systems, and programming.
Digital museum presences, including websites, catalogues, digitised manuscripts or objects, social media, and virtual or augmented reality.

Key dates:

100-200 word abstracts due on Monday 3 November, 5pm GMT.
First drafts of full chapters will be due on Friday 3 April, 5pm GMT.

References: Diebold, W, “Medievalism,” Studies in Iconography, 33 (2012), 247-256; McLaughlin, L, and Sandy-Hindmarch, J, “Special Collection The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past: Introduction”, Open Library of Humanities (2023-2024); Sterling-Hellenbrand, A, Medieval Literature on Display: Heritage and Culture in Modern Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Karkov, C, Art and the Formation of Early Medieval England (Cambridge: CUP, 2022); Jolly, Karen, “Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred”, in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. by Jolly and B Elliott Brooks (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022), pp. 217-244; Davies, J, Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester: MUP, 2018); Lees, C, and Overing, G, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice (London: UCL, 2019); Whalley, B, “Maldon and the Blackwater Estuary: Literature, culture and practice where river meets sea”, in St Peter-On-The-Wall: Landscape and heritage on the Essex coast, ed. by Johanna Dale (London: UCL, 2023).

Murray Seminar: ‘The artist’s new body, burle, and the praise of caricature in early modern Italy’, with Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Birkbeck, 20 October 2025, 17:00-18:30 (GMT)

20 October 2025, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

Please join Birkbeck on 20 October, at Birkbeck and online, for the first Murray Seminar of this academic year. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius will share her research on ‘The artist’s new body, burle, and the praise of caricature in early modern Italy’.

If modernity placed caricature in the public sphere, linking it with insult and politics, caricatura, at the time of its emergence as an art form in early modern Italy, had been confined to a close milieu of artists’ workshops. It was treated as a drawing exercise or a practical joke (burla) among the company of students and friends. Even so, it attracted a host of 17th-century art writers and poets, from Mancini to Bellori, Baldinucci, and Malvasia. This seminar will re-examine the drawing representing a group of the former students of the Carracci watching a mountebank show. I will juxtapose the visual claim of the drawing itself, in which caricature serves as a tool of artists’ self-fashioning, turning their bodies into the locus of identity while ignoring any signifiers of social status, to the textual sources that ponder on caricature’s puzzling ability to procure likeness through deformation, as well as associate it with performance, banter and camaraderie.

Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, taught art history at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck School of Historical Studies. Her publications include Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (Polish Academy 2000); National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (National Museum in Warsaw 2001); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (Black Dog 2011, with Natalia Zarzecka), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Ashgate 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski); Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to the Communist Bloc (Routledge 2021). Her current research is on the historiography of caricature.

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Conference: ‘Boundaries and Encounters in Medieval Art and Architecture: A Conference in Memory of John McNeill’, Oxford, 12-14 December 2025 (Scholarship deadline 16 October)

In memory of our much-missed friend and inspiration, the British Archaeological Association will be holding a conference to celebrate our former secretary, John McNeill, on 12-14 December 2025.

The conference opens for registration at 12.30pm on Friday 12 December at Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA.

The President’s Welcome and Introduction will be at 2.00pm followed by the first lecture at 2.15pm.

Tea & coffee refreshments will be served during the lectures and a buffet lunch will be provided on Saturday and Sunday in addition to dinner on two evenings. The conference will also include an evening reception.

Participants will need to arrange their own travel and accommodation. Oxford is well provided with hotels and B&Bs, and further information will be supplied by the conference organisers along with the booking form. These will be sent out later this month on our website.

Speakers will include:

Eric Fernie, Nicola Coldstream, Lloyd De Beer, Fernando Gutiérrez Baños, Alexandrina Buchanan, Róisin Astell, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Sally Dormer, Richard Gem, Gerhardt Lutz, Alison Perchuk, Marcello Angheben, Julian Luxford, Rosa Bacile, Costanza Beltrami, Richard Halsey, Øystein Ekroll, Jordi Camps, Sandy Heslop, Neil Stratford, John Munns, Verónica Abenza, Tom Nickson, David Robinson, Zoë Opaciĉ, Alexandra Gajewski and John Goodall.

Scholarships:

A limited number of scholarships for students are available to help them cover the cost of the conference.

Please apply by 16th October, 2025, attaching a short CV along with the name and contact details of one referee. Applications should be sent to: rplant62@hotmail.com.

Any general enquiries about the conference should be sent to conferences@thebaa.org.

This conference has been made possible by a generous donation from Tim and Geli Harris to whom the Association is very grateful.

Lecture: ‘Episcopal display and the English crozier around the time of the Norman Conquest’, with Sophie Kelly, 22 Oct 2025, 17:30-19:00 (BST), Courtauld Institute of Art

Date and time: 22 Oct 2025, 17:30 – 19:00

Location: Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2. This event takes place at our Vernon Square campus (WC1X 9EW).

Croziers, the sceptre-like staffs granted to bishops, abbots, and abbesses across Europe as a sign of authority, are one of the most distinctive symbols of ecclesiastical office. In England in the decades either side of the Conquest, their style and function underwent a fundamental change. ‘T-shaped’ or tau-crosses were gradually replaced by the crook-like crozier with its distinctive swirling head, a shift that occurred alongside changes to their role in the ecclesiastical and secular worlds. Whether processed at the heart of liturgical ceremonies or wielded as signs of ecclesial power in bitter disputes between bishops and kings, croziers were increasingly becoming a powerful visual indication of status and episcopal display.

This paper focuses on an important witness to these art-historical, political, and liturgical changes. The so-called Beverley Crozier, now in the Hunt Museum in Limerick, has tentatively been associated with the mid-eleventh century Archbishop of York, Ealdred, on account of the unusual pair of scenes carved on either side of its volute, one of which depicts the healing of a young boy by St John of Beverley. Ealdred was known to have been particularly devoted to John of Beverley, but his relationship to this crozier, and its significance in the context of Ealdred’s other artistic and literary commissions, has not been teased out in depth. Moreover, hitherto unnoticed by art historians is the unusualness of this crozier’s form. This is one of – if not the – earliest surviving crozier from England to be carved with a circular head, rather than the cross-shaped Tau-croziers favoured in pre-Conquest England.

Drawing on evidence for Ealdred’s connections with the Holy Roman Empire, where he may have seen this new crozier design, and reflecting of the significance of its form and imagery in the context of the political turmoil of his career, this paper offers a new reading of the little-known Beverley Crozier, revealing its importance in understanding broader relationships between status, symbols, and material culture in pre- and post- Conquest England.

Dr Sophie Kelly is a Lecturer in Visual Studies and Cultural Heritage in the Department of History of Art at the University of Bristol. Her forthcoming book Imagining the Unimaginable: The Trinity in Medieval England draws on her PhD research, which was supervised by Prof Alixe Bovey and Dr Emily Guerry. Prior to her current role, Sophie was Project Curator on the 2021 exhibition Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint at the British Museum. She has also held curatorial roles at Canterbury Cathedral and the Royal Collection Trust. Sophie’s current research project focuses on the making and meaning of medieval croziers, the sumptuous and highly decorated staffs owned by bishops, abbots and abbesses across medieval Europe.

Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History, and Professor Alixe Bovey, Professor of Medieval Art History, The Courtauld, as part of the Medieval Work-in-Progress Series. This series is generously supported by Sam Fogg.

Conference: ‘Communication – Cooperation – Confrontation: Queens, Noblewomen and Burgher Women in the Middle Ages’, 16-17 October 2025, Prague

Academic Conference Center, Prague, 16–17 October 2025

Medieval women were not isolated figures in society. As part of a complex system of personal, ideological and material relations, they lived and worked within various networks. The terms ‘communication, cooperation and confrontation’ can serve as analytical categories for understanding how women exerted influence and power, gained support to achieve their goals and navigated social, economic and other obstacles. This conference seeks to apply these analytical categories to the investigation of the manifold relations between medieval women and material culture in the broadest sense. The conference organisers invite all members of the academic community to attend.

The conference is open to the public. For the Zoom link, please, register for free at the e-mail addresses below by 12 October 2025.

Helena Dáňová (danova@udu.cas.cz);
Klára Mezihoráková (mezihorakova@udu.cas.cz)
Věra Soukupová (soukupova@ucl.cas.cz)

This international conference will be the third meeting in a row on the topic “Queens, Noblewomen, and Burgher Women in the Middle Ages” organized by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences with the support of the Strategy AV 21 Programme – Anatomy of European Society: History, Tradition, Culture, Identity. The aim of the conference continues to be the development of an international platform for research on the topic of women patrons, their social standing and way they presented themselves in medieval Europe. In connection with the conference, a volume on the topic will be published by the Institute of Art History, Prague.

Conference programme can be viewed/downloaded here:

Conference_programme_ Queens_2025 Download

Lecture: ‘Video Games & the Work of Medieval Art History: Possibilities for Public Impact Through Industry Collaborations’, with Dr Glaire Anderson, University of York, 12 Nov 2025, 5.30-7pm (GMT)

Speaker(s): Dr Glaire Anderson (The University of Edinburgh)

York Medieval Lecture

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.

To attend in person, please register via Eventbrite.
To attend online, please register via Zoom.

This lecture will be recorded, which we hope to upload to the Centre for Medieval Studies Youtube Channel shortly after the lecture.

Location: SLB118, Spring Lane Building, University of York

CFP: ‘Animal Representation in the Global Middle Ages: Bridging the Natural and Social Worlds’ (AAH Conference Panel), deadline 2 November 2025

Animals occupied a multivalent space in the medieval world. As part of nature, they were embedded in ecological systems, yet they were also abstracted into symbols of power, religious allegory, and medicinal knowledge—ultimately serving as a nexus between human societies and the natural environment. This panel explores the representation of animals across the global Middle Ages (c. 500–1500 CE), examining how diverse cultures imbued fauna with meaning through their representation. Moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks, we investigate how animal representations functioned as dynamic sites of meaning-making, from the meticulously rendered beasts in Islamic manuscripts, the symbolic menageries of Chinese paintings and prints, to the creatures that materialised along the Afro-Eurasian trade routes.

How did artists and patrons deploy animal iconography to articulate political authority, spiritual ideologies, or ecological knowledge? In what ways did the circulation of creatures, whether real or imagined, confer social prestige or negotiate cultural encounters? How did depictions of animals reflect or shape premodern environmental consciousness? Adopting a global perspective, we seek to illuminate the interconnectedness of medieval visual cultures while challenging anthropocentric narratives in art history. Of particular interest are studies that demonstrate how animals, as living beings and symbolic constructs, actively participated in shaping artistic traditions across regions. We welcome submissions focusing on understudied geographies and encourage interdisciplinary approaches bridging art history and environmental humanities. Ultimately, this panel aims to reconsider the global Middle Ages through its creaturely representations, revealing how such species—real, mythical, and metamorphic—fundamentally shaped medieval visual knowledge.

Session format

The session will include between three and eight 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025: Yuxi Pan, SOAS University of London, 714232@soas.ac.uk

More information can be found on the For Art History website.

Online lecture: ‘Grünewald Remediating Wood from the Panel’ with Gregory Bryda, 8 October 2025, 5pm (CEST)

Online lecture series, ‘Material Worlds – the Virtual Salon at IMAREAL’

On Wednesday, October 8 2025, at 5 p.m. (CEST), Gregory Bryda (Barnard College, Columbia University, New York) will speak on “Grünewald Remediating Wood from the Panel”.

Gregory Bryda (Barnard College, Columbia University, New York)

This lecture examines how the well-known south German painter known as Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470–1528) exploited wood’s semantic ability to oscillate between subject and medium in order to interweave the medicinal properties of the bodies of Christ and saints with those of the vegetal bodies of trees and plants. Grünewald employed this form of meta-representation on altars, where his artworks staged the liturgical enlivenment of Christ’s body as well as medicinal herbs. In analyzing two of his major painted altarpieces, one for the Antonine canons at Isenheim and the other for Jakob Heller in Frankfurt’s Dominican Church, this talk demonstrates how the church, through the performance of the liturgy, which centered around but branched outward from the altar table, exerted itself as agent accounting for the healing properties of real-world plants and trees. Building an impasto relief off the wooden panel or applying such a thin layer of paint as to allow the panel to shine through, Grünewald cleverly simulated the performative essence of medieval plants with his paintbrush, blurring the distinctions between metaphor and practice and artifice and nature.

Gregory Bryda is an assistant professor of medieval art history at Barnard College (Columbia University, New York). His book The Trees of the Cross (Yale University Press, 2023), which was the finalist for a PROSE Award in Art History, explores the fraught relationship between the church and plants in late medieval Germany. His research into Germany’s long historiographic affinity with the forest formed part of a special issue of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte he co-edited in 2023 on “Art and Environment in the Third Reich,” whose contributors examined the period’s aestheticization of “race” and landscape across a broad range of disciplines and media. He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, Universität Hamburg, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he was a Fulbright Guest Professor.

The lecture will take place online via Teams. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact sekretariat.imareal@plus.ac.at.

Find out more and register on the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit website.

New Publication: ‘The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Material Approaches to Digital Codicology’ by Suzette van Haaren

We increasingly encounter medieval books as digital facsimiles—zooming in on high-resolution images, clicking through virtual pages, or engaging with interactive displays. But what actually happens when a parchment manuscript is translated into a digital object? How does this change affect our understanding of cultural heritage?

This book explores the digital medieval manuscript as a unique cultural artifact, not just a copy of its physical counterpart. Through three case studies, it reveals how digital manuscripts function in libraries, museums, and scholarship today. Blending manuscript studies with digital humanities, it offers a fresh materialist approach to the discourse surrounding the digitisation of cultural heritage and provides a nuanced view of how it shapes the way we perceive, handle, and preserve medieval manuscripts in an increasingly digital world.

Find out more information about this book on Brill.

About the author

Suzette van Haaren is a postdoc in the CRC Virtuelle Lebenswelten at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research reflects on the impact of the increasing digitisation (and virtualisation) of historical heritage. She is interested in the Middle Ages in contemporary media contexts.