Symposium: ‘The Image of the Book: Representing the Codex from Antiquity to the Present’, Philadelphia, 16-18 Nov 2023, (in-person and online)

The 16th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age
University of Pennsylvania and Free Library of Philadelphia

A great deal of recent research has focused on the objecthood of the pre-modern book and its associated materiality. But only sporadic attempts have been made to understand the role of visual representations of the book in conveying ideas about knowledge. How can our understanding be transformed when the dictum that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is put into practice, when the how of depiction is accorded as much importance as the what of textual content? This symposium will examine the means by which the book, and in particular the manuscript, is described across a wide variety of media, from painting and sculpture to digital media and film. Topics to be addressed include the book as a symbol of authority, wisdom, or piety; the visual archeology of otherwise vanished bookbinding styles, reading practices, and study spaces; and the re-imagining of the physicality of the codex through digital means.

The event will also mark the public launch at Penn Libraries of the Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) project, an innovative, public-access web database of thousands of depictions of books in artwork produced between about 1300 and 1600 CE. The database, like the symposium itself, aims to engage historians of religion, literacy, art, music, language, and private life, as well as book artists, conservators, and interested members of the public. The symposium is organized in partnership with the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The program will begin Thursday evening, November 16, 5:00 pm, at the Free Library of Philadelphia in the Rare Book Department, with a reception and keynote address by Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University. The symposium will continue November 17-18 at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

The symposium will be held in person with an option to join virtually. All are welcome to attend. Use the link to register.

Conference Programme

Thursday, November 16, 2023, 5pm-7pm

Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia, Parkway Central Library, third floor
All registrants are invited to a reception before the lecture. The lecture will begin at 6:00 pm.

Keynote Address: ‘Avatars of Authorship’, Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University

With opening remarks by Janine Pollock, Free Library of Philadelphia; Sean Quimby, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Penn Libraries; and Nicholas Herman, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Penn Libraries

Friday, November 17, 2023, 9.30am-7pm

University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, sixth floor

9:30 – 10:00 am: Coffee

10:00 – 10:15 am: ‘Welcome and Introduction’
Nicholas Herman, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Penn Libraries

10:15 – 11:30 am: Meaning

  • ‘Book History’s Genesis in Exodus: Revisiting the Round Topped Tablets’, Sonja Drimmer, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • ‘Under Construction: Making and Metaphor in Medieval Images of Book Production’, Beatrice Kitzinger, Princeton University

11:30 – 11:45 am: Coffee

11:45 am – 1:00 pm: Making

  • ‘Representations of Wax Tablets: Codices in Greco-Roman Art and their Importance for Understanding their Making and Use’, Georgios Boudalis, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki
  • ‘Visual Metaphors: Exploring Bookbinding Structures through Visual Representations’, Alberto Campagnolo, University of Udine

1:00 – 2:30 pm: Lunch (with display of real and replica items in Lea Library)

2:30 – 4:00 pm: Format

  • ‘Artisanal Books: Ceramic and Lacquer Imitations from the Qing Court’, Devin Fitzgerald, Yale University
  • ‘A Sampling of Blooks: A Foray into the Fascinating World of Book-form Objects’, Mindell Dubansky, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(this session will conclude with a showcase of book-form objects)

4:00 – 4:15 pm: Coffee

4:15 – 5:00 pm: Official Launch of BASIRA: The Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art Database
Barbara Williams Ellertson, Independent Scholar and SIMS
Nicholas Herman, SIMS

5:30 – 7:00 pm: Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 10-year Celebration Event

Saturday, November 18, 2023, 9.30am-7pm

University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, sixth floor

9:30 – 10:00 am: Coffee

10–11:15 am: Identities

  • ‘The Image of the Book at the Ottoman Court’, Emine Fetvacı, Boston College
  • ‘Imagining Religious Identity and Difference Through Book Formats: Scrolls and Codices in Judaism and Christianity’, Thomas Rainer, University of Zurich

11:15 – 11:30 am: Coffee

11:30 am – 12:45 pm: Avatars

  • ‘Scrolling through Scrolls and Books in Books of Hours’, Dominique Stutzmann, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes
  • ‘Virtual Manuscripts in Virtual Spaces’, Sabina Zonno, University of Southern California

12:45 – 2:15 pm: Lunch (with demo of Manuscripts in VR)

2:15 – 3:45 pm: Icons

  • ‘The Medieval Book as Gateway: Contemplation, Meditation, and Image Making in the Lives of the Desert Fathers’, Denva Gallant, Rice University
  • ‘Iconic Books in Renaissance Art’, James Watts, Syracuse University

3:30 – 3:45 pm: Coffee

3:45 – 5:00pm: Transformations

  • ‘Manuscript Images of the Destruction and Salvage of Books’, Lucy Freeman Sandler, New York University
  • ‘Pop Bibliography: Finding Book History in Popular Media’, Allie Alvis, Winterthur Library

5:00 – 6:00 pm: Closing Reception

Lecture Series: Mmmonk School 2023 webinars on the Medieval Book

Mmmonk and Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (UGent) will host the second edition of Mmmonk school in the autumn of 2023. Mmmonk School offers lessons for advanced beginners about the medieval book. It is an interdisciplinary practice-focused programme about medieval Flemish manuscripts. Six experts introduce the main concepts, skills and methods of their given field of expertise. The lessons are online, free and open for everyone.

Join us on three consecutive Fridays (4-6pm CET) in November and December!

Register and find out more here.

Programme

17 November (4-6pm CET)

  • Elaine Treharne (Stanford University): The human experience as an integral part of the history and identity of a book
  • Ann Kelders (KBR Royal Library Belgium): An Introduction to Polyphony Manuscripts in Medieval Flanders and Brabant

24 November (4-6pm CET)

  • Élodie Lévêque (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): An Introduction to Biocodicology – The material studies of medieval manuscripts
  • Thomas Falmagne (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): An Introduction to Medieval Cistercian Reading Culture

1 December (4-6pm CET)

  • Lisa Demets (Ghent University): An Introduction to Multilingual Manuscripts in Medieval Flanders
  • Jeroen Deploige and Wim Verbaal (Ghent University): ‘Spotlight on Mmmonk Research’: Medieval Reading Strategies – The Liber Floridus as a circular enclosure of creation, history and incarnation

Call for proposals: ‘Environmental Narratives and the Eremitic Turn’, Different Visions Journal, deadline 30 November 2023

Different Visions invites proposals for contributions to a special issue, “Environmental Narratives and the Eremitic Turn.” This encompasses the locus of eremitic experience, which might be from any religious tradition or geographical location, whether wilderness, mountain, or desert, broadly conceived. It also encompasses the bodies – individual and communal – who chose to inhabit that landscape (as a real or imagined place), and their lived experience. This special issue seeks to explore the diverse ways in which eremitic bodies, ascetic practice, and the landscape of the wilderness, were represented and imagined in visual culture.

We welcome submissions that:

  • consider the resonance and meaning of the ascetic tradition across time and space
  • investigate the ascetic tradition and its entanglement with notions of the landscape as wilderness and holy mountain
  • adopt an environmental or ecocritical approach to the eremitic experience
  • explore the tensions between, for example, wilderness and cultivation, inhospitable and fertile landscapes, ascetic practice and the eremitic impulse
  • consider the re-imagining or invocation of the historical desert in monastic, mendicant or other contexts
  • explore the continuing resonance of the eremitic, in symbolic or ecologic terms, in our contemporary world
  • approach the themes above from a global perspective

This special issue engages with urgent contemporary concerns about the impact of human activity on the earth that sustains us. It resonates with recent scholarly interest in the relationship between humanity and nature in the pre- and early modern period, seeking a broad, inclusive, and cross-disciplinary reflection on the visual representation of this interdependence.

Please submit a proposal of no more than 300 words to differentvisionsjournal@gmail.com by Nov 30th. First drafts of accepted essays of no more than 12,000 words will be due August 1, 2024.

For questions please reach out to differentvisionsjournal@gmail.com.

You may also reach out to the special issue editors:

Find out more information here.

Funded PhD in Medieval Painting and the End of Life, Northeastern University London (NU London), deadline 31 October 2023

PhD Scholarship (Fully Funded) in Art History – Medieval Painting and the End of Life: From the Monumental to the Personal

As part of a major investment, Northeastern University London (NU London) has multiple, fully-funded PhD studentships available to accelerate its interdisciplinary research in the humanities, social sciences, and computing, maths, engineering and natural sciences. Each scholarship is fully-funded for three and a half years (UKRI rates) and includes full course fees, an annual stipend (including an additional London allowance) and associated costs, such as training.

The Project

This research will contribute methodologically to current debates across the humanities concerning the importance of visual and material objects within human experience. The student recruited to the research project will be required to work on medieval visual culture pertaining to the end of life, to demonstrate how imagery held agency in medieval people’s navigation of formative moments in the human lifecycle.

The specific regions and materials of focus will be shaped by the candidate.

More information and how to apply here.

Online Lecture: ‘Zero Hour for Illuminated Manuscripts? The Acquisition and Alienation of Medieval Art in Post-World-War II Nuremberg’, London Society for Medieval Studies,14 November 2023, 5.30-7pm (GMT)

Prof William Diebold, historian of early medieval art at Reed College, will share his latest work at the London Society for Medieval Studies.

Diebold will discuss the decisions regarding two manuscripts made during the 1950s by the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. The first was to acquire a spectacular Ottonian-era gospel manuscript, a book used in the Christian liturgy. The other was to sell two late medieval haggadahs (the book used by Jews to celebrate Passover) that had been in the collection of the Nuremberg museum for a century. This paper documents these stories, one of acquisition and the other of alienation, and locates them in their post-World-War-II German historical context.

This is part of the ongoing IHR London Society for Medieval Studies seminar series. All welcome – this event is free, but booking is required.

Seminar Abstract

This paper examines two decisions regarding medieval illuminated manuscripts made during the 1950s by the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. The first was to acquire a spectacular Ottonian-era gospel manuscript, a book used in the Christian liturgy.  The other was to sell two late medieval haggadahs (the book used by Jews to celebrate Passover) that had been in the collection of the Nuremberg museum for a century.

This paper documents these stories, one of acquisition and the other of alienation, and locates them in their post-World-War-II German historical context.  Because the Nazis had so heavily capitalized on the Middle Ages, which they saw as the “First Empire” that was reincarnated in their Third Reich, the status of medieval art was fraught in Germany after 1945.  And nowhere was this more true than in Nuremberg, the city that had been the site both of the Nazi Party’s annual rallies and of the postwar trials of the leading Nazis. To try to deal with this impossibly difficult legacy, many Germans viewed the end of the Second World War as the “Zero Hour,” a moment when their country began entirely anew.  This paper argues, however, that the acquisition of the early medieval gospel book and the alienation of the two haggadah manuscripts show that, assertions of a Zero Hour to the contrary, the legacy of the Nazi era was not an easy one to leave behind. Instead, the acquisition and deaccession policy of the Nuremberg museum instead shows more continuities with Nazi practices than breaks from it.

Register and find out more here.

British Archaeological Association Post-Graduate Online Conference Programme, 29 November 2023, 12.30pm – 17.35pm (GMT)

We are excited to present a diverse conference which includes postgraduates and early career researchers in the fields of medieval history of art, architecture, and archaeology. The British Archaeological Association postgraduate conference offers an opportunity for research students at all levels from universities across the UK and abroad to present their research and exchange ideas.

This year, the conference will take place online via Zoom.

Use this link to register for the conference.

Conference Programme

Wednesday 29th November 2023

12:30 pm (GMT) Welcome

Panel 1: Approaches to Overlooked Elements in Medieval and Early Modern Art and Architecture

12.40 – 14.30 pm (GMT)

  • Bryony Wilde (University of Warwick, UK), ‘Decoding Medieval Roof Bosses’
  • Mats Dijkdrent (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium), ‘Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics as a lieu for Architectural Thinking’ 
  • Nils Hausmann (University of Cologne, Germany), ‘Naming and Meaning – On the Survival and Reuse of Early and High Medieval Book Cases’
  • Sophia Feist (University of Cambridge, UK), ‘Extravagant Violations and Visual Tropes: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Semiotic use of Dress in the Budapest Martyrdom of Saint Catherine’

14.30 – 14.45 pm (GMT) – Break

Panel 2: Intersections of Materiality and Identity: Unpacking the Medieval Landscape and Space

14.45 – 16.05 pm (GMT)

  • Theodore Muscillo (Independent Researcher), ‘Jugs, mugs and aquamaniles: pottery and networks on the east coast of England, 1250-1500’
  • Sercan Batum (Middle East Technical University, Turkey), ‘Christianization of Urban Topography in Late Antique Histria’
  • Eleanor Townsend (University of Oxford, UK), ‘‘All the werkemanship and masonry crafte of a frounte Innying to the Awter of our lady’: the problem of the Jesse reredos in St Cuthbert’s, Wells’

16.05 pm – 16.15 pm (GMT) – Break

Panel 3: Stones and Stories: Interrogating the Art and Gender Dynamics in Religious Commemoration Across Medieval Europe

16.15 pm – 17.25 pm (GMT)

  • Nicola Lowe (Independent Researcher), ‘Tears at the Graveside’
  • Philip Muijtjens (University of Cambridge, UK), ‘Tombs as Sensory Experiences in Fifteenth-Century Italy’
  • Arica Roberts (University of Reading, UK), ‘Gender in Early Medieval Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales c. 410-1150 CE’

5:35 pm (GMT) Closing remarks

Register for the conference.

Lecture: ‘Byzantine Tradition in Africa: Art and Culture in Northern and Eastern Africa’ with Dr Andrea Achi, Friday 13 October 2023, 6:30–7:30pm, The Met Fifth Avenue, New York City

Join a Met expert to learn about the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world. Highlighting artworks rarely or never before seen in public, the talk sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of medieval Africa. Hear an overview of Byzantine art in Africa and take a deeper look at fifth-century Nubian (Sudanese) chests that shift perceptions about Byzantine art production and sources.

Andrea Achi, Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art, Department of Medieval Art, The Met

Find out more information here.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Africa and Byzantium.

Free, though advance registration is required. Please note: Space is limited; first come, first served.

Use the street-level Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education entrance at Fifth Avenue and 81st Street.

Online Lecture: ‘Emblems of the Past: saints, stained glass and early medieval antiquities’, Dr Martin Crampin, 12 October 2023, 5.00pm (BST)

Focussing mainly on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery of saints in Wales, the talk will look at ways in which artists and designers, mainly working in stained glass, attempted to provide the early saints of Wales and Ireland with an authentically Celtic appearance. These images sometimes included specific references to early medieval metalwork and other kinds of historical artefacts.

Follow the link to join through Zoom:
https://uwtsd-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91815254511

Martin Crampin is an artist, photographer and designer based at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth. He has been researching ecclesiastical art, the visual culture of Medievalism and the Celtic Revival in Wales for around twenty years, and has contributed to a series of research projects including ‘The Visual Culture of Wales’, ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’, ‘The Cult of Saints in Wales’ and ‘Ports, Past and Present’. Publications include Stained Glass from Welsh Churches (2014), Depicting St David (2020) and Welsh Saints from Welsh Churches (2023).

Lecture: ‘Medieval and Medical: Developing The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the 1940s’, Lauren Rozenberg, University of East Anglia, 11 October, 5pm (BST)

It is our immense pleasure to invite you to the first of this year’s World Art Research Seminars, coming up on Wednesday 11th October at 5pm in the SCVA Lecture Theatre (01.10).

In this opening session, we’ll be welcoming Dr Lauren Rozenberg, currently a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department, who will be sharing her fascinating research on the unusual formation of Henry Wellcome’s Medical Museum in the 1940s, a project that draws together her expertise on medical curating, medieval healing, and both modern and premodern visual culture.

As ever, WARS sessions are free and followed by a glass of wine – all are welcome, so please do pass on the details to interested friends, colleagues, and students!

For more information on the series please contact j.hartnell@uea.ac.uk.

Location: Department of Art History & World Art Studies, UEA (SCVA Lecture Theatre (01.10))

Online Lecture: ‘Reconstructing Bury St Edmunds Abbey’, with Steven Brindle, British Archaeological Association, Wednesday 4 October 2023, 5pm (BST)

This month’s British Archaeological Association Lecture will take place via Zoom (sign up link here). Tune in to hear Dr Steven Brindle from English Heritage present on ‘Reconstructing Bury St Edmunds Abbey’.