Issue 6 of Medieval World: Culture & Conflict looks at the world of King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–1270) – “the most Christian king” – who was a keen diplomat, ardent crusader, and remarkable patron.
Theme-related content includes:
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, “‘The most Christian king’: The World of Louis IX,” 16-23.
William E. Welsh, “Disaster in the Delta: Louis’ Seventh Crusade,” 24-27.
Nicholas Morton, “Louis and the Mongols: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Tides of War and Diplomacy,” 28-33.
Sean L. Field, “Louis IX’s Large Family: Powerful Women of the Capetian Court,” 34-37.
Lindy Grant, “Blanche of Castile: The Mother of Louis IX,” 38-41.
Other features:
Marvin G. Haynes, “Bloody Waters: The Imjin War at Sea, 1592-1598,” 8-13.
Robert Jones, “Heraldic Roots: Origins and Early Development,” 14-15.
Magdalena Lanuszka, “Wawel Hill: The Real ‘House of the Dragon’,” 42-45.
Andrew G. Ralston, “‘A stately edifice of large extent’: Glasgow’s Medieval Cathedral,” 46-47.
Brandon M. Bender, “Æthelred versus Cnut: The English Campaigns of 1014,” 48-51.
Manon Henzen, “Blanc Manger: Chicken pudding anyone?” 52-53.
Adrian Gheorghe, “Dracula’s Men: The Equipment and Tactics of Wallachian Soldiers,” 54-57.
Lecture: Heralding the Coronation: Heralds and Heraldry at Coronations from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Adrian Ailes, 2nd May 2022, 1-2pm (BST)
A look at the way in which heralds have helped organise, marshal, and record coronations in this country since 1400 and how the heraldry displayed at these extraordinary rituals symbolised power both royal and imperial.
This event is in person and online.
Attendance at Burlington House:
- Open to anyone to join, Fellows, Affiliates and General Public.
- Places in person will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
- The event will begin at 13.00 BST. Please arrive in plenty of time.
- Registration is essential for non-Fellows but we encourage Fellows to register as well.
Attendance by Live Stream:
- Open to anyone to join, Fellows, Affiliates and General Public.
- The event will be live-streamed to YouTube here
- The event will begin at 13.00 BST.
- You will receive an email reminder with the link to join the day before the lecture.
If you have any questions, please contact us at communications@sal.org.uk
To book tickets, please click here.
Lecture: “Giotto’s Ugliness: Art, Literature, and Pictorial Naturalism”, by Marco Ruffini, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 3rd May 2023, 17:00 GMT
That Giotto was ugly – indeed of proverbial ugliness – Boccaccio tells us in the Decameron. But was this really Giotto’s physical appearance? This paper will explain that the painter’s ugliness is a symbolic attribute of Giotto’s pictorial naturalism focused on the faithful imitation of the natural world, at the time juxtaposed to ideal beauty. Giotto’s ugliness, therefore, has more to do with Giotto’s art rather than with his own physical features. As a matter of fact, depicting an artist as an ugly individual is a recurring trope in the history of pictorial naturalism and art literature from the classical to the modern age.
Marco Ruffini is Professor of History of Art Criticism and Artistic Literature at Sapienza, University of Rome. He studied at Sapienza and the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Dartmouth College and Northwestern University. His studies focus on theoretical and methodological issues in thinking about the arts and the history of art history.
Organised by Dr Guido Rebecchini (The Courtauld)
This is an in person event at the Vernon Square campus. Booking will close 30 minutes before the event begins.
New Publication: “Rethinking the Dialogue between the Verbal and the Visual: Methodological Approaches to the Relationship Between Religious Art and Literature (1400–1700)”, ed. Ingrid Falque and Agnes Guiderdoni
Intermediality, figurability, iconotext, visual exegesis: these are some of the many new ways in which the relationship between text and image has been explored in recent decades. Scholars have benefited from theoretical work in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, alongside more traditional fields such as literature, art history and cultural history. Focusing on religious texts and images between 1400 and 1700, the essays gathered in this volume contribute to these developments by grounding their case studies in methodology. In considering various relations between the visual and the verbal, the editors have adopted the broadest position possible, emphasizing the phenomenological point of view from which the objects under discussion are examined.
Fellowship: Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Smarthistory (Deadline 26 May 2023)
Smarthistory is seeking applications for an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow to develop public art history content. This is a one-year full-time position, beginning September 2023. Applicants will have a Ph.D. in art history (within the last two years) as well as teaching experience. Applicants with diverse backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply.
The successful applicant will have a commitment to public scholarship and teaching. The successful candidate will be self-motivated and comfortable working remotely for a small organization. Ideally, the candidate will have some facility with content management systems, audio and video editing, or an interest in learning these tools. The candidate will work closely with Smarthistory founders and Executive Directors Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker on a range of activities including editing, producing, and publishing essays and video content for Smarthistory, working with contributors and content editors, seeking new contributors, reorganizing content as new material is added, and working to create consistency across the site. The candidate will contribute essays in their area of expertise.
The Fellow will receive professional development mentoring, periodic performance evaluations, and will be supported in developing professional relationships with academic contributors over the course of the year. This is a temporary full-time position with an annual salary of $55,000 (plus a generous health insurance option and a retirement match). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow can work remotely.
Smarthistory is a not-for-proft organization dedicated to making engaging yet rigorous art history accessible to learners around the world for free. Learn more about the organization and our mission here: https://smarthistory.org/about/. We encourage applications from those who contribute to our diversity.
Click here to apply.
New publication: ‘Touching Parchment: how medieval users rubbed, handled, and kissed their manuscripts. Volume 1: officials and their books’ by Kathryn M. Rudy
Touching Parchment: how medieval users rubbed, handled, and kissed their manuscripts. Volume 1: officials and their books. A new open-access book by Professor Kathryn M. Rudy.
In her latest work, published in April 2023 by Open Book, Kathryn M. Rudy, professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, considers how signs of wear on the folios of parchment manuscripts can reveal how those books were handled in the past.
Anyone who has examined considerable numbers of medieval European books—in museums, libraries’ special collections, archives, and in the homes of private collectors—will have noticed that they rarely survive into the modern era unscathed. Candle wax, water, and fire can disfigure books dramatically. Repeated handling can result in more subtle damage to images, parchment or paper folios, stitching, or bindings; this includes applying grease or dirt through bodily contact, abrading material by repeatedly touching it, poking holes by sewing on objects, and degrading the fibres of parchment, paper, leather, and thread by repeatedly bending and unbending them. These activities leave traces that reveal how people have interacted with books. Heavy use is visible in dirty surfaces, tattered stitching, frayed edges, and deformed material.
In Touching Parchment, Rudy presents numerous and fascinating case studies that relate to the evidence of use and damage through touching and or kissing. She also puts each study within a category of different ways of handling books, mainly liturgical, legal or choral practice, and in turn connects each practice to the horizontal or vertical behavioural patterns of users within a public or private environment.
With her keen eye for observation in being able to identify various characteristics of inadvertent and targeted wear, the author adds a new dimension to the medieval book. She gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on the social, anthropological and historical value of the use of the book by sharpening our senses to the way users handled books in different situations.
Rudy has amassed an incredible amount of material for this research, and the way in which she presents each manuscript conveys an approach that scholars of medieval history and book materiality should keep in mind when carrying out their own research. What perhaps is most striking in her articulate text is how she expresses that the touching of books was not without emotion, and the accumulated effects of these emotions are worthy of preservation, study and further reflection.
Published as a free open-access book, Touching Parchment is available in several formats and is accessible to blind and seeing-impaired people. It has 122 images, all keyed to ‘alt-text’, so that readers with limited sight can hear descriptions of the images. There is also added metadata that tells a reader using accessibility aids what type of content is included. The author is keen to hear from readers relying on these accessibility aids about how to improve the reading experience even further.
Book contents:
Chapter 1: Feeling One’s Way Through the Book
Chapter 2: Ways of Touching Manuscripts
Chapter 3: Swearing on Relics and Gospels
Chapter 4: Kissing: From Relics to Manuscripts
Chapter 5: Swearing: From Gospels to Legal Manuscripts
Chapter 6: Performances Within the Church
Conclusion: The Gloves Are Off
Touching Parchment has 272 pages and 122 images.
Download Touching Parchment for free, read online, or purchase a print copy in hardback or paperback formats at Open Book.
Conference: Encountering Other People: Material Religion and Cultural Exchanges in Medieval Accounts of Asia, University of Fribourg, 3rd May 2023
During the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, Christian missionaries and merchants travelled from Latin Europe to the Mongol Empire and India. They recorded what they had experienced in letters, treatises, and reports. These travelogues offer an insight on the mobility of both men and objects during the global Middle Ages. The conference deals with this historical conjuncture, focusing on three main aspects. First, it examines the travellers’ attitude towards religious otherness. Western Missionaries and merchants conceptualized the plurality of Eastern religions according to Latin categories (cultus, lex, fides or secta), and they framed them within their cultural patterns and stereotypes, such as those of idolatry and monstrosity. Second, the conference contextualizes the experiences of the travellers within the religious landscape of Medieval Asia. In fact, they witnessed and described religious habits that actually took place in the East: rituals associated with images and relics, bloody sacrifices and self-immolations, as well as shamanic practices. Third, the conference aims to shed light on the consequences that these contacts provoked on the life of both men and objects, focusing on the experiences of Christians that were martyrized in the East (Thane, 1321). Furthermore, a great variety of objects was recorded by the sources: misplaced, re-functionalized, migrated, and misunderstood, they often compensated the communication difficulties between the travellers and the indigenous people, overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers.
Click here for complete conference information.
Please find the conference schedule below:
09:00 Greetings and introduction (Michele Bacci)
FIRST SESSION, CHAIR: MICHELE BACCI
09:15 Jana Valtrová (Masaryk University)
‘In istis partibus sunt multe septe ydolatrarum diversa credentium…’
Conceptualization of religious plurality in the medieval Latin travel accounts of Asia
09:45 Jennifer Purtle (University of Toronto)
Spaces of Enunciation: Franciscan Narratives of the Sino-Mongol City
10:15 Coffee break
10:30 李文丹 Li Wendan (Peking University)
Encounters of European travellers with Buddhists in the Far East in the 13th
and 14th century *[online]
11:00 马晓林 Ma Xiaolin (Nankai University)
Marco Polo and Yuan China: rituals and religions *[online]
11:30 Discussion
12:00 Lunch
SECOND SESSION, CHAIR: ELEONORA TIOLI
13:30 Partha Mitter (University of Sussex) Early Representations of Hinduism in the West (13th to 17th centuries)
14.00 Pier Giorgio Borbone (Università di Pisa) Rabban Sauma in the Land of the Franks *[online]
14:30 Agnes Birtalan (Eötvös Loránd University) The Mongols’ Pre-Buddhist Religious Views.
The Etic Understanding (Some Examples from the 13th – 14th century sources)
15:00 Discussion
15:30 Coffee break
THIRD SESSION, CHAIR: VESNA SCEPANOVIC
16:00 Michele Bacci (University of Fribourg) Image Worship in Medieval Eurasia. Comparative Perspectives
16:30 Alexandre Varela (University of Fribourg) “Ele lhe disse que yão buscar Christãos e especearia”. Encountering Christians in India: Cheryia Pally (Kottayam) wall paintings as a study case
17:00 Anne Dunlop (University of Melbourne) From martyrdom to mirabilia. The Franciscans, Odoric, and the deaths at Thane
17:30 Eleonora Tioli (University of Fribourg, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) The Perception of Religious Otherness in Medieval Texts and Images
18:00 Conclusion and final discussion
18:30 End of the conference
Symposium: ‘Medieval Matters: A Symposium in honour of Professor Miri Rubin’, 29-30 June 2023, QMUL School of History, London
Register for tickets here. Please see the full agenda for both days below. You are welcome to attend one of the days, or both – please book your tickets accordingly.
Organising committee: Matthew Champion (Melbourne), Kati Ihnat (Nijmegen), Eyal Poleg (QMUL), Milan Žonca (Prague)
Thursday 29 June 2023
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM
Registration and Coffee
9:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Opening Remarks
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
The City (chair: Ian Wei, Bristol)
Katalin Szende (CEU) Mario Ascheri (Rome) Jan Dumolyn (Ghent) Étienne Anheim (EHESS)
11:30 AM – 11:45 AM
Coffee break
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM
Women, Gender and the Body (chair: Bronach Kane, Cardiff)
Ruth Mazo Karras (Trinity College, Dublin) Walter Simons (Dartmouth) Delfi Nieto Isabel (QMUL)
1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Lunch
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Jews and Christians (chair: Rosa Vidal, QMUL)
Deeana Klepper (Boston) Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (Ben Gurion) Elisheva Baumgarten (Jerusalem)
4:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Coffee break
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Visual and Material Culture (chair: Paul Binski, Cambridge)
Sara Lipton (Stony Brook) Anne E. Lester (Johns Hopkins) Verena Krebs (Bochum)
Friday 30 June 2023
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Music, Ritual and Liturgy (chair: Emma Dillon, KCL)
Iris Shagrir (Open University, Israel) Susan Boynton (Columbia) Cecilia Gaposchkin (Dartmouth) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen)
11:30 AM – 11:45 AM
Coffee break
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM
Literature (chair: Julia Boffey, QMUL)
David Wallace (UPenn) Rita Copeland (UPenn) Paul Strohm (Columbia)
1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Lunch
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Reform and Resistance (chair: Mishtooni Bose, Oxford)
Tamar Herzig (Tel Aviv) Sylvain Piron (EHESS) Gabor Klaniczay (CEU) Lyndal Roper (Oxford)
4:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Coffee break
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Reflections and final discussion (chair: John Arnold, Cambridge)
Marek Tamm (Tallinn) Ora Limor (Open University, Israel) Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard) Virginia Reinburg (Boston)
New Publication: “Revivals or Survival? Resurgences of the Icon from the 15th Century to the Present Day”, ed. Ralph Dekoninck and Ingrid Falque
The art of the icon, a visual idiom born in the Eastern Church, has deeply influenced the visual creations of Western Christianity from the Middle Ages onward, despite the adoption of a different aesthetic that was created in opposition to this maniera greca during the Renaissance. Even though artistic modernity was built against this art considered ‘awkward’, it did not prevent the ‘Byzantine’ style to come back to surface several times in the West. This volume aims to question the reasons of these revivals of the art of the icon in distinct Western artistic and religious contexts. It will highlight in particular the issues underlying the meeting, and sometimes the merging, of the two visual cultures, but also the complex and often conflicting relationships between art and religion.
Lecture series: Oxford Medieval Visual Culture Seminar (Trinity Term 2023), St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, Thursdays 5.15 p.m (BST)
The Smiling Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts
Week 2, 4 May
Richard Gameson Durham University: ‘British Medieval Illuminators’ Blues‘
Week 4, 18 May
Hanna Vorholt University of York: ‘Ruled Lines and the Making of Manuscript Images‘
Week 6, 1 June
Michelle Brown University of London: ‘Visual Exegesis and its Deployment in Insular Illumination‘
Week 8, 15 June
Sara Lipton Stony Brook University: ‘Blood Piety and Anti-Judaism in an Early Fourteenth-century Illuminated Prayer Book from Liège‘
Convenors: Elena Lichmanova (elena.lichmanova@merton.ox.ac.uk) and Gervase Rosser
Talks are open to everyone and will be followed by a drinks reception.
Location: St Catherine’s College, Arumugam Building
Medieval Art Research 