Tours and Talks: Rituals of Power Through the Centuries at the Society of Antiquaries, 5th May 2023, 5-8pm (BST)

To coincide with the Coronation of Charles III on Saturday 6 May, we will be welcoming visitors to a rolling programme of show and tell sessions, tours, workshops, performances and demonstrations all exploring rituals of power through the ages.

Come and see some of our portraits of Kings and Queens and learn more about what a 1225 copy of the Magna Carta, the Great Seal of Henry VIII, Civil War pamphlets, and a colourful panorama of Queen Victoria’s coronation procession, among many others, tell us about rituals, symbols, and transfers of power.

Join us for sessions of Early Modern poetry and music. Fellow Linda Grant will be reading two poems, one each from the courts of Henry VIII and Charles II, by Thomas Wyatt and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester – the latter extremely bawdy and obscene so adults only! Each reading will be accompanied by live music from the period – and we’ll consider how these poems might contest and subvert ideas of monarchy and authoritative power.

We are also offering activities to get creative and inky with lino block printing and the chance to create your own printed badge, postcard or tote bag to take away. We have commissioned lino cut replicas of ‘royal themed’ 18th-century printing blocks, which were used to illustrate the Society’s early publications. Visitors will be guided in inking one of these blocks to print onto their chosen object.

Cocktails and victuals throughout the evening.

You can book your free time slot below. Please note that each time slot will have the same activities so please only book one slot for yourself or one slot per person in your group as we expect this event to be over-subscribed.

Please note:

  • Tours will start on the hour, each hour. Places are limited to 20 and these will be allocated on a first come, first served basis, regardless of if you’ve registered to come.
  • The poetry readings contain graphic, sexual and explicit content that will not be appropriate for minors.

For those with accessibility needs, the show and tell session in our Library can be reached via our lift, which can fit one standard wheelchair inside it, without a carer.

This event is in person at Burlington House only. Please select the appropriate ticket below.

If you have any questions, please contact us at communications@sal.org.uk

Reserve your tickets here

Symposium: “Intersections: Encounters with Medieval and Renaissance Textiles, 1100-1550”, The 28th Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Monday 22nd May 2023, 9am-6:30pm (BST)

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, textiles wrapped up and coated walls, people, furniture, and objects. They provided omnipresent, and often complex, symbolic and visual demarcations of spaces. Diplicare, the root of display, is in unfolding: so much of the frameworks of how we surround ourselves are rooted in practices using cloth. The value of these textiles, both in their materiality and craftsmanship, exceeded that of many other artforms which have been privileged by scholars. Textiles were often disregarded in art historical study, considered to be visually unappealing or discredited in previous centuries as part of the decorative arts. In addition, only a fraction of the textiles that functioned in these spaces survive, many of which are in a fragmented state.

In recent years, textiles have received more attention in art historical studies, and block buster exhibitions on tapestries have made the importance of textiles clear to a wider public. There are, however, still many new angles from which we can interrogate and discuss textiles which can enrich, connect, and reframe not only textile history but wider research subjects in Medieval and Renaissance studies.

In this symposium we would like to draw together varying angles of research through their intersections with textiles, in whatever capacity. The theme of this symposium centres on how Medieval and Renaissance textiles, real and depicted, combine, overlap or intersect in different ways. In short, it aims to interrogate how textiles get entangled with other people, arts, materials, objects and functions.

Organised by Jessica Gasson (The Courtauld) and Julia van Zandvoort (The Courtauld). 

Generously supported by Sam Fogg.

Tickets are free, but essential. Register here.

Please find a complete programme below:

9.00 – Opening remarks

Secular Textiles
9.15 – 10:40 Panel 1 – Networks and trade /collecting of textiles

Key Note Samuel Cohn
Textiles, Piety, and Memory in Late Medieval Tuscany

Julia van Zandvoort
‘Per la gran furia di compratori’: Obtaining Flemish Tapestries in Sixteenth-century Italy, the case of the Van der Molen firm (1538-1544)

Nina Reiss – Trojan War tapestries (production / trade)
The ‘intersecting geographies’ of the tapestries of the Trojan War – tapestry
production between Paris and Tournai

10.40-11.00 Panel discussion

11.00-11.30 Tea Break

11:35 – 13:00 Panel 2 – Textiles in secular settings

Chiara Stombellini
(Re-)Weaving Ritual Paths: Silk Textiles as Markers of Ceremonial Space in Late Medieval Venice

Pauline Devriese
The stink of the cities – secondary scenting of domestic textiles in Europe

Karina Pawlow
Textile and glass interweaved. Entanglements of two arts in Renaissance Venice

13.00-13.20 Panel discussion

13.20-14.20 Lunch break

Religious Textiles
14:25 – 15:50 Panel 3 – Textiles and ritual function / iconography

Jessica Gasson
Tapestries on the altar: exploring the design and use of the Louvre Virign of the Living Water and the Sens Three Coronation tapestries

Julie Glodt
Overlapping Incarnation and Consecration Textiles, Images and Gestures around the Cluny Museum’s Corporal Case (13th century)

Aimee Clark
“The Garden of the Incarnation and the Conversion of the Heart: The Mass of Saint Gregory”

15.50-16.10 Panel discussion

16.10-16.30 Coffee break

16:35 – 17:55 Panel 4 – Reassembling Religious Textiles

Mireia Castano Martine
Fragmentation and reconstruction of an embroidered altar frontal

Jeroen Reyniers
Many layers of textiles. The relic treasure of Herkenrode in Hasselt (Belgium) revealed through material technical research

Jordan Quill
At the Intersection of Political and Ritual functions of textiles: Sensory Experiences of Textiles in the Sumtsek at Alchi, Ladakh

17.55-18.15 Panel discussion

18.15-18.25 Closing remarks

18.30 Wine reception

New Publication: Medieval World: Culture & Conflict Issue 6, “King Louis IX of France (r. 1226-1270)”

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.

Preorder here.

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.

Register here.

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.

Purchase here.

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)