The latest research, news, and reviews from the world of Medieval Art History
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
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 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”.
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.
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.
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.
If the mission of Art History is to make sense of visual and material cultures, then what can be learned from objects that resist art historical study?
This panel invites contributors to reflect on pre-modern artworks that they find compelling, but which they feel they have ‘failed’ to satisfactorily engage in art historical study. We encourage contributors to consider objects and images that they find confounding, have struggled to write about, have abandoned study of, or which they have found resistant to art historical methodologies. We also invite papers which consider methodological ‘failings’: art historical theories that present significant challenges when applied to pre-modern art.
In reflecting on encounters with the limits of art historical research, we hope to provoke generative discussion about what can be learned from this friction, about both these objects and Art History as a discipline. In doing so, we conceive frustration as a productive method in the study of material culture.
This panel discussion will consist of 10-minute presentations followed by a round table discussion and Q&A. We therefore invite 10-minute presentations that reflect on: a single pre-modern artwork, object, image or method. Papers should raise issues which will form the basis of a broader conversation between panellists and with the audience. We welcome papers which consider pre-modern objects from across periods and geographies, including those related to the ‘afterlives’ of pre-modern objects.
Submit your Paper via a form available here. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenors below by Sunday 2 November 2025:
Contributing panellists will have the opportunity to submit their paper for publication in a special issue of the open-access journal, Different Visions, titled ‘Points of Friction’ and coedited by Millie Horton-Insch and Lauren Rozenberg. More details may be found here.
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Facultad de Geografía e Historia), Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Casa Árabe
This year’s International Complutense Conference on Medieval Art, titled Transculturality and Medieval Art in Dialogue: Negotiating New Identities, will once again offer a specialised forum for scholarly exchange. The conference organisers invite all members of the academic community to attend. Registration will be available from October 6, 2025.
Below is the program and additional information can be found on the conference webpage.
Registration:
Organisation:
The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Technology, Science, and Art (AVISTA) are excited to announce the publication of the 18th volume in our Brill series, AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art, with American Gothic: Reflections on Gothic Scholarship in America 1925–2025, edited by Robert Bork.
Use code DGBCONFC for 35% off the list price through October 31st, 2025, here: https://brill.com/display/title/72359
This book chronicles the contributions of American scholars to the study of European Gothic architecture. It traces this history through a series of biographical case studies of major figures ranging from Arthur Kingsley Porter to Robert Branner and Jean Bony to Caroline Bruzelius, calling attention to their influence as mentors and to the character of their professional networks. These biographical chapters are supplemented by thematic essays and a roundtable discussion of current issues in the field. Altogether, the book explains how working from overseas presents both significant challenges and valuable perspectives, allowing American scholars to enrich dialog in the field.
Contributors are: Robert Bork, Caroline Bruzelius, Meredith Cohen, S. Diane Daussy, Jennifer M. Feltman, Erin Hulbert, Maile Hutterer, Matthew Reeve, Lisa Reilly, Rebecca Smith, Zachary Stewart, Kyle Sweeney, Kristine Tanton, Sarah Thompson, Arnaud Timbert, and Joseph Williams.
WORK | ARBEIT
Spuren, Konstellationen, Wertungen
Traces, Constellations, Valuations
October 23–26, 2026
Organised together with Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rehm, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Kirsten Lee Bierbaum, Technische Universität Dortmund
The analysis of medieval artefacts provides insights into the material traces of contemporary work processes by examining traces of work and material characteristics on the artworks. The preservation of materials and working tools also allows conclusions to be drawn about the technical practices and availability of resources in the respective era. The examination of work routines reveals the collaborations and hierarchies between different actors, for example in corporate contract awards or collaborative manufacturing processes. The social environment plays a decisive role here – whether in a monastic or courtly context – as do the integration of gender relations and the origins of migrant artists or workshops. In addition, the social standing of the producers is considered. Evidence for this is provided by signatures, inscriptions or depictions themselves, which reflect the appreciation of their work. Overall, it can be said that artistic production in the Middle Ages reflects not only technological aspects, but also social structures, social roles and values in an integrative way. From an art history perspective, we are interested in the following questions:
First, what information can be gleaned from medieval artefacts? What traces of workmanship have been preserved in the artworks themselves, and what can be deduced from them? What about the transmission of contemporary materials and tools?
Second, we ask about specific work routines and processes. What was the relationship between the various actors involved in art production, and what can be said, for example, about corporate commissioning and collaborative or collective production processes? And in what social constellations were these processes embedded (for example, in a monastic or courtly context)? What role did gender relations or the origins of migrant artists or workshops play in this?
Thirdly, it is necessary to examine the social position of the producers and the esteem in which they were held. What claims did the artists themselves make, whether through signatures or inscriptions, or in their own representations of artistic work and its producers?
Against the backdrop of the corresponding findings, we can finally ask once again whether the persistently asserted epochal difference between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, “craftsmanship there, art here”, can be upheld.
Proposals that go beyond this brief outline are of course welcome, and we would also like to see the breadth of our professional fields represented. We would like to expressly encourage younger researchers who are still in the process of qualifying to apply with a presentation.
Please apply for one of the sessions by 15 October 2025 using the form on our website and submitting an abstract (max. 350 words). The presentations are scheduled to last 20 minutes. The results of the selection process and the programme are expected to be published by the end of 2025 at www.dvfk-berlin.de and through other relevant online channels.
Please note that only one person is scheduled per presentation at a time. Applications can only be submitted via the online form.
Full position details and application link: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10513
The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies is pleased to announce a John W. Baldwin Post-Doctoral Fellowship for a recent Ph.D. whose work focuses on European medieval studies within the global comparative context. The position is for a maximum of 2 years, beginning July 1, 2026. To be eligible for consideration, applicants must have received their Ph.D. between September 1, 2019, and June 30, 2026.
The Post-Doctoral Fellow will be a scholar whose research aligns with the goals of the study of “Europe in the world” and who has demonstrated evidence of innovative methodologies. A successful applicant may be working in a discipline or between disciplines in the European Middle Ages but should engage Europe in the world at micro and macro levels. We understand the European Middle Ages to include the period from the 3rd to the start of the 17th century, and where the 16th century is studied in continuity with the late medieval period. Mirroring the work of John W. Baldwin, for whom the postdoctoral fellowship is named, a successful applicant will conceive of Europe within a broader global context and be conversant across disciplines.
The Fellow will join the vibrant research and academic communities within the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, with scholars working on all facets of early Global studies. He/she/they will have the following responsibilities and opportunities: develop their research agenda while participating regularly in CMRS-CEGS academic events; work collaboratively with a diverse group of scholars, graduate students, and other postdoctoral fellows; help to conceive Center’s programming (including public-facing programming). He/she/they will have the opportunity to prepare one scholarly event (workshop or small symposium) hosted by CMRS-CEGS in the second year.
Named to honor the legacy of the esteemed historian JOHN W. BALDWIN, this postdoctoral fellowship is made possible by a gift from Arcadia, a charitable fund that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge.
We are seeking to interview candidates with a demonstrable commitment to underrepresented and underserved populations and epistemologies, and with an enthusiasm for building ties across fields within the university. The appointment (which includes benefits) will be for a 24-month period. Salary will follow university standards for post-doctoral scholars and will reflect the applicant’s experience.
Basic qualifications
Additional qualifications
Full position details and application link: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10513
Thursday 16th October 2025, 18:30 – 20:30 (BST), Bristol Cathedral
An evening of remembrance and celebration of Jon Cannon’s life and work
Find out more and register for tickets here.
Join us for a special evening celebrating the life and work of Jon Cannon (1962–2023) — architectural historian, lecturer, and Canon Historian at Bristol Cathedral.
This event marks the launch of his final book, The Stones of Britain — a profound exploration of how geology has shaped the landscapes and history of our island. Interwoven with reflections on place, home and belonging, it is Jon’s definitive work and a moving legacy.
The evening will feature readings, tributes, and a drinks reception, offering space to honour Jon’s remarkable contributions and connect with others inspired by his writing.
We look forward to welcoming you to Bristol Cathedral to celebrate Jon Cannon’s enduring legacy and the launch of his extraordinary book.
Medieval Art Research