Medieval Art Research

Scholarship: Medieval Academy/CARA Summer Scholarships 2022 (Deadline 1st April 2022)

The Medieval Academy/CARA Summer Scholarships support graduate students and and particularly promising undergraduate students participating in summer courses in medieval languages or manuscript studies. Applicants must be members of the Medieval Academy in good standing with at least one year of graduate school remaining and must demonstrate both the importance of the summer course to their program of study and their home institution’s inability to offer analogous coursework.

The stipend will be paid directly to the student and must be used to offset a portion of the tuition cost. The awards are contingent on acceptance into the program.

For more information and to apply, visit the scholarship page here.

Job Opportunity: Assistant Professor in Early Medieval History, Trinity College Dublin (Deadline 21st March 2022)

The Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, is seeking to appoint an Assistant Professor in Early Medieval History for one year from August 2022. The post-holder will maintain research and teaching interests in Early Medieval History, with demonstrable expertise and relevant publications within the period 400-1000. The successful applicant will contribute to the delivery of modules at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum, including supervision of BA dissertations, as well as the Medieval Studies MPhil programme. Within the undergraduate History programme, the holder of the post will coordinate one of the existing Freshman-level (first-year) modules. At Sophister level, the post-holder will develop and coordinate one or more advanced modules arising from their research interests. At MPhil level, the post-holder will teach either Medieval Latin or another module based on their research interests. Supervision of appropriate undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations is also expected. The post-holder will also undertake other teaching and administrative duties at the direction of the Head of Department.

To apply, visit the Trinity College job posting.

New Publication: ‘Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy’ by Timothy McCall

From PSU Press:

‘Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies, Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati—gorgeously dressed and adorned men—to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power.

Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials.

This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.’

Timothy McCall is Associate Professor of Art History at Villanova University. He is a coeditor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe and the forthcoming six-volume series A Cultural History of Luxury.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Brilliant Bodies and Fashionable Men at Court
1. Riddled with Gilt: Lords in Shining Armor and Shimmering Brocades
2. “Ornado d’Oro e Giemme”: Brilliant Male Bodies Adorned
3. The Contours of Renaissance Fashion
4. Fair Princes: Blanched Beauty, Nobility, and Power
Epilogue: Black is the New Gold
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

To purchase, please visit PSU Press.

Lecture: IHR Seminar Europe 1150-1550: ‘Making Late Medieval Urban History “British”: Networks, Comparisons, and Scale, 3rd March 2022 17:30 GMT

The IHR Europe 1150-1550 seminar returns this Thursday 3^rd March at 5.30 pm. Dr Eliza Hartrich (UEA) will speak on ‘Making Late Medieval Urban History ‘British’: Networks, Comparisons, and Scale.’

‘Research into late medieval English towns over the last thirty years or so has demonstrated that no urban centre should be studied in isolation: as a site of exchange and administration, a town is inextricably linked to the countryside and to other urban centres. This paper considers, however, the methodological, conceptual, and practical questions that arise when attempting to ‘scale up’ urban history to encompass multiple towns over an extended geographic area: in this case, when constructing a history of towns in Britain and Ireland between 1350 and 1500. Did insular towns operate within a shared political and economic framework in this period, or do attempts at a ‘British’ urban history impose anachronistic identities on the past and obscure other influences on urban experiences?’

This seminar will take place in hybrid form. Those meeting in person should assemble at UCL Cruciform LT2. It will also be possible to join the meeting online Please register online here. (The online form will prompt you to specify whether you are attending in person or online). Those attending in person should wear face coverings for the talk.

Please send any enquiries to Andrew.Jotischky@rhul.ac.uk or emily.corran@ucl.ac.uk

Recorded Lecture: ‘Renaissance Lives- Erasmus of Rotterdam: the Spirit of a Scholar,’ William Barker, Micha Lazarus and François Quiviger

Erasmus of Rotterdam came from an obscure background but, through remarkable perseverance, skill, and independent vision, became a powerful and controversial intellectual figure in Europe in the early sixteenth century. He was known for his vigorous opposition to war, intolerance, and hypocrisy, and at the same time for irony and subtlety that could confuse his friends as well as his opponents. His ideas about language, society, scholarship, and religion influenced the rise of the Reformation and had a huge impact on the humanities, and that influence continues today. This book shows how an independent textual scholar was able, by the power of the printing press and his wits, to attain both fame and notoriety. Drawing on the immense wealth of recent scholarship devoted to Erasmus, Erasmus of Rotterdam is the first English-language popular biography of this crucial thinker in twenty years.

Speakers: William Barker (University of King’s College & Dalhousie University), Micha Lazarus (Warburg Institute & University of Cambridge), François Quiviger (Warburg Institute)

William Barker is the Inglis Professor and former president of the University of King’s College as well as professor emeritus of English at Dalhousie University. He is the editor of The Adages of Erasmus.

Micha Lazarus is Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

Renaissance Lives is a series of biographies published by Reaktion Books as well as a series of conversations discussing the ways in which individuals transmitted or changed the lives of traditions, ideas and images.

This event was filmed on 20 January 2022

New Publication: ‘Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World – ‘Abdīshō’ of Nisisbis and the Apologetic Tradition’ by Salam Rassi

Oxford Oriental Monographs

First book-length history of Syriac and Christian Arabic apologetic literature
First intellectual biography of an influential Syriac author
An in-depth analysis of the entangled worlds of medieval Christian and Islamic theology
A detailed study of a much-neglected period of social and intellectual history in the Middle East

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World: ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition is the first monograph-length study and intellectual biography of ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis (d. 1318), bishop and polymath of the Church of the East. Focusing on his works of apologetic theology, it examines the intellectual strategies he employs to justify Christianity against Muslim (and to a lesser extent Jewish) criticisms. Better known to scholars of Syriac literature as a poet, jurist, and cataloguer, ʿAbdīshōʿ wrote a considerable number of works in the Arabic language, many of which have only recently come to light. He flourished at a time when Syriac Christian writers were becoming increasingly indebted to Islamic models of intellectual production. Yet many of his writings were composed during mounting religious tensions following the official conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam in 1295. In the midst of these challenges, ʿAbdīshōʿ negotiates a centuries-long tradition of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to remind his readers of the verity of the Christian faith. His engagement with this tradition reveals how anti-Muslim apologetics had long shaped the articulation of Christian identity in the Middle East since the emergence of Islam. Through a selective process of encyclopaedism and systematisation, ʿAbdīshōʿ navigates a vast corpus of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to create a synthesis and theological canon that remains authoritative to this day.

Introduction: ‘A Constant but not Frozen Tradition’
1:Authority, Compilation, and the Apologetic Tradition
2:The Life and Times of a ‘Most Obscure Syrian’
3:The One is Many and the Many Are One: ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Trinitarian Thought
4:Debating Natures and Persons: ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Contribution to Christology
5:Christian Practices, Islamic Contexts: Discourses on the Cross and Clapper
Conclusion: A Tapestry Woven from Many Cloths

Salam Rassi, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford, UK

Salam Rassi earned his D.Phil. in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and has held teaching and research positions at Royal Holloway, the American University of Beirut, and the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. His primary interest is medieval intellectual and social history with a focus on scholarly exchange between Christians and Muslims. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Online Lecture: ‘Luxury handguns at the Renaissance courts,’ Catherine Fletcher, The Warburg Institute via Zoom, 24th May 2002, 15:30-17:00 (BST)

Catherine Fletcher (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘Luxury handguns at the Renaissance courts’

By the early sixteenth century, handguns had become an important technology of warfare. European cultural attitudes towards these new objects were ambivalent. In literature firearms were often described as diabolical and unchivalrous. Yet at the same time a gift culture developed around guns. They were assimilated into the world of the court, where designs of firearms and accessories echoed those of fashionable clothes, textiles and furniture. Using a series of examples from museum collections, this talk will investigate the ways that sixteenth-century guns became ‘civilized’.

This event is part of the A Material World: Ritual, which brings together academics and heritage professionals from a wide range of disciplines to discuss issues concerning historical objects, their materials, forms, and functions, as well as their conservation, presentation, display, and reconstruction.

Organisers: Rembrandt Duits (Acting Curator, The Photographic Collection, The Warburg Institute) and Louisa McKenzie (PhD student, The Warburg Institute).

All sessions during 2021-2022 will be delivered online.

FREE VIA ZOOM WITH ADVANCE BOOKING. CLICK HERE TO BOOK.

New Publication: ‘Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts,’ edited by Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing

The presence of gold, silver, and other metals is a hallmark of decorated manuscripts, the very characteristic that makes them “illuminated.” Medieval artists often used metal pigment and leaf to depict metal objects both real and imagined, such as chalices, crosses, tableware, and even idols; the luminosity of these representations contrasted pointedly with the surrounding paints, enriching the page and dazzling the viewer. To elucidate this key artistic tradition, this volume represents the first in-depth scholarly assessment of the depiction of precious-metal objects in manuscripts and the media used to conjure them. From Paris to the Abbasid caliphate, and from Ethiopia to Bruges, the case studies gathered here forge novel approaches to the materiality and pictoriality of illumination. In exploring the semiotic, material, iconographic, and technical dimensions of these manuscripts, the authors reveal the canny ways in which painters generated metallic presence on the page. Illuminating Metalwork is a landmark contribution to the study of the medieval book and its visual and embodied reception, and is poised to be a staple of research in art history and manuscript studies, accessible to undergraduates and specialists alike.

Joseph Salvatore Ackley, Wesleyan Univ., Middletown, USA; Shannon L. Wearing, Pontifical Inst. of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada.

Contents:

I INTRODUCTION
Preciousness on Parchment: Materiality, Pictoriality, and the Decorated Book Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing	1
II TECHNIQUE
Surface Effect and Substance: Precious Metals in Illuminated Manuscripts Nancy K. Turner	51
III REPRESENTATION
Metal Labor, Material Conversions: Goldsmiths in the Life of St. Denis and in Parisian Life, ca. 1300 Brigitte Buettner	113
Copying, Imitation, and Intermediality in Illuminated Ethiopic Manuscripts from the Early Solomonic Period Jacopo Gnisci	139
The Colors of Metalworks: The Painted Materials of Machinery in Byzantium Roland Betancourt	167
IV MATERIAL TRANSLATIONS
Metal, Materiality, and Maṣāḥif: Ornamentation in Abbasid Qur’ans Beatrice Leal	199
Manuscript as Metalwork: Haptic Vision in Early Carolingian Gospel Books Beth Fischer	223
A “Multimedia” Manuscript: Metalwork and the Siegburg Lectionary Heidi C. Gearhart	247
Illuminating Luxury: The Gray-Gold Flemish Grisailles Sophia Ronan Rochmes	275
V TREASURIES IN BOOKS, BOOKS AS TREASURIES
The Golden Spaces of the Uta Codex Eliza Garrison	303
The Matter of Memory: Illuminated Metalwork in the Vita of St. Albinus of Angers Sasha Gorjeltchan	333
Packaging the Sainte-Chapelle Relic Treasury, Paris ca. 1500 Julia Oswald	361
VI PHENOMENOLOGY AND PIETY
Pilgrimage across Borders: Painted Pilgrim’s Badges in Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts Megan H. Foster-Campbell	393
Peripheral Primacy: Metallic Illumination and Material Illusion in the Aussem Hours Susan Barahal and Elizabeth Pugliano	421
A Curator’s Note: The Tarnished Reception of Remarkable Manuscripts Lynley Anne Herbert	443
Bibliography	463
Index of Manuscripts	505
Index of Names	511
Index of Places	515
Subject Index	519

Call for Papers: ‘Experiencing the Sacred – The Role of the Senses in Medieval Liturgies and Rituals’, 1st International Multidisciplinary Conference Series, 21st-23rd September 2022, Deadline: 15th April 2022

By the Late Middle Ages, the liturgy has become the most important and elaborate ceremonial of Christianity in an already highly ritualised society. Indeed, rituals dominated the everyday life of the faithful, from the Divine Office and the Mass to the individual reading of the Hours; and they accompanied the life of people from their birth to their last breath. Besides, liturgy called for collective involvement and aimed at engaging the faithful by stimulating their senses, in order to trigger emotional and spiritual responses.

Over the past century, much has been said about the liturgy in the Middle Ages. Starting from the historical contribution of Mario Righetti (1946), in the last decades scholars have explored fresh research paths, incorporating notions and tools established by diverse disciplines. Philippe Buc (1997) and Eric Palazzo (2000) have opened up new research opportunities by assimilating sociological concepts, exploring the role of rituals as agents in shaping society and fostering social cohesion. More recently, this field has been fuelled with contributions from numerous disciplines that have started to engage in the study of the past, including neurosciences, performance studies, anthropology (Bull & Mitchell, 2016) and sensory studies (Palazzo, 2014; Neri & Caseau, 2021).

The scientific relevance of these contributions in generating adventurous approaches and opening up new panoramas is unquestionable. Following these fresh pathways, the first conference of the series “Experiencing the Sacred”, established by the SenSArt ERC project, aims to develop the topic further by triangulating the liturgy (broadly intended), the experience of the faithful (understood both as an individual and as social groups) and the sensoria (i.e. the diverse sensory systems that existed in the Middle Ages). In so doing, it aims at showing that the experience of the sacred was not homogeneus and static. On the contrary, it was a multimodal and multisensorial activity, one that bore complex and overlapping layers of meaning, and which was perceived in different ways by the diverse groups and individuals involved.

In order to reach this objective, the conference will consider both the material and the immaterial aspects of the liturgy, and will emphasise the wide range of its sensorial appeal. Images, objects, odours, words, flavours, movement, and sounds all formed part of the liturgical performance that permeated the life of medieval people. And yet, they were exploited and perceived in different terms by the diverse groups involved, such as the religious and lay community, men and women, members of the aristocracy and of the lower social groups.

The meeting will bring together a multi- and interdisciplinary community of scholars with a broad interest in the religious rituals of the late Middle Ages (ca. 1200 to ca. 1500), with particular respect to Art History, History, Musicology and Liturgy, in order to cross-fertilise these perspectives.

Scholars may address the topic with a broad approach but always considering the role of the sensorium in the performance and reception of the rites. This conference will focus specifically on Christian liturgies without geographical restrictions. Paper topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

Rituals beyond the Mass such as vestments, consecrations, or monastic professions.
Civic rituals mediated by the Church, such as coronations.
Individual liturgical practices: how the rituals enter the everyday.
The materiality of liturgy: the role of objects within different liturgical ceremonies (books, altarpieces, sculptures, paintings, metalworks, vestments, relics).
Regulations and norms: how was the liturgy orchestrated? How did the church regulate the rituals?
‘Unofficial’ liturgy and subversive rituals: irregularities, contaminations and hybridisations between popular traditions and the Church regulations.
Collective practices: how did different social groups interact with the sacred during the rituals? How were the rituals received and perceived by the faithful, from the clergy to the peasants?

Please send a title and abstract of no longer than 300 words, together with a short CV and personal data (max. 300 words), to the following emails: zuleika.murat@unipd.it; valentina.baradel@unipd.it; sara.carreno@unipd.it
The language of the conference is English.
Deadline: April 15th, 2022

This conference is organised by the ERC research project SenSArt – The Sensous Appeal of the Holy. Sensory Agency of Sacred Art and Somatised Spiritual Experiences in Medieval Europe (12th-15th century), Grant Agreement ID: 950248, ERC H-2020, PI Zuleika Murat, Università degli Studi di Padova. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/950248

Organising Committee:
Zuleika Murat (Associate Professor, Università degli Studi di Padova)
Valentina Baradel (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Università degli Studi di Padova)
Sara Carreño (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Università degli Studi di Padova)

Scientific Committee:

Valentina Baradel (Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali – Università degli Studi di Padova)

Sara Carreño (Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali – Università degli Studi di Padova)

Matteo Cesarotto (Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance – Université de Tours)

João Luís Inglês Fontes (Instituto de Estudos Medievais – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Zuleika Murat (Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali – Università degli Studi di Padova)

Salvador Ryan (St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth)

More information can be found here.

Publication: ‘Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History’, Dany Sandron and Andrew Tallon, Translated by Andrew Tallon and Lindsay Cook

Since its construction, Notre Dame Cathedral has played a central role in French cultural identity. In the wake of the tragic fire of 2019, questions of how to restore the fabric of this quintessential French monument are once more at the forefront. This all-too-prescient book, first published in French in 2013, takes a central place in the conversation.

The Gothic cathedral par excellence, Notre Dame set the architectural bar in the competitive years of the third quarter of the twelfth century and dazzled the architects and aesthetes of the Enlightenment with its structural ingenuity. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral became the touchstone of a movement to restore medieval patrimony to its rightful place at the cultural heart of France: it was transformed into a colossal laboratory in which architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc anatomized structures, dismembered them, put them back, or built them anew—all the while documenting their work with scientific precision.

Taking as their point of departure a three-dimensional laser scan of the cathedral created in 2010, architectural historians Dany Sandron and the late Andrew Tallon tell the story of the construction and reconstruction of Notre Dame in visual terms. With over a billion points of data, the scan supplies a highly accurate spatial map of the building, which is anatomized and rebuilt virtually. Fourteen double-page images represent the cathedral at specific points in time, while the accompanying text sets out the history of the building, addressing key topics such as the fundraising campaign, the construction of the vaults, and the liturgical function of the choir.

Featuring 170 full-color illustrations and elegantly translated by Andrew Tallon and Lindsay Cook, Notre Dame Cathedral is an enlightening history of one of the world’s most treasured architectural achievements.

“Smaller, more concise, and more streamlined than a traditional monograph, it emphasizes a series of graphics developed from Tallon’s 3D-scan data, which together purport to show the development of Notre-Dame over the nine centuries of its history. In this way it helps to make the fruits of recent research on the cathedral’s history readily accessible to nonspecialist readers. The new translation undertaken by Lindsay Cook, who studied with both Murray and Tallon and whose own research considers parish churches constructed in the orbit of Notre-Dame, now effectively expands that mission to anglophone audiences.”—Robert Bork, caa.reviews

Dany Sandron is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Sorbonne Université.

Andrew Tallon (1969–2018) was Associate Professor of Art at Vassar College.

Lindsay Cook is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College.

This volume is currently available on sale here.

Contents:

1163: Planning the Cathedral

The Bishop

The Cathedral Chapter

The Fabric

Resources

Episcopal Donations

Capitular Donations

Lay Donations

1170: Building the Cathedral

The Materials

The Master Mason

The Design

The Construction

1177: Constructing the Vaults

The Vaults

Technical Aspects of Vault Construction

The Space of the Choir

1182: Liturgical Choir and Sanctuary

The Liturgical Choir

Staging the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy

The Medieval Sanctuary

1208: Form and Meaning

The Choir

The Nave

1220: Portals and the Gallery of Kings

1225: Changing Tastes

A Radical Transformation

The Changes

Instability of the West Front

1245: Towers and Bells, Marking Time at the Cathedral

The Casting of a Bell

1265: Relics and Processions

Relics and Reliquaries

Stational Liturgy and Processions

1300: Pious Foundations and Tombs

The Choir: Preserve of Prelates and Princes

The Chapels

Confraternities at Notre Dame

1350: A Point of Reference

The Architects

Directing the Works

1780: Baroque Transformations

1860: The Major Restoration of Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc

Notre Dame in Peril

The Invention of French Cultural Heritage

The Competition

The Project

The Restoration

The Rational Cathedral

The Cathedral Today

Conclusion

Plan of Notre Dame

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Credits