The latest research, news, and reviews from the world of Medieval Art History
The final University of Reading GCMS seminar will be this Thursday 17th March at 4:30 pm BST, when Professor Catherine Holmes (University of Oxford) will be delivering a lecture entitled ‘Entrepots, Networks and Kinetic Empire in Byzantium and neighbouring worlds, 950-1100’.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82778262433?pwd=R2lDb29aUkZkT0lFRlQ2cUlWUmYvUT09
The seminar will be hybrid, in person in the Ramsden room, St Catharine’s College Cambridge and on Zoom (if you would like to receive the link, please email Prof N Berend nb213@cam.ac.uk). If you attend in person, please wear a mask.
Students of medieval identity have long been preoccupied with questions about how communities were brought together. The strategies deployed by medieval writers when devising a history for their communities, or when distinguishing them from others, can reveal much about their visions of identity.
The fifth Aberystwyth Medieval Conference will explore strategies for uniting and dividing medieval communities, how those writing about the past helped to construct – or to overcome – borders between communities, and how their visions of communal identities may have shaped, and may in turn have been shaped by, the construction of medieval polities.
The workshop will take place from 29th June to 1st July 2022. We anticipate that it will take place in-person. We warmly welcome proposals for 20-minute papers from postgraduates, early career & established scholars working on any aspect of the high medieval past (c.700-1300). Perspectives from any discipline are welcome, including but not limited to history, literary studies, art history, philosophy, archaeology, and palaeography.
Keynote speakers:
Michal Biran (Jerusalem)
Gerd Lubich (Bochum)
Hugh M. Thomas (Miami)
Alex Woolf (St Andrews)
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
Borders and identity
The construction of networks
Relations between the “centre” and “periphery”
Disputing/dispute settlement
Belonging and exclusion.
Divisions between lay and spiritual
Ideas of “the other”
Please submit proposals to aberystwythmedievalists@gmail.com
The Medici Archive Project is pleased to announce the dates for the upcoming 2022 Summer Seminars in Paleography and Archival Studies which will take place in Florence on 20-25 June 2022 and 27 June – 2 July 2022.
The principal aim of this seminar is to provide an introduction to Italian archives (with particular emphasis on Florentine archival collections); to examine in depth various documentary typologies; to read diverse early modern scripts; and to to assist in planning research in Italian archives and libraries. Especially relevant for graduate students, university faculty, and museum curators working on Renaissance and early modern topics, this seminar is taught by a team of current and former MAP scholars, as well as university professors and other MAP-affiliated researchers.
Seminar lecturers include: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Sheila Barker, Davide Boerio, Pasquale Focarile, Piergabriele Mancuso, Luciano Piffanelli, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Lorenzo Vigotti.
Teaching will take place at MAP head offices at Palazzo Alberti in Via de’ Benci 10 and on-site, in public and private archives in Florence.
The seminar week is composed of lectures on archival practice and paleography sessions, lasting between 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours, for a total of 6-7 hours a day.
A working knowledge of Italian is recommended. No previous archival and paleographic experience is required. Teaching will be in English.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, availability is limited to 10 spaces per session.
Participants will be encouraged to develop their research with archival approaches, meet with instructors individually in order to strategize future archival research in Italy, network with scholars in their field, and gain access to archives and libraries resources pertinent to their research.
Prospective applicants should send to education@medici.org:
– a one-page CV
– a brief statement explaining how this course will benefit the applicant’s current research
– Your preferred session
The same email address should also be used for queries on administrative details, course tuition and general information.
Deadline: 1 June 2022
Tuition for one session is Euro 1000 (which includes six lunches and other cultural activities)
For further information: education@medici.org
The next World Art Research Seminar online will be on Wednesday 16 March at 3.30pm GMT when Prof. Alison Wright (UCL, History of Art) will present on ‘The Golden Surface: Gold Between City and Sovereign in Late Medieval London’.
To join the Microsoft Teams Meeting, please click here.
This anthology examines the workings of historical imagery in fourteen essays, offering fresh perspectives from leading researchers on a wide range of medieval and early modern artworks in a similarly wide range of functional contexts.
How did historical images work and interact with their beholders and users? Drawing on the results of an international conference held in Vienna in 2018, this volume offers new perspectives on a central question for contemporary art history. The fourteen authors approach working imagery from the medieval and early modern periods in terms of its production, usage, and reception. They address wide-ranging media—architecture, sculpture, painting, metalwork, stained glass—in similarly wide-ranging contexts: from monumental installations in the most public zones of urban churches to exquisite devotional objects and illuminated books reserved for more exclusive settings. While including research from West European and American institutions, the project also engages with the distinctive scholarly traditions of Eastern Europe and Israel. In all these ways, it reflects the interests of the dedicatee Michael Viktor Schwarz, whose introductory interview lays out the parameters of the subject.
Christine Beier is senior scientist at the Department of Art History at Vienna University. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern book illumination.
Tim Juckes works at the Department of Art History at Vienna University. He is the main researcher in a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) on visual media and spatial contexts in late-medieval Central Europe.
Assaf Pinkus is professor of art history at Tel Aviv University. He works on spectatorship, response, and somaticism with a focus on the visual media of late medieval Europe.
Below is the table of contents:
Editors’ Introduction
PART I: VISUAL ELOQUENCE
Can We Grasp Wordless Images? — Milena Bartlová
Gothic Art, Realism and magniloquentia: Thoughts on Erich Auerbach — Paul Binski
The Scaling Turn: Experiencing Late Medieval Artifacts— Assaf Pinkus and Einat Klafter
„Where the Wild Things Are“. Die Wilden Leute des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit im Raum des Dekorativen — Hans Körner
Das Kultbild und sein Rahmen: Zur Funktion von Stildifferenzen (zwei schlesische Beispiele aus dem Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts) — Romuald Kaczmarek
PART II: IMAGERY IN BOOKS
In cerchio: Illuminating the Trojan Legend and the Commedia between the Veneto and Naples (with some conjectures on Madrid, BNE, MS 10057) — Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto
Wie die Bilder im Roman d’Alexandre en prose die dubiose Herkunft des Helden diskutieren — Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch
Bonaventure and Monastic Images of St Elizabeth — Ivan Gerát
PART III: IMAGERY IN SPACE
In Praise of the Pigeon: Interpretive Adventures in Naumburg Cathedral — Jacqueline E. Jung
Bilder und Kult als Ausdruck bischöflicher Macht: Berthold von Buchegg und die Katharinenkapelle im Straßburger Münster— Marc Carel Schurr
Eye of the Donkey: Visual Strategies on the Choir Threshold of St Laurence’s in Nuremberg — Tim Juckes
Bildkonzepte im Widerstreit. Donatellos Judith als „naturalisierte Allegorie“— Ulrich Pfisterer
Inhaltliche Vielfalt durch motivische Zurückhaltung. Zur Wandmalerei in der camera pape im Papstpalast von Avignon — Tanja Hinterholz
Storia, mito e allegoria: I portali del Santo Sepolcro a Brindisi — Valentino Pace
To purchase, visit Brepols.
Thanks to the continued support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, The Medici Archive Project is offering two fellowships for graduate and pre-doctoral students to undertake specialized archival research on-site at the Archivio di Stato as well as other archival collections housed in Florence and across Tuscany.
These fellowships are especially aimed to provide graduate students in art and architectural history with the opportunity to examine original source materials, receive scholarly guidance from MAP Staff, present their findings at MAP-sponsored conferences and workshops, and enroll in MAP’s Paleography and Archival Studies Seminar.
Both fellowships must take place within a period of no less than three months from 15 May 2022 to 23 December 2022.
The stipend is USD 8,000. Fellows will be responsible for their travel and accommodations in Florence.
Eligible candidates must either have American citizenship or be enrolled in graduate programs at universities in the United States.
There is no application form for this fellowship.
Instead, suitable candidates are invited to send via email to education@medici.org, the following documents in a single PDF by 2 APRIL 2022:
1) A cover letter.
2) A short essay (no more than two pages) on how the candidate’s topic will benefit from archival research.
3) A curriculum vitae.
4) The name and email address of a scholar in the field, preferably the candidate’s supervisor, who can comment on the applicant’s qualifications and the merits of the research proposal (please do not include letters of recommendation with the application).
To apply for these fellowships, the following material should be sent electronically to education@medici.org.
Please do not include supplementary material (publications, papers, syllabi, etc.).
All materials must be submitted in English.
For further information, contact education@medici.org.
The University of Salamanca invites applications for two 3-years PhD Students positions to obtain a PhD degree in Medieval History, starting in August 2022. The positions are part of the project “PEOPLEANDWRITING: The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula” under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 850604), supervised by Dra. Ainoa Castro Correa.
Application period: 1 March 2022 to 30 June 2022.
Complete information at: https://sede.usal.es/tablon/anuncio/4984/
The PhD candidate will join the project “PeopleAndWriting – The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula” at the Department of Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary History at the University of Salamanca.
PeopleAndWriting investigates the connection between people of rural communities and the written word in the medieval Iberian Peninsula as a key instrument in forging long-lasting personal identities while shaping the interactions within and among social groups. We aim to look at the lives and work of ordinary laypeople and construct their social profile in relation to written communication for the first time, analysing how the introduction of writing and writing-based social practices changed society. To this end, PeopleAndWriting proposes the application of a novel and holistic approach beyond the state-of-the-art to study an overlooked corpus of written material: the extant tenth- to twelfth-century manuscript sources from the north-western Iberian Peninsula.
Full information about the project, including latest results and news can be found in the web page: https://peopleandwriting.wordpress.com
Candidates will be expected to conduct original primary research which will conclude with the production of a PhD thesis. The PI, with assistance from the rest of project members will provide training and will supervise and guide the students.
More information: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/751889
The final Murray Seminar at Birkbeck, entitled ‘The Painted Histories of the Welles-Ros Bible’, will be delivered by Kathryn A. Smith on Tuesday 15th March, 16:45 BST.
‘Sometime probably c.1366-73, Maud de Ros, widow of the Lincolnshire nobleman John, 4th Baron Welles, commissioned the Welles-Ros Bible, a grand illuminated pandect that preserves the most complete surviving witness of the Anglo-Norman Bible—England’s earliest full prose vernacular Bible translation. This paper examines evidence for the Bible’s production under Carmelite auspices, and for the Carmelite sympathies of its patron and principal intended reader-viewer, the adolescent John, 5th Baron Welles. The paper analyzes a selection of the Bible’s richly narrative illustrations as well as elements of its design, to show how these painted histories register the lineal, tenurial, spiritual, and social concerns of a noble family struggling to rebuild in the wake of the Plague.’
Kathryn A. Smith, Professor of Art History at New York University, is the author of Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England (2003), The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England (2012), and articles, essays and reviews on early Christian and late medieval art, especially the illustrated manuscripts of Gothic England. She is founding series editor of Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols) and was a co-editor of the journal Studies in Iconography. Her seminar derives from her current book project, Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible, her work on which is supported by a Senior Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
For free tickets, visit the event’s Eventbrite page.
As Ukraine is under invasion, the the Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie (RMM) and the National Institute of Art History (INHA), supported by the Louvre Museum, the Center Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay , the National Library of France (BnF), the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem), ICOM France, the Ecole du Louvre, the French Committee for Art History (CFHA) , the General Association of Curators of Public Collections in France (AGCCPF), the Associations of Friends of Museums (AMAR, AMMD), the Regional Department of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) Normandy, are taking the initiative to open a cultural forum to bring to life the Ukrainian culture and heritage under threat.
Every Wednesday programmes on the arts, history, and heritage of Ukraine will be held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen. Some will be reprised at the INHA. Each meeting will be recorded and put online, thus creating an audiovisual collection accessible to all French-speaking audiences, which will offer access to what Ukraine has most preciously given to humanity.
The first programme in the conference is: ‘The first Christian buildings of Kyiv’ by Jannic Durand (General Curator of Heritage, Director of the Department of Works of Art at the Louvre Museum), Wednesday 9th March at 14:30 local time, in the Musee de Beaux Arts Rouen auditorium.
For complete details, please click here.
Below is the announcement in French:
Alors que l’Ukraine est envahie, la Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie (RMM) et l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), appuyés par le Musée du Louvre, le Centre Pompidou, le Musée d’Orsay, la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), le Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem), l’ICOM France, l’École du Louvre, le Comité français d’histoire de l’art (CFHA), l’association générale des conservateurs des collections publiques de France (AGCCPF) les associations d’Amis de musées (AMAR, AMMD), la Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (DRAC) Normandie, prennent l’initiative d’ouvrir un forum culturel pour faire vivre la culture et le patrimoine ukrainiens menacés.
Tous les mercredis se tiendront au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen des conférences sur les arts, l’histoire et le patrimoine d’Ukraine, dont certaines seront reprises à l’INHA. Chaque rendez-vous fera l’objet d’une captation qui sera mise en ligne, créant ainsi une collection audiovisuelle accessible à tous les publics francophones, qui proposera un accès à ce que l’Ukraine a apporté de plus précieux à l’humanité.
Les personnalités invitées, conservateurs et conservatrices de musées, historiennes et historiens de l’art ou du cinéma, écrivaines et écrivains, cinéastes, artistes visuels, etc., feront entendre d’autres voix que celles des armes, en rappelant la richesse et la diversité de l’apport culturel de l’Ukraine au patrimoine universel, qui résulte d’échanges et de dialogues permanents, y compris au sein des conflits qui ont marqué ces « terres de sang ». Elles s’engagent en faveur d’un arrêt des combats, de la souveraineté de l’Ukraine sur son territoire et de la préservation des vies et des biens culturels, matériels et immatériels.
La programmation commencera avec une première conférence: ‘Les premieres edifices chretiens de Kyiv’ par Jannic Durand (conservateur general du patrimonie, directeur du department des Objets d’art au musee du Louvre), mercredi 9 mars 14h130.
Une reprise de cette conférence aura lieu le Lundi 14 mars à 18h30 (Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, auditorium Jacqueline Lichtenstein de la galerie Colbert)
Medieval Art Research