Symposium celebrating Charles Little
Columbia University
Details to come
Symposium celebrating Charles Little
Columbia University
Details to come
Join us for the second of three workshops on inclusion, diversity and equity in the editing and publishing of peer-reviewed journals. Presentations will focus on the mechanics, ethics, and economics of journal publishing, including the organization and distribution of labor within journal publications; the many people involved in editing and production; the costs of processes; the roles and challenges of digital platforms; the respective advantages and disadvantages of open access vs. firewall, etc. The workshop will also discuss the relationships between journals and their sponsoring or hosting institutions. This event will take place virtually.
The link to register is here. Registrants who attended the October 18, 2021 workshop will receive a link automatically and do not need to re-register.
Panelists:
Susan Boynton (organizer) coeditor of Gesta
Callum Blackmore, editor of Current Musicology
Alex Gil and Kaiama Glover, coeditors of archipelagos
Michelle Wilson (Digital Publishing, Columbia University Libraries)
Shannon Wearing (University of Toronto, managing editor of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics)
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The third and final workshop will take place on April 4, 2022: Working towards Equity and Inclusion in Journal Publication: What does it take to make journal publishing function more inclusively and transparently? In this workshop, participants will discuss their perspectives on future paths for greater equity and inclusion in authorship, the division of labor, peer review, the constitution of editorial boards, and consider the ways in which journals can foster the diversity of all participants. Presenters will address the ways in which institutional contexts (universities, university presses, scholarly societies) shape journal operations, and consider how the relationships between journals and institutions can lead to support for enhanced inclusion and equity.
What can we do to help humanistic studies thrive? In the Luce Design Workshop at ACLS, teams from six schools developed practical solutions to the challenges we face, from declining undergraduate enrollments to faculty diversification. Our lesson: great experiments are going on around the country, but change must be ambitious, connected, systemic, and swift. This event showcases their results and sets the stage for further exchange and collaboration.
The aim of the event is to make our work visible, to invite collaboration and exchange with others trying to bring about change in the academy, and to determine together what collaborative work is needed (transcending any single organization or initiative) to bring about systemic change.
Moderated by Joy Connolly, ACLS President and James Shulman, ACLS Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.
Speakers:
Jasmine Alinder, Dean of Humanities and Professor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz
Amy Cook, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, College of Arts and Sciences and Professor, Department of English, Stony Brook University
Christopher Heath “Kit” Wellman, Dean of Academic Planning for the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor, Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis
Ari Kelman, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor, Department of History, University of California, Davis
Claire M. Waters, Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of California, Davis
Maria J. Donoghue Velleca, Dean, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Professor, Department of Biology, College of William & Mary
Special thanks to Treviene Harris for her work and assistance.
REGISTER HERE.
The ICMA congratulates Elina Gertsman and Joan Holladay for their recent book awards.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award - College Art Association
Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.
Countering the customary interpretation of late medieval art as relentlessly profuse and exuberant, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, explores different constructions of emptiness ranging from the presentation of voids in illustrations to represent the unrepresentable to the deliberate inclusion of physical holes in manuscript pages designed to reveal portions of other pages. Gertsman’s investigation of the “fecundity of emptiness” is a generative and compelling topic for scholars of art history/visual studies across areas, both within and outside Medieval Studies. She argues and demonstrates that, between 1200s and 1500s, the broad circulation of scientific thought and its engagement with theology and formal and literary discourses on emptiness, absence, and negation account for visual, cognitive, and material expressions on the pages of medieval books. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, Gertsman’s book simultaneously draws attention to the visual and material aspects of the manuscripts, phenomenological experience, and philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of the period. In doing so she uncovers an unexpected kinship between the medieval artists and the modernist avant-garde, where the void is regarded as the locus of the sublime and of boundless possibility. Her erudite writing and compelling approach to the subject poses questions throughout that magnify the relevance of her study and stimulate personal inquiry—as a reader reflects on other areas of consideration across time called out in the text. The book is lavishly illustrated and artfully designed with a shape and size complementary to the subject of study.
Committee:
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Christina Hellmich, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota
Lisa D. Schrenk, University of Arizona
Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia (Chair)
2022 Karen Gould Book Prize in Art History - Medieval Academy of America
This is the first book to deal exclusively with medieval genealogical imagery. While paying attention to historical precedents in Roman and Carolingian times, and covering a wide range of examples in multiple media, Joan Holladay does full justice to a distinctive and important visual genre which, from the twelfth century, developed rapidly across medieval Europe. Through diagrams, monumental painted cycles, tomb sculpture and stained glass, the author’s sweeping and authoritative analysis is driven by admirable attention to the structural and formal qualities of the imagery, which throughout the book emerge as a visual genre in their own right. Equally focused on the genre’s ideological dimensions, Holladay persuasively demonstrates, for example, how genealogical imagery was produced to solidify lineal claims -- both real and imagined -- and assist memory in contexts of discontinuity and stress in transition lines. By touching on a great variety of stimulating topics, this fluently written and generously illustrated book offers a unique and seminal contribution to the field, one destined to inspire a broad interdisciplinary audience of medievalists.
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Byzantine-related content for Mapping Eastern Europe
Mapping Eastern Europe is a platform intended to promote study, teaching, and research about Eastern Europe between the 13th and 17th centuries through historical and thematic overviews, case-studies and videos of monuments and objects, ongoing projects, as well as reviews of books and exhibitions.
This year, we are expanding our content with more Byzantine-related entries!
If you are interested in contributing to this project with a case study and/or a historical or thematic overview, please let us know by completing this FORM by February 15, 2022.
Please enter your name, affiliation, and email. In the comments section, specify the topic, title, and entry type (long-form case study, video case study, historical overview, or thematic overview) that you would be interested in submitting. Entries are in the range of 1000-2000 words, and video case studies are ~10min long.
We will make final decisions and will be in touch with each author by March 1, 2022. Authors will then be asked to follow a template, and entries will be thoroughly reviewed and edited prior to publication. Each author will receive a modest honorarium for each contribution. Final submissions will be due May 1, 2022.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Maria Alessia Rossi, PhD | Princeton University
Alice Isabella Sullivan, PhD | Tufts University
ICMA ANNUAL BOOK PRIZE
WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2021 ICMA ANNUAL BOOK PRIZE:
Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture, Boydell Press, 2020.
Click here for the Boydell site
Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in medieval England, double tomb brass memorials and recumbent effigies of couples supplied far more than monuments to deceased lay patrons or matrons. The double tomb, as Jessica Barker compellingly argues in this first holistic volume devoted to the topic, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture, materializes entangled records of fluid social boundaries during an age of social transformation following the Black Death. These funerary monuments complicate biographical readings as the depicted are diachronically to be counted both amongst the living and the dead, supply the mise-en-scène for grief and public funerary practices, and commemorate multiple marital unions or various forms of homosocial and perhaps even homosexual bonds. Rather than pure funerary monuments, double tombs by their very nature became sites of veneration recalling the exploits of deceased royals, extreme dissonance as surviving spouses witnessed their effigies for up to a generation, and an idealized fantasy of affective devotion, as both pre- and postmortem couples clutched to medieval funerary tradition and often one another. This impeccably researched book offers a pristine model of how a kaleidoscopic, holistic reexamination of medieval funerary practice, and in particular the visual culture of the double tomb, can unveil the affections and aspirations of late medieval men and women, resurrect portions of their lost identities, exemplify the legal bonds of medieval matrimony, and empathetically invigorate the changing theological and socio-political ideals to which these funerary monuments allude.
We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Eric Ramirez-Weaver (Chair), Péter Bokody, Till-Holger Borchert, Dorothy Glass, and Julie Harris
Symposium—Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages
28–29 April
Bard Graduate Center
Location: Zoom
Covering, protecting, and adorning the body count among the most fundamental of human concerns, at once conveying aspects of an individual’s persona while also situating a person within a given social context. Wearable adornment encompasses materials fashioned by human hands (like fabric, metalwork, or even animal bones) and modifications to the body itself (such as tattoos, cosmetics, or hairstyles), which beautify the body while simultaneously conveying social, political and protective functions and meanings. The wearable is thus the most representational and at the same time most intimate product of material culture.
This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the wearable in the Middle Ages. Current scholarship on the topic in Byzantine, western medieval, Eurasian art, as well as Islamic traditions tends to encompass clothing and jewelry, and is frequently medium-specific, with minimal regard to the interrelatedness of different aspects of appearance. On the one hand, work on medieval textiles has tended to approach questions of identity, consumption, and appearance by comparing textual sources and visual depictions with surviving textiles. The study of medieval jewelry, on the other hand, largely focuses on the classification and attribution of precious metal pieces from excavations and museum collections, as scholars make sense of pieces long removed from the bodies they once adorned. Tattoos, prosthetics, cosmetics and headgear are almost entirely absent in our understandings of medieval dress practices. This separation was not always so, however, and indeed nineteenth-century art historians such as Gottfried Semper integrated all aspects of bodily adornment in their considerations of the nature of ornamentation and surface decoration.
This conference will reimagine the wearable in similarly holistic terms. Bringing together varied forms and different media to help scholars better understand how the surfaces of medieval bodies not only presented social values and norms, but also operated within a designated spatial environment.
This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants in advance of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions.
Fragment of a Hanging with Nereids, Egypt, 5th-6th c. Tapestry weave, wool and linen. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC, Byzantine Collection, BZ.1932.1.
Wood: Between Natural Affordance and Cultural Values in Eurasia
Mar 31–Apr 2, 2022
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / online
Organised by Aleksandra Lipińska (Professor for Art of the Early Modern Period, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich) and Ilse Sturkenboom (Professor for Islamic Art History, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich)
In ‘The Theory of Affordances’ of 1977, the American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term affordance to denote that which environment offers an animal [or a human for that matter] for good or ill. This concept resonated broadly within humanities and, more recently, especially within material culture studies. Wood can be understood as a natural affordance that is one of the most universally available materials in a vast area of the world. Wood comes with its natural and physical characteristics that determine its workability. The use of various kinds of wood is, however, not only determined by the availability and applicability of the material itself but also by cultural values and specific requirements within a society.
This conference aims at bringing together scholars from diverse fields within humanities and science to discuss similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities in the notions surrounding wood in various cultural contexts within Eurasia until the “material revolution” that followed after 1900. We would like to address the question of the relationships or tensions between the naturally determined affordances of timber and their cultural coding.
Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art
28 – 30 Mar 2022
British School at Rome
The British Archaeological Association will hold the seventh in its biennial International Romanesque conference series in conjunction with the British School at Rome on 28-30 March, 2022. The theme is Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art, and the aim is to examine the use of imagery in the Latin Church between c.1000 and c.1200. The Conference will take place at the British School, with the opportunity to stay on for two days of visits to Romanesque monuments on 31 March and 1 April.
While illustrated codices, sequential pictorial narratives, apse mosaics, and devotional statues were well established before c.1000, several important new image types and settings came into being over the Romanesque period – figuratively enriched portals, historiated cloisters, moralizing programmes, imagery in glass. The conference will consider imagery in its various manifestations, exploring narrative modes, the significance of spatial positioning and visibility, the uses and physical trappings of devotional images, the relationship between political or reformist agendas and the rhetorical power of imagery, and the extent to which media play a role in the development or importation of new iconographical formulae. Are images invested with singular meanings, or are they intentionally polysemous? Does the interest in architectural ‘articulation’ initiate a new understanding of the expressive and aesthetic potential of imagery, and/or emphasise its didactic purpose? Are viewers provided with guidance as to interpretation – through inscriptions, or compositional and visual triggers? How does material and setting affect imagery? How might we understand image and narrative in the Latin West between c.1000 and c.1200?
Speakers include Kristen Aavitsland, Marcello Angheben, Claude Andrault-Schmitt, Giulia Arcidiacono, Yael Barash, Tancredi Bella, Jessica Berenbeim, Armin Bergmeier, Irene Caracciolo, Manuel Castiñeiras, Gaetano Curzi, Barbara Franzé, Deborah Kahn, Wilfried Keil, Robert Maxwell, John McNeill, Mina Miyamoto, Alison Perchuk, Claudia Quattrocchi, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Serena Romano, Carles Sanchez, Béla Zsolt Szakács, Rose Walker, and Andrea Worm.
The 2022 conference will be held in the British School at Rome from 28-30 March, 2022 on the theme Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art. Given continuing restrictions on numbers in Italian lecture theatres, however, numbers are restricted and we will operate a waiting list in the hope that the cap on numbers – currently 60 – will rise to 90.
41st Annual Conference of Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies "Cultures of Exchange: Mercantile Mentalities Between Italy and the World"
March 26-27, 2022
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus, 113 W. 60th St., New York, NY 10023, United States
Recent scholarship has shed light on the complexity of medieval Italy’s multifaceted political and intellectual landscape and attempted to place it within a Mediterranean and global context. At the heart of this landscape was an innovative, linguistically and culturally diverse mercantile culture, fundamentally urban and rooted in a culture of exchange, which integrated merchants and mercantile mentalities into the fabric of government, politics, and society. Positioned at the crossroads of many cultures of exchange, Italy’s mercantile culture was embedded within and contributed to broader, global networks. This conference aims to investigate the practices and values pioneered by merchants, both in Italy and beyond, their impact on political and economic life, as well as on the development of the arts and society’s response to catastrophic upheaval.
“The Egyptian Red Monastery Church in Early Byzantium: The Agency of Visual Culture”
Elizabeth Bolman
25th January 2022
7:15 pm CET
Spätantike Archäologie und Byzantinische Kunstgeschichte e. V.
© Elizabeth Bolman
The Ziyareti of Kykkos: The Kykkotissa Meets the Ottomans
Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University (emerita)
Respondent: Robert S. Nelson, Yale University
Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here
You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.
Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.
Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.
Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery
Staging Late Antiquity: An 11th Century Revolution in Ethiopian Architecture
Mikael Muehlbauer, American Council of Learned Societies
Respondent: Jacopo Gnisci, University College London
Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here
You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.
Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.
Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.
Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery
“Towards a Higher Vision” and “Inside the Depth of Words”: The Aesthetics of Layering in Byzantine Art and Literature
Panagiotis Agapitos, University of Cyprus
Respondent: Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Princeton University
Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here
You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.
Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.
Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.
Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery
Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies
March 24–26TH, 2022
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland Ohio
Beyond Transfer and Revival: Narrative Creativity in Medieval Italian Mural Decoration (11th–13th c.)
3 March; 9:30–10:30am CST, Zoom
The 110th College Art Association Annual Conference
More information and registration: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0
Organizer and Chair: Armin Bergmeier, University of Leipzig
Organizer and Discussant: Alison Locke Perchuk, California State University: Channel Islands
The period 1000–1250 saw vibrant artistic and intellectual creativity in medieval Italian wall paintings and mosaics. Large-format narrative sequences were deployed in new ways to elevate viewers spiritually, perform exegesis, shape communal identity, teach history and theology, and display power. Authors and artists offered sophisticated theorizations of the aesthetic, affective, and communicative capacities of images. While some sequences drew on existing models, notably the paintings and mosaics that accrued to Old St. Peter’s, many more were ad hoc creations, mixing old and new motifs, styles, and artistic strategies to generate distinctive compositions intended for specific spaces, sites, and purposes. The historical and conceptual weight of Rome (then as now) and the natural coherence of pictorial recensions versus the heterogeneity of unaffiliated narrative sequences has resulted in a historiographical privileging of passive transfers and revivals over discrete acts of artistic and patronal creative agency. This panel seeks to reset that balance.
Narrative creativity played out in the development of new iconographies, narrative structures, and framing systems, and in the reimagining and repurposing of old ones. New pictorial strategies were generated for new architectural forms and spatio-liturgical arrangements; Byzantine decorative practices were integrated with Latin architecture and vice versa. Collective analyses generally cluster by iconography, region, or artisans; we seek instead to bring together papers underscoring how creativity manifested itself in discrete monuments, whether well-known, like Santa Maria in Cosmedin or Sant’Angelo in Formis, or deserving of greater fame, like San Tommaso ad Acquanegra sul Chiese or San Calocero in Civate.
After the Book of Kells: Insular Art in Scotland and Ireland, c. 900 to 1900
Online, three half-days (Sat Feb 6th, Sat Mar 6th, Sat Apr 24th )
Examinations of Insular art typically focus upon the eighth and early ninth centuries; and yet, the Insular artistic tradition in Scotland and Ireland continued to flourish and develop into the early modern era. The reliquaries, monuments, and manuscripts made in the earlier period had long lives, with additions and transformations occurring across many generations and even into the twenty-first century. This material is less familiar to the general public, possibly due to antiquarian perception of it as a waning and degenerate manifestation of the art of the earlier period. As are composite objects, an assemblage of parts and repairs that span centuries, they have challenged traditional ways of categorizing, conserving and valuing artworks and monuments.
This conference shifts the emphasis to the later phases of Insular art, exploring the continuity and transformations of shared traditions evident from the medieval to modern day.
Organizers: Heather Pulliam, University of Edinburgh and Rachel Moss, Trinity College Dublin.
Shrine of The Gospels of Saint Molaise early 20th century (original dated 1001–25), Metropolitan Museum of Art
8th Annual Ards Conference "Alabaster as Material for Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture"
Musée Du Louvre, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
18–20 January 2022
9:00–17:00 CET
The 8th ARDS annual colloquium focuses on alabaster as a material for European sculpture from the 14th until the 17th century.
Much research has been carried out on this subject over the past few decades in several European countries, both in universities and in laboratories, and in particular on the occasion of restorations carried out in museums and historic monuments. New analysis methods have improved our knowledge of the origin of alabaster and the quarries exploited during this period, supply and trade circuits - often long distance - have been brought to light, restorations have enabled to specify the implementation of the material. The results have been the subject of seminars, study days and major publications.
In order to present the general public with a summary of the current state of our knowledge, M Leuven and the Musée du Louvre jointly organize an international exhibition on this theme in the fall of 2022. This exhibition will show how and why alabaster was used for sculpture in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque period. This exhibition will bring together high-quality sculptures, small-format objects with monumental achievements, from the Louvre and M’s collections, as well as from numerous public and private collections.
This Paris colloquium brings together specialists in this material, whether they are geologists, restorers, historians or art historians. The scientific committee of the conference invited researchers to submit papers via a call for papers and has selected 15 papers, which resulted in a highly qualitative and varied programme.
© Franck Paubel Centre des monuments nationaux
MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR ICMA EVENTS “AT” CAA ONLINE
The College Art Association conference will be held online this year.
We encourage you to register for the conference and to tune in to the Special Session, sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (details in the CAA program here):
Friday, February 18, 2022
9:00-10:30am PT
11:00am-12:30pm CT
12:00-1:30pm ET
17:00-18:30 GMT
18:00-19:30 CET
Chair: Hannah Maryan Thomson (UCLA)
Papers:
Opening Remarks: Legacy and Afterlife of the Middle Ages
Hannah Maryan Thomson
A Harlem Middle Ages
Lindsay S. Cook (Ball State University)
Medieval Stage, Modern Circus: The Medievalism(s) of Bread and Puppet Theater
Michelle Oing (Stanford University)
Digital Reconstruction and the Legacy of Early Gothic
Tori Jean Schmitt (UCLA)
The CAA Conference provides an opportunity for ICMA members to get together for our Annual Meeting. This gathering usually is a jolly event, where members have a chance to mingle and where we announce the winner of the ICMA Book Prize as well as the results of our elections for the ICMA Board of Directors, our council of Associates, the Nominating Committee, and other officers.
In 2022, CAA will be virtual, so we will hold our Annual Meeting online as well. But we promise to make it fun and informative!
Please join us for the ICMA Annual Meeting on Friday, February 18, 2022. Register HERE
11:00am-12:00pm PT
1:00-2:00pm CT
2:00-3:00pm ET
19:00-20:00 GMT
20:00-21:00 CET
At our virtual Annual Meeting, Nina Rowe, President of the ICMA, will share this year’s election results and other announcements. Then she will hand the screen over to colleagues who will offer updates on projects supported by the ICMA:
Jennifer Feltman, winner of a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Seed Grant (nominated by the ICMA), will share her project, The VR Cathedral, a virtual reality experience designed for middle school students.
Heather Badamo and Elizabeth Williams will discuss the work and goals of the ICMA’s Task Force – Detours and Diversions in “Medieval” Art History.
Sherry Lindquist will present on the ventures of the ICMA’s New Initiatives Working Group (NIWG).
We hope that you will tune in for this Zoom event! We will leave the “chat” open so that those on the call can connect with colleagues through text, and attendees will be invited to share announcements or just say hello to the virtual audience.
We are sorry we cannot meet IRL this year. But we are crossing our fingers with the hope of hosting in-person ICMA gatherings soon.
Best wishes,
Nina Rowe, President of the ICMA
Ryan Frisinger, Executive Director of the ICMA (icma@medievalart.org)
Sonja Drimmer at the Bard Graduate Center: https://www.bgc.bard.edu/events/1310/09-feb-2022-the-kings
February 9 at 12:15 pm eastern time
A persistent myth in the history of the book in the west is that the roll gave way to the codex. This idea is often encountered in the prepositional formula, “from roll to codex,” as ubiquitous as the phrase “from manuscript to print.” Over the last two decades, an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to the abundant variety of scrolls and rolls in medieval Europe has offered welcome pushback to this supersessionist model of book history. Yet, the roll and the codex were not the only formats available for the book arts of the Middle Ages. Focusing on a recent acquisition made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a manuscript genealogy of King Edward IV that is both roll and codex—this talk will examine the political significance of codicological diversity during the Wars of the Roses. Nearly one hundred genealogical rolls survive from fifteenth-century England, across which scribes and illuminators fashioned remarkably experimental approaches to the narration of genealogical history, approaches that defy our own genealogical narrative of the history of the book. Public doubts about the monarch’s legitimacy, pragmatic considerations about the physical presentation of history, and the robust scribal infrastructure required to proliferate genealogies combined to drive this experimentation, which rests largely on the different affordances of each medium produced.
This talk is part of a larger project that examines a variety of reproducible media that preceded movable type as political discourse in visual and material form in late medieval England. None of the objects considered in this project—from livery badges and coins to heraldry, genealogical rolls and, horribly, the bodies of the decapitated and the lists that bear their names—were new media. Yet in the quantity, manner, and contexts of their production, distribution, and display, they threatened the foundations of the social and economic affiliations they forged. What does it mean when the most potent media for political discourse are themselves the instruments of doubt and suspicion? And why is it important to recognize the role of pre-print reproduction in this history?
Sonja Drimmer is associate professor of Medieval Art in the department of the history of art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), which was awarded High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art. Recently, she edited a special issue of Digital Philology (2020), “Manual Impressions: Visualizing Print in Manuscript, Europe c.1450-1850.” Her articles have appeared in Gesta, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Viator, Exemplaria and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second book, Political Visuality: Reproduction, Representation, and the Wars of the Roses.
This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 10 am on the day of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions.
Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England, British, 1466–67 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)