Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations

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  Reassessing Alabaster Sculpture in Medieval England

  Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, Jessica Brantley, and Stephen Parkinson

  This volume offers fresh approaches to both the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. Devotional alabaster images, too often thought of as a narrowly English “folk art,” were avidly collected and appreciated throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. This collection of essays seeks to place the alabasters within a variety of late medieval textual and visual contexts, taking into account questions of materiality, the role of seriality in the changing modes of artistic production of the late Middle Ages, and broad debates about whether it is useful to draw distinctions between "high" and "low" cultures.

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  The Locus of Meaning in Medieval Art: Iconography, Iconology, and Interpreting the Visual Imagery of the Middle Ages

  Lena Eva Liepe

  This book addresses the status and relevance of iconography and iconology in the contemporary scholarly study of medieval art. There is a widespread tendency among art historians today to regard the study of iconography and iconology in the tradition of Erwin Panofsky as an outmoded and trivial pursuit. Nonetheless, Panofsky’s three-level interpretative model sits firmly in the methodological toolkit of art history, and remains a common point of reference among adherents and adversaries alike. Iconography and iconology demands to be taken seriously as a feature of continued praxis in the discipline. The book contains a collection of essays on the validity of various approaches toward the interpretation of meaning in medieval art today. They aim to either demonstrate the continued usefulness of iconography and iconology as analytical strategies, or propose alternative approaches to the investigation of meaning in the art of the Middle Ages.

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  St. Albans and the Markyate Psalter: Seeing and Reading in Twelfth-Century England

  Kristen Collins and Matthew Fisher

  One of the most compelling and provocative books of twelfth-century England, the Markyate Psalter was probably produced at St. Albans Abbey between 1120 and 1140. The manuscript has been known by many names: the St. Albans Psalter, the Albani Psalter, the Hildesheim Psalter, and the Psalter of Christina of Markyate. Heralded as a high point of English Romanesque illumination, the manuscript contains the earliest known copy of the saint's life known as Chanson de St. Alexis. This volume explores the manuscript's many contexts, reading its texts and images amidst the rising internationalism of the period, marked by the circulation of objects, ideas, and peoples. Some of the leading scholars of twelfth-century manuscript studies here explore the Markyate Psalter, understanding it through new methodologies, pursuing innovative lines of inquiry. The collection shines fresh light on a well-known manuscript, and promises to open important lines of discourse about the book and its readers.