Medieval Institute Publications
Studies in Iconography
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Edited by:
Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations is a companion series to the long-standing scholarly journal Studies in Iconography, also published by Medieval Institute Publications. Volumes focus on the visual culture of the period before 1600. Submissions are welcomed for monographs or tightly-conceived essay collections that take a cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to their subjects or that examine theories and methods of iconographic analysis and histories of representation from a critical perspective.
Series Editorial Board
- Diliana Angelova, University of California - Berkeley, Series Editor
- Pamela A. Patton, Princeton University, Series Editor
- Adam Cohen, University of Toronto
- Blake de Maria, Santa Clara University
- Martha Easton, St. Joseph’s University
- Maria Evangelatou, University of California, Santa Cruz
- María Judith Feliciano, Independent Scholar and Director, “Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean”
- Beatrice Kitzinger, Princeton University
- Alka Patel, University of California, Irvine
- Debra Higgs Strickland, University of Glasgow
- Thelma Thomas, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Submissions
Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication in this series should be sent to Tyler Cloherty(tylercloherty44@gmail.com), the acquisitions editor for the series, or to the series editors. The series' editorial board is hosted by the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University.
Topics
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 demand 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. These essays 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.
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 “folk art” and narrowly English, were avidly collected and appreciated throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages, and this collection of essays seeks to help integrate them into the current discourse on materiality, the role of seriality in the changing modes of artistic production of the late Middle Ages, and the broad debate about whether it is useful to draw distinctions between elite/high and folk/low culture.
