Out of Bounds

Where are the limits of medieval art as a field of study? What happens when conventionally trained art historians disregard the chronological, geographical, or cultural parameters that both direct and protect their scholarship? Beginning with Thelma K. Thomas and Alicia Walker’s acute assessment of the need for a “medieval art history for now,” the essays in Out of Bounds ask what happens when the study of medieval art disregards boundaries that it once obeyed. The volume focuses on questions surrounding the production of knowledge and on how scholarly investigation beyond the conventional thematic boundaries of medieval art history is changing, demonstrating how the field can address the ethics of scholarship today by positing a global turn in response to growing demands for socially responsible medieval studies. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate how “going out of bounds” can transform modern understanding of the people, traditions, and relationships that gave rise to medieval works. As such, this book argues for the necessity of reshaping scholarly discourse about the nature and significance of medieval art and generates fresh scholarly interpretations and important new critical tools for teaching and researching the Middle Ages.

The contributors to this volume are Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Michele Bacci, Jill Caskey, Eva Frojmovic, Sarah M. Guérin, Christina Maranci, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Thelma K. Thomas, Michele Tomasi, and Alicia Walker.

“The book makes an eloquent case that ‘exploring the limits of medieval art’ to include global study and diversity benefits from innovative thinking, interdisciplinary study, and collaboration.”—D. H. Cibelli, Choice

“Out of Bounds is a timely and valuable contribution to the growing body of works on global perspectives for the study of art history and on the place of medieval art in this global discourse. It is a welcome addition to the category of anthologies, which are among the most useful resources enabling us to grasp the expanded and reconfigured landscape of the field of medieval art.”—Eva R. Hoffman, Tufts University, Emerita

“Out of Bounds is a compelling body of essays providing access to new concepts on the breadth of the medieval world in time and place and ways to study it in global, non-Eurocentric terms. Patton and Rossi stress the importance of what can be learned from regions and peoples that were once considered the nearly irrelevant periphery and recognize the challenges in seeking such new understandings.”—Helen C. Evans, Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator for Byzantine Art Emerita, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pamela A. Patton is Director of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain and coeditor of The Lives and Afterlives of Medieval Iconography, both published by Penn State University Press.

Maria Alessia Rossi is Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the coeditor of Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages and Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean.

List of Illustrations

Preface

1. Shifting Boundaries: Medieval Art History for Now

Thelma K. Thomas and Alicia Walker

2. On Account of the Rotundity of the Earth: Steps Toward an Inclusive Medieval Art

Jill Caskey

3. Medieval Masks? Meditations on Method Out of Bounds

Sarah M. Guérin

4. Along the Art-Historical Margins of the Medieval Mediterranean

Michele Bacci

5. Looking at the “Center” from the “Border”: An Exchange of Franco-Ottoman Gifts and the Perception of Art Around 1400

Michele Tomasi

6. Alexander the Great’s Encounters with the Sacred in Medieval History Writing: From the Shahnameh to the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César

Suzanne Conklin Akbari

7. Fashioning the Gendered, Classed, and White Self: A Sephardi Cultural Project

Eva Frojmovic

8. Beyond Traditional Boundaries: Medieval Art and Architecture in Eastern Europe

Alice Isabella Sullivan

9. “The Summit of the Earth”: What Armenian Texts Can Do for the History of Medieval Art and Beyond

Christina Maranci

Contributors

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Chapter1

Art History & Architecture

           European

           Medieval

           Art Theory & Criticism

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Medieval Art and Architecture