Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages
Edited by Pamela A. Patton
“Each study in Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages productively challenges readers to reassess disciplinary assumptions. No comparable study engages so diverse a range of material through such a lens.”
- Description
- Reviews
- Bio
- Table of Contents
- Sample Chapters
- Subjects
The contributors each began with a single question: In the eyes of their makers and viewers, how were medieval images understood to assert or to resist forces of power? Their case studies come from a wide range of cultural, geographic, and historical contexts: the Byzantine, Ottonian, and Valois courts; the Umayyad and Castilian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula; the pluralistic military and commercial zones of the eastern Mediterranean; and the metaphorical as well as personal battlegrounds linked to medieval “courtly love” culture. Over eight chapters, the authors highlight patterns of visual rhetoric still evident in art today. They invite readers to contemplate how modern priorities and sensibilities might amplify, mute, or transform the discourses related to power and resistance that were threaded through the visual culture of the Middle Ages.
This insightful book should be of value to anyone interested in medieval art history and art’s relationship to power and authority in society.
In addition to the editor, the contributors include Heather A. Badamo, Elena N. Boeck, Thomas E. A. Dale, Martha Easton, Eliza Garrison, Anne D. Hedeman, Tom Nickson, and Avinoam Shalem.
“Each study in Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages productively challenges readers to reassess disciplinary assumptions. No comparable study engages so diverse a range of material through such a lens.”
“The relationship of art to power was no less complex in the Middle Ages than it is today, as we witness the toppling of monuments testifying to histories of racial conflict. This volume reinvigorates our conversations about works of art and the contingencies of power across the medieval world through a range of provocative chapters tracing how medieval artworks come to serve as sites of resistance over time.”
“The diverse cultures that contributed to medieval art are wonderfully engaged here by scholars who focus in compelling ways on a broad range of materials from throughout the Mediterranean. The object- and monument-centered case studies at the core of this volume are both brilliant and interesting, and have significant implications for the complex factors at play in the creation of works of medieval art, dislodging preconceptions about the insularity of medieval art.”
Pamela A. Patton is Director of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the author or editor of several books, including Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America and Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain, the latter also published by Penn State University Press.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Pamela A. Patton
1. Stones of Pretension and Acts of Resistance: The Triumphal Column of Justin II
Elena N. Boeck
2. Ottonian Resistances
Eliza Garrison
3. Visualizing Muslims and/as Black Africans in Medieval Venice
Thomas E. A. Dale
4. Saint George, Translation, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean
Heather A. Badamo
5. The “Holy Blood” of ʿUthmān ibn Affān in the Great Mosque of Córdoba: On Manābir, Relics, and Sunni Struggles
Avinoam Shalem
6. The Names of God: Art, Power, and Ritual in Medieval Córdoba
Tom Nickson
7. Power and Authority in Visual Paratext: The Case of the Grandes chroniques de France
Anne D. Hedeman
8. Roses and Resistance: The Iconography of Courtly Love in the #MeToo Moment
Martha Easton
Contributors
Index
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