The course explores medieval visuality through a topical focus on art produced at “limits and margins,” defined ideologically, physically, and geographically.
The course material centers on four main themes. The first of these addresses images located at the edges and ancillary areas of church spaces and manuscripts, and how the character of these images shifts as one moves toward the “margins.” Topics to be studied include the iconographic programs of thresholds, depictions of the apocalypse, and the irreverence and humor of manuscript marginalia. A second theme introduces students to how medieval viewers imagined their world through maps, and specifically how the edges of society, the “monstrous,” and the unknown came to be depicted and conceptualized.
A third theme deals with art that flourished in locations with significant cross-cultural contact, and how this visual evidence pushes against anachronistic ideas of “borders” or constructs of “center/periphery.” Topics for this section of the class include rock-cut or “cave” churches in Anatolia and Southern Italy, as well as art produced in medieval Ethiopia and under the medieval Serbian Empire. The fourth theme concentrates on medieval imaginings of the “Other,” and includes discussions on crusader views of the Islamic world and the politics of Christian visual representations of Judaism.
As a complement to the four broad themes described above, the course concludes with a final section on “medievalisms.” Considering topics such as Gothic Revival, the Neo-Medieval architecture of Rome, and the use of medievalisms in modern nation-building, this final focus of the course asks how “the Middle Ages” itself has been construed in terms of its “alterity.”