THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF MEDIEVAL ART IN THE BRITISH ISLES

Wednesday 3 April 2024

Where are we with writing the history of British medieval art? The arts of medieval Britain once had a peripheral place in broader histories of medieval art where they were frequently understood as passive receptors of Continental influence. Much scholarship has challenged this view and reframed British art as a vital component of European and even global Medieval art. But “British art” was never monolithic: it was created by diverse linguistic, religious, and artistic cultures (Welsh, Norman, etc). These diverse cultures and their art production were shaped and reshaped by colonial encounter from the mission of Augustine and the Viking incursions through the Norman and Edwardian conquests, and yet they retained their cultural, linguistic and artistic complexity. “British art” was also inherently international: the importation of relics and ars sacra during the crusades, the export of luxury goods such as opus anglicanum and alabaster, and the odysseys of artists from Rome to Westminster or architects from Bristol to Prague, meant that British art was framed by global networks of exchange.Recent discoveries such as the Staffordshire Hoard, the Macclesfield Psalter, and the wall paintings of St Cadoc’s, Llancarfan, and the publication of significant studies of Anglo-Saxon through Gothic art in Britain have profoundly changed the scholarly landscape and demand that we reassess some of our key ideas and approaches.

This session will present research that explores British art from a range of perspectives (including historiographical), although each will reflect critically on the place of British art within medievalist art history in general.

Session Convenors:
Amanda Luyster, College of the Holy Cross

Matthew M Reeve, Queen’s University

Speakers:
Heather Pulliam, University of Edinburgh: British art c. 600-1066: the state of the field

Meg Boulton, University of York

What lies beneath: reassessing how recently unearthed finds expand the material mesh of the early medieval world

Matthew M Reeve, Queen’s University: The British invasion(s)? Colonisation, climate change, and the contours of Romanesque and Gothic Art 1066-1350

Amanda Luyster, College of the Holy Cross: Seeing ghosts: Islamic and Byzantine textiles and their traces in Gothic England

Julian Luxford, St Andrews University: Addressing British Art after the Black Death: Problems and Possibilities

Eleanor Townsend, University of Oxford: When is an altarpiece not an altarpiece? The Jesse reredos at St Cuthbert’s, Wells