When the Index of Medieval Art hosted its 2019 conference, which inspired this volume Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages, the organizers and speakers tapped into a topic that has only become more relevant and significant in the years following. Already then, we were entering what has been widely characterized as a post-truth era, to which Pamela Patton alludes in her introduction when she mentions the perpetuation of fakes, and in which the visual culture of social media had become a driving political force. With the book’s publication in 2025, we look ahead to a landscape increasingly shaped by advancements in artificial intelligence and the proliferation of deepfakes, developments poised to profoundly alter the way we gather information from images and which raise new questions about their interconnection with the perpetuation of power--and resistance. Like many readers, each morning as I scan the news, I wonder how I might relate the medieval world of my classroom to contemporary events and discourses, and vice versa. The essays in this volume offer compelling arguments on art and power that, both explicitly and implicitly, engage with issues of contemporary concern: from the rallying cry of #MeToo drawing attention to violent sexual imagery in late medieval ivories, as considered by Martha Easton; to Elena Boeck’s method of “testing” the credibility of one source through comparison to others, a process increasingly necessary in a world saturated with convincing disinformation; to Anne Hedeman’s reflection on the power of rubrics and images to purposefully skew perceptions of a central text, which will likely resonate in a generation where Twitter (or X) has framed an understanding of the news as much as the long-format story.
Two central and intersecting threads of the book are the way in which individuals and institutions manipulate images to perpetuate power, and, conversely, how the visual language(s) of power can be coopted for resistance. Thomas Dale and Tom Nickson both investigate sites of considerable cultural hybridity and interconnection, Venice and Córdoba. In one instance, difference is exaggerated and caricaturized as a form of racial and religious othering to elevate Christian Venice, and in another, a variety of artistic and verbal languages are subsumed into the visual program of the Cordoban mosque-turned-church to demonstrate the soft power of the cathedral chapter. Within two regions often marginalized as peripheries, Georgia and Coptic Egypt, Heather Badamo interrogates the inverse: instances of resistance that appropriate and transform dominant visual languages of power.
Another meaningful thread of the book is the ability of scholarship itself to be a form of resistance. Eliza Garrison discusses the challenges of entering a field with a fraught historiography, as well as refreshingly recounts her experiences with scholarly gatekeeping and her path forward. Avinoam Shalem begins his chapter with a relatable anecdote of googling his subject, “minbar,” and receiving incomplete results. The simplified answers returned by the search engine contrast with the multiplicity of historical uses and meanings that he excavates. I regularly do a similar exercise in my own classes as a means to demonstrate how contemporary values can skew our perception of medieval culture. Along with many of their fellow contributors, Garrison and Shalem resist inherited narratives and demonstrate our own power as scholars and students of art history to challenge and rewrite them.
In chapter one, “Stones of Pretension and Acts of Resistance: The Triumphal Column of Justin II,” Elena Boeck explores the unfinished and soon dismantled column of sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justin II. Her work resists the unsatisfactory premise that we must trust the sole source on the column’s existence, John of Ephesos, parse his account for facts, or reject it outright, leaving us unable to study the column. In a method that will become increasingly important within a world saturated with synthetic media, Boeck “tests” John’s account by comparing his claims to other surviving evidence, in this case coins. Her work thus nuances understandings of Justin II’s reign, and the column within it, arguing that despite his later reputation, Justin oversaw a largely successful early period and introduced a program aimed at restoring Roman tradition. This trajectory shifted under his successor Tiberios II, who redefined imperial power as divinely sanctioned by Christ, a transformation which contextualizes the commemorative column’s early demise and the reuse of its stones in a church construction project.
Eliza Garrison continues the thread of resisting inherited narratives, in this case those that have shaped the subfield of Ottonian art history. In chapter two “Ottonian Resistances,” Garrison explores multiple layers of authority and resistance: the resistance inherent in working in a field shaped by a problematic history and the (precarious) power communicated through the eleventh-century portraits of Henry II. She vividly recounts the twentieth-century appropriation of Ottonian art as a visual pillar of National Socialism, casting the Ottonians as a so-called First Reich. In response, the latter half of the twentieth century saw art historians either study Ottonian art with documentary detachment, or avoid it completely. These historiographical and political tensions converge in her study of Henry’s portraits and their visual strategies: dazzling in their pictorial richness, they simultaneously obscure the uncertain foundations of his imperial claim. While Garrison’s chapter looks backward to examine the history of the field, her methodology looks forward: its implications resonate in the context of social media’s ability to dazzle and conceal, shaping public perception and thus political authority.
Thomas Dale also deals with a constructed imagery of power that does not entirely align with historical reality. In chapter three “Visualizing Muslims and/as Black Africans in Medieval Venice,” Dale discusses the use of racialized strategies for projecting Venice’s Christian preeminence, despite the polity’s dependence on its trade relationships with Muslim powers and its cultural hybridity. On the Porta da Mar of the basilica of San Marco--facing a principal maritime entrance and one of the city’s main markets--appear several racialized types from an “assimilable” light-skinned Muslim who converts after being miraculously healed by St. Mark, to figures depicted using the visual trope of the “Ethiopian” being brutally devoured by beasts. As argued by Dale, the Porta da Mar, with its imagery of St. Mark, articulated Venice’s place within the Mediterranean world, constructing a narrative of superiority grounded in racialized othering.
The theme of saints as tools for the harnessing of power continues in the fourth chapter. In “Saint George, Translation, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean,” Heather Badamo considers together two instances of imagery of St. George from areas traditionally referred to as peripheries of the Byzantine Empire. Through case studies from Georgia and Coptic Egypt, Badamo reveals how these communities harnessed a shared imperial visual language as well as transformed it to assert distinct localized identities and ambitions. In an icon today held in Mt. Sinai, St. George intercedes for Georgian King Davit IV, who, dressed in Byzantine imperial regalia, is positioned as the successor to the struggling Byzantine state. In Egypt, a painting at the Monastery of Saint Anthony portrays George, depicted with Byzantine and Islamic attributes, among other equestrian saints to assert Coptic monastic authority within Ayyubid-ruled Egypt. Like Garrison, Badamo draws attention to the problematic legacies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in this case, she challenges the persistent exclusion of histories belonging to cultures that did not become modern global powers, despite attempts to globalize medieval art history.
Also questioning scholarly assumptions, Avinoam Shalem takes a much-needed deep dive into the minbar form (plural manābir) through the example of the Great Mosque of Córdoba’s lost minbar. In chapter five, “The “Holy Blood” of ʿUthmān ibn Affān in the Great Mosque of Córdoba: On Manābir, Relics, and Sunni Struggles,” Shalem both expands the often restrictive and anachronistic understanding of manābir today and situates Umayyad caliph al-Hakam II’s tenth-century addition to the Great Mosque--which included a minbar and the bloodied folios of the third caliph ʿUthmān ibn Affān--within contemporary religio-political currents. First, while generally seen as a pulpit for the khutbah, or sermon, the minbar held a wider nexus of meanings and functions, including as a place for blessing and symbol of political authority and, in the case of the Prophet’s minbar, even specifically Sunni authority. As demonstrated by Shalem, the latter meaning was central to Córdoba’s minbar within Umayyad caliph al-Hakam II’s tenth-century expansion of the Great Mosque, in which the maqsura, with the minbar and relics within it, formed a stage for asserting Umayyad authority in the face of growing Fatimid Shiite power.
In the next chapter we remain in Córdoba, but travel forward to the fourteenth century, where again the Great Mosque, now a cathedral, serves as a site for the performance of power. In “The Names of God: Art, Power, and Ritual in Medieval Córdoba,” Tom Nickson discusses the spectacular bronze doors of the Pardon Portal. As illuminated by Nickson, the portal speaks in three ways through its inscriptions--a vernacular encomium for the Castilian king Enrique II, a Latin prayer, and a repeated Arabic invocation that sovereignty belongs to God alone--as well as through its decoration, materials, and sheer scale (the bronze doors are the largest to survive anywhere in medieval Europe and Mediterranean). However, while the inscriptions are multilingual, the Arabic is not intended for the modest Muslim community remaining in Córdoba or as an act of resistance by the artists, but rather reinforces the power of the cathedral chapter.
In chapter seven, “Power and Authority in Visual Paratext: The Case of the Grandes chroniques de France,” Anne Hedeman critically examines how visual paratextual elements, specifically illuminations and rubrics, operate as tools for performing and legitimizing power. Hedeman’s contribution underscores how history can be subtly rewritten through attention-attracting visuals and headings. Specifically, Hedeman examines French King Charles V’s ca. 1370 Grandes chroniques de France, an illuminated chronicle based largely on an earlier history held in Saint-Denis. New rubrics and images structured the way the text was understood and were likely the elements that drew the most attention. Moreover, in a campaign just a few years later, the paratext was employed to slant a reading of a historical event in favor of the French crown, staking claims appealing to French king Charles V within the fraught climate of the Hundred Years War. Through an example of medieval paratext, Hedeman’s work considers an important issue which should reverberate with today’s students of art history, of how images and headlines can profoundly influence interpretation and reshape history.
In the volume’s final chapter, “Roses and Resistance: The Iconography of Courtly Love in the #MeToo Moment,” Martha Easton explicitly connects past and present power dynamics through applying frameworks of sexual consent to ivories decorated with imagery of so-called courtly love. While motifs such as the siege of the Castle of Love, in which battles between the sexes are fought with flowers, and the capture of the unicorn who rests its head in a maiden’s lap are often cast as playful and charming, the images are tinged with violence. When read in concert with popular stories like the pastourelle and fabliaux, in which rape is a recurring theme and women are frequently cast as foolish, the ivories can be seen as upholding rape culture, or at the very least, as perpetuating the values of a patriarchal society. Nonetheless, Easton’s argument leaves room for resistance: both through the critical lens that can be brought to these objects today, informed by growing cultural awareness of sexual violence and the ethics of consent foregrounded by #MeToo, as well as the resistance of medieval women like Christine de Pisan, whose castle, the City of Ladies, “will never be taken or conquered.”