The past few decades have witnessed a growing body of scholarship that considers how global approaches might reinvigorate the field of medieval art history. These projects have taken the form of conferences, edited volumes, a textbook, and exhibitions that move beyond the western European canon. Much of this scholarship seeks to revise Eurocentric narratives of the past and question the disciplinary formations that sustain them. The present work participates in these trends. It comes from a two-day conference, “Out of Bounds: Exploring the Limits of Medieval Art,” hosted by the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University on 17 November 2018. Its publication was delayed by the pandemic, meaning that both the conference and resultant contributions were conceptualized prior to a number of major world events: the COVID-19 shutdowns, George Floyd protests, January 6th insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israeli-Gaza war, and re-election of Trump. While the absence of this framing is notable, the volume has much to offer. It comprises nine chapters of consistently high quality, beautifully illustrated and produced. What sets this collection apart from other volumes on premodern globalism is its explicit focus on methodology, coupled with a refreshing candor about the challenges of expanding the field.
In chapter 1, Thelma Thomas and Alicia Walker provide an introduction to the volume. Rather than relitigating the value of global approaches, the authors begin from the premise that global art histories are here to say. Thomas and Walker employ David Armitage’s essay, “In Defense of Presentism,” to consider how constructions of the Middle Ages have been bound up in nationalist projects, feeding contemporary misuses of the past by religious fundamentalist organizations. [1] Global approaches, they argue, offer a way for medievalists to counter narratives of cultural and religious purity with ones of complexity, interactions, and intermingling. They also suggest, somewhat optimistically, that a commitment to the medieval globe “levels the playing field” by undertaking a remapping in which “power and authority are redistributed, both in the Middle Ages and in the academic fields that study it today” (5). Finally, the authors deftly draw out themes explored by the authors, including the need to adopt multiple temporalities and impose geographic limits on the field of inquiry; the challenges of working across multiple languages; and the value of investigating interactions between centers and margins. In conclusion, Thomas and Walker point to the need to move beyond a stance of total expertise to one of humility and collaboration.
The next two chapters explore the possibilities and limitations of moving beyond one’s disciplinary focus and training. In chapter 2, Jill Caskey draws on her experience as co-author of a textbook on medieval art, which is now available from Cornell University Press: Jill Caskey, Adam S. Cohen, and Linda Safran, Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World (2022). She juxtaposes two types of interactions considered in the course of writing the textbook: the dense record of exchange fostered by Sogdians along the silk roads and a one-time encounter between Norse traders and the Tinuitt (Indigenous North Americans). The abundance of primary sources and studies on the Sogdians, she shows, enables a non-specialist to produce a detailed account of how painters transformed circulating visual forms to create their own wall painting programs. Efforts to investigate a Tinuitt mask thought to depict a Norseman, in contrast, raise more questions than answers. First and foremost, the mask poses ethical questions about who has the right to interpret material long subject to colonial regimes of knowledge. It also raises methodological ones about the use of contemporary ethnography to interpret artifacts from the past, which is common in places where oral, rather than written, modes of knowledge transmission held sway. Ultimately, Caskey, Cohen, and Safran included the Sogdians in the textbook but not the Tinuitt mask, deeming it out of bounds for scholars trained to work on European materials. The chapter provides both an intriguing glimpse into the decision-making processes behind the textbook and also a nuanced consideration of how to conduct cross-cultural studies with care.
Chapter 3, by Sara Guérin, grapples with similar challenges, focusing on an Ife mask from West Africa. Not unlike the Tinuitt mask, the Ife mask comes from a culture that prioritized oral over written traditions—albeit one in contact with Arab travelers. Guérin considers the ways in which non-specialists might employ a creative combination of sources to shed light on the mask, produced in a kingdom that favored oral transmission but observed by Arab travelers. As she explains, art historians and anthropologists have typically employed ethnography—a tool developed to study contemporary communities—to interpret artifacts produced by cultures with no written records. In the case of Africa, such approaches can inadvertently reinforce racist myths of the continent as a place without history, relegated to an earlier phase of civilizational development. Guérin brings together visual analysis, primary sources written in Arabic, and contemporary ethnographic studies to show how investigations of the present can “shed light obliquely” on artworks of the past. Like Caskey, Guérin continuously draws attention to how her disciplinary training both facilitates and hinders cross-cultural investigations. She also takes her cue from her work on the award-winning Caravans of Gold exhibition catalog, where contributors were asked to incorporate reflections on historiography and methodology. [2]
In chapter 4, Michele Bacci turns to the proliferation of terms scholars have adopted to describe and interpret visual manifestations of exchange. Ranging from “hybridity” to “mélange,” these terms designate artworks that appear composite to modern eyes. Focusing on the Mediterranean, he identifies seven types of dynamics that governed cross-cultural interactions. Each of them leads to the creation of artworks that challenge traditional understandings of style, which assume the alignment of artistic production with geographic, religious, and ethnic boundaries. Through a case study of panel paintings that depict the nursing Virgin, which circulated across the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, he shows how these dynamics interacted. Bacci places the varied images into rhizomatic visual networks, identifying instances of both incidental and self-conscious adaptations of foreign styles. The essay foregrounds how art-historical methods can contribute to theories of globalism developed in over disciplines.
The next two chapters explore exchanges between western Europe and the Islamic world. In chapter 5, Michele Tomasi asks how the expansion of the field prompts art historians to reconsider artworks within the traditional canon. To do so, he focuses on the negotiation of differences and similarities through French-Ottoman diplomatic encounters. Comparing accounts of an embassy that King Charles VI of France (1380-1422) sent to the Turkish sultan Bayezid (1389-1403), Tomasi argues that textiles evoked a sense of shared identity among French and Ottoman courtiers as consumers of exotic sumptuous arts. A tapestry depicting scenes from the life of Alexander the Great suggests knowledge of Ottoman claims to descend from the ancient world conqueror--along with an awareness that this French artistic medium was coveted in the Ottoman sphere. The social groups and objects moving across diplomatic spaces, he concludes, are more clearly understood through their interactions with the Other.
Alexander the Great is also central to chapter 6, in which Suzanne Conklin Akbari undertakes an experiment in comparative and cross-cultural analysis from the perspective of a historian. Her contribution compares French and Persian accounts of Alexander’s encounter with sacred places, which captured the imagination of illuminators in Shiraz and Acre. Akbari probes depictions of Alexander at the Ka’aba and Alexander at the gates of Jerusalem to consider the possibility of inter-visual echoes, ending with a consideration of how medieval maps register culturally-specific notions of centers and margins. In her conclusion, Akbari observes the significant challenges of working across traditions when scholars cannot achieve the same depth of scholarly knowledge. She urges scholars to adopt creative approaches to meet the challenges posed by medieval contact zones.
The final three chapters focus on specific locales, demonstrating how deep knowledge of a particular place can bring marginalized traditions into focus. In chapter 7, Eva Frojmovic turns to medieval Aragon, brilliantly mobilizing Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of autoethnography to explore depictions of Sephardic Jews in Hebrew manuscripts, focusing on the Sarajevo Haggadah. [3] She begins by showing how Jewish painters employed depictions of the seder meal to envisions themselves as members of a fashionable, elite, and, above all, white society. She deftly demonstrates how these self-representations emerged through dialogue with Christian depictions of host-desecration, appropriating their pictorial conventions to counter defamatory images of Spanish Jews. While rejecting Spanish Christian views of an ideal world order, representations of the seder meal in the Sarajevo Haggadah employed dominant conventions of depicting skin color to set Jews above Muslims, speaking to the contingent nature of racial constructions in medieval Spain. Her contribution draws attention to value of considering intersectionality in medieval art.
In chapter 8, Alice Sullivan demonstrates how the Kingdom of Moldavia challenges traditional geographic and temporal definitions of the Middle Ages. After an illuminating discussion of why eastern Europe has been marginalized in medieval studies, Sullivan considers how the arts and architecture of Moldavia selectively appropriated aspects of western European, Slavic, Byzantine, and Ottoman visual languages to create a distinctly Moldavian mode of architectural design, metalwork, and illumination. Like other scholars working in eastern Europe, Sullivan recuperates the term “eclecticism” to describe and analyze this aesthetic. Doing so enables her to position Moldavia as a parallel to better-known contact zones, such as Venice, underscoring the need for scholars working across the globe to move beyond nationalist frameworks for investigating the Middle Ages.
In the final contribution, Christina Maranci argues that art historians interested in expanding the field should not dismiss the value of primary sources, which often reveal how different actors envision their place in the world. Drawing on her experience of working on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2018 exhibition Armenia! (as well as a long-standing commitment to Armenian art history), Maranci considers how four different artworks “world” themselves, that is, how they construct the place of Armenia in relation to surrounding cultures and the larger world. Spanning the seventh through eighteenth centuries, these monuments and objects show how patrons, artists, and users collectively or individually created a sense of place through establishing relationships to outside cultures. In her analysis, the art and architecture she studies emerge as the products of ever-shifting interregional and global encounters. Read together, Sullivan and Maranci’s chapters speak to the ways in which kingdoms tend to construct themselves as centers. They make a powerful argument for a medieval art history in which we investigate a plurality of centers, rather than a singular region (western Europe) or empire (Byzantium).
Overall, the volume offers a valuable contribution to investigations of the medieval globe, which will appeal to a wide range of scholars, including (but not limited to), historians, art historians, and historians of literature. The attention to methodology should ensure the place of these essays on syllabi for advanced undergraduate classes and graduate seminars. They endorse a variety of approaches (mondialisation, worlding, etc.) and provide intriguing insights into the intellectual labor and decision-making processes behind recent exhibitions and textbooks. As such, individual and paired essays might find their way into courses on globalism, efforts to decolonize medieval studies, and more tailored topics, such as medieval Spain.
Still, the volume will be of interest as much for what it does as what it does not. As Thomas and Walker note in their introduction, the majority of contributors have primary areas of expertise in western Europe. Scholars who specialize in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are not given a say in where to draw the boundaries of the field, nor are they asked how engagements with different historiographies and disciplinary methods might shape broader pedagogic practices. The volume is also notable for repeating common calls to collaboration, without acknowledging the often imbalanced and extractive nature of such partnerships. Indeed, the fact that scholars continue to advocate for collaboration in volumes filled with single-authored works speaks to the significant institutional and practical barriers to fostering true collaborative and interdisciplinary work--which are only sure to intensify in the coming years. As Suzanne Conklin Akbari notes, scholars who seek to re-imagine the discipline will have to get creative.
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Notes:
1. David Armitage, “In Defense of Presentism,” in History and Human Flourishing, edited by Darrin M. McMahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 44-69.
2. Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
3. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transcultural Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).