Reassessing Alabaster Sculpture in Medieval England - (Studies in Iconography) by Jessica Brantley & Stephen Perkinson & Elizabeth C Teviotdale

About the Book

This volume offers fresh approaches to the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. The book comprises an introduct

Book Synopsis

This volume offers fresh approaches to both the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. Devotional alabaster images, too often thought of as "folk art" and narrowly English, were avidly collected and appreciated throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages, and this collection of essays seeks to help integrate them into the current discourse on materiality, the role of seriality in the changing modes of artistic production of the late Middle Ages, and the broad debate about whether it is useful to draw distinctions between elite/high and folk/low culture.

From the Back Cover

This volume offers fresh approaches to the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. Devotional alabaster images, too often thought of as a narrowly English "folk art," were avidly collected and appreciated throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. This collection of essays seeks to place the alabasters within a variety of late-medieval textual and visual contexts, taking into account questions of materiality, the role of seriality in the changing modes of artistic production of the late Middle Ages, and broad debates about whether it is useful to draw distinctions between "high" and "low" cultures.

About the Author

J. Brantley, Yale U., New Haven, S. Perkinson, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, and E. C. Teviotdale, Western Michigan U., Kalamazoo, USA.