“Mediterranean Art History: An Introduction”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
17-20 June 2024 • Remote

The Summer Skills Seminar,  “Mediterranean Art History: An Introduction”  will be held via Zoom from Monday, 17 June to Thursday, 20 June 2024 from 10am to noon and 1pm to 3pm MDT.

This Summer Skills Seminar provides participants with an overview of key concepts and methodologies in the study of Mediterranean art history. The course will address the themes of mobility, connectivity, and encounter in relation to the visual culture of peoples and territories across the sea. Participants will acquire an art historical tool kit to assist them in conducting their own research on the visual culture and artistic production of the medieval Mediterranean

Course overview
The growth of medieval Mediterranean art history over the past twenty years has provided the opportunity for a reassessment of key concepts and methodologies. Art historians have broken down disciplinary barriers in their field to conduct research in a holistic, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary manner. However, the visual culture of the medieval Mediterranean is an incredibly broad topic of study, encompassing a large geographic area, multiple media, and numerous cultures and political territories over a millennium. This skills seminar will approach this vast body of material with a focus on mobility, connectivity, and encounter. How do these three concepts decenter older narratives, encourage cross-cultural inquiry, and broaden the range of the objects and monuments we study? Course participants will analyze these themes and questions in four sessions, divided into the following categories: People, Things, Places, and Routes/Vectors. Each day will be dedicated to one of these topics with readings connected to broader issues in the first half of the session and close readings of primary sources (documentary and monumental) and theoretical studies in the second half. Selected medieval Mediterranean monuments will serve as visual case studies to focus the discussion of the day’s readings. Additional readings and resources will be provided for each topic in shared folders. The aim of the course is to provide a broad overview of current trends in the field of medieval Mediterranean art history and to enable participants to dig deeper and conduct their own research using the tools provided during the seminar.

Day One will address the human agents who produced, consumed, and disseminated artworks across the sea. Patrons, artists, merchants, and producers of raw materials all played a role in a network of people and things. Producers and consumers of art may or may not have been the same and audiences, individual or collective, may have understood works of art in complementary or diametrically opposed ways. Artworks also played the role of defining identity, highlighting familial status, corporate membership, or multicultural, transnational, and cross-confessional affinities and connections. Readings related to particular case studies and social groups will demonstrate how mobility staged encounter, created transnational artworks, and catalyzed connectivity in the medieval Mediterranean. In the second half of Day One, participants will discuss readings concerning patronage, production, dissemination of artworks, and reception theory.

Day Two will address a second set of Mediterranean actors in the realm of visual culture: things. We will explore the different types of materials that were used for making artworks that were often a combination of disparate materials. We will address the aesthetics and symbolism of materials as well as a Mediterranean aesthetic that embrace polymaterial ensembles. We will also analyze the types of objects and raw materials that circulated across the sea that captured the imagination of artists, patrons, and audiences. Ivories and ceramics will serve as focus, as they were the ultimate pan-Mediterranean objects, produced and consumed in various locales. The second half of Day Two will focus on theoretical approaches to objects and things. We will address thing theory and material culture studies in addition to analyzing the agency and biographies of objects. We will also look at inventories such as the Book of Gifts and Rarities (Kitab al-Hadaya wa’l Tuhaf) to understand hierarchies of objects, their worth, and how they forged relationships between people and one another.

Day Three will address a sense of place and space in the Mediterranean. How was a local identity and sense of place expressed in visual terms? How did local forms, traditions, styles, and mentalities contribute to larger global circulation and artistic practices? The content for this day’s discussion will also consider the impact of exploration and cross-cultural contact, and opportunities for cultural appropriation and appreciation. We will also look at more abstract conceptions of space as seen in the developing field of cartography in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—what did it mean to see the world as a map? In the second part of Day Three, we will analyze four central Mediterranean spaces as case studies for different approaches to place and space, local identities and cross-cultural interaction. The first locale will be Spain and the development of a unique Mudéjar aesthetic there. Next, we will travel to the Peloponnese in Greece and analyze the hybrid visual culture created there in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. The third stop will be Cairo and the new visual forms developed by the Mamluks to connect them to Mediterranean artistic culture. Finally, we will go to Italy to study the vibrant visual culture developed there to distinguish Italian polities from one another in a fiercely competitive environment.

Day Four brings together all the topics of the first three days—people, places, things—and then study how they came to interact with one another in a Mediterranean environment. What motivated people to move and visit distant lands? What caused goods to circulate and garner new meanings and uses in new places? We will look at various vectors like commerce, pilgrimage, and war/crusade that forged novel connections between these three elements and then study the consequences of this heightened cultural interaction across the Mediterranean. What were the implications of connectivity for artistic production and reception? The second half of day two will consist of a brainstorming session addressing the ways in which all four of the course’s topics can be combined in the study of medieval Mediterranean visual culture. What kind of artworks should be addressed? How can they be studied in novel ways? What new combinations and connections can be created between people/things, people/places, things/places to gain a deeper understanding of visual culture and artistic production?

This Summer Skills Seminar builds on the experience of earlier editions, which participants signaled as “transformative” in terms of their research, and which provided them with an opportunity to network and lay the foundations for future collaborations. For information and participant reviews of our former Skills Seminars (Ladino/Judezmo & Aljamiado) see here.

Faculty

The course will be conducted by Prof. Karen Mathews (Department of Art and Art History, University of Miami). She received her B.A. in Art History from UCLA and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. She has been conducting research on the visual culture of the medieval Mediterranean for forty years, with a particular emphasis on artistic production in Spain, Italy, and Egypt.

Program

Monday, 17 June 2024: Who?—People
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.  Patrons, artists, merchants, and producers
2. Patronage, production, dissemination of artworks, and reception theory

Tuesday, 18 June 2024: What?—Things
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.    Materials, aesthetics and symbolism
2.   Theoretical approaches to objects and things

Wednesday, 19 June 2024: Where?—Places
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     Sense of place and space in the Mediterranean
2.     Mediterranean spaces: case studies

Thursday, 20 June 2024: How?—Routes, Vectors, and Means of Communication
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1.     Mediterranean environment: motivations and vectors of exchange
2.     Approaches to medieval Mediterranean visual culture

Participants

Michelle Armstrong-Partida (History: Emory University)
Michelle Armstrong-Partida specializes in the study of gender, sexuality, and women’s history in Iberia and the Mediterranean. Her first book Defiant Priests focused on the clerical masculinity, violence, and the illicit sexual unions of the clergy in medieval Catalonia. She has also coedited a book on Women & Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2020) and has written on clandestine marriage, illegitimacy, as well as gang rape and adolescent masculinity. Her current project is a comparative study of concubinous unions among the merchant class, urban poor, and peasantry across the late medieval Mediterranean. This research exposes the significant population of enslaved, single, married women, and widows, who by circumstance or choice, ended up in an informal union to weave the experiences of women at the lowest levels of society into an account of medieval people who remained on the margins of marriage. Armstrong-Partida has also embarked on a collaborative project on singlewomen—both enslaved, formerly enslaved, and free—in the late medieval Mediterranean with fellow medievalist Dr. Susan McDonough and together they have written articles on women who lived on the spectrum of singleness, prostitute-concubines, and laboring class masculinity. They have also used a Mediterranean framework to write about a shared sexual culture of same-gender relationships, gender fluidity, and the experiences of trans individuals in medieval Christian and Islamic societies.

Pamela Beattie (Comparative Humanities: University of Louisville)
Pamela Beattie holds a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and a MSL from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto). She is an Associate Professor of Medieval Studies and Chair of the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville where she has taught for more years than she cares to remember. She is affiliate faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice.
Dr. Beattie is a specialist on the life and works of the thirteenth-century Catalan polymath Ramon Llull (1232–1316) through which lens she conducts research on the history and culture(s) of the medieval Mediterranean; interreligious dialogue and polemic between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; vernacular theology; and late medieval religious culture with an emphasis on the intersection between scholastic and lay theology. Her recent research has focused on two main areas: (1) translation, vernacular literature, and questions of religious orthodoxy and heresy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and (2) points of contact between classical, medieval, and postcolonial literatures and visual cultures.
Pamela is currently working on an article that uses theBreviculum, a beautifully illustrated manuscript that contains a visual narrative of Ramon Llull’svita along with an explanation of his philosophy and short anthology of his works by Lull’s disciple, Thomas LeMyésier, as a way to explore lay women’s communities of learning in the early fourteenth century. She is finishing a critical edition and translation of Roger Bacon’sOpus Minus (with Dr. Thomas Maloney), and hopes to spend at least a part of her sabbatical next spring at the Raimundus Lullus Insitute at the University of Freiburg working on a critical edition of Llull’sArs Iuris for the Raimundi Lulli Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis.
Recent publications include:
• Time, Space, Matter in Translation, (London: Routledge, 2023) edited with Simona Bertacco and Tatjana Soldat Jaffe, and in which she published “Thomas Le Myésier’s Breviculum as a ‘Translation Site’, 154-173.
• “J.N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism, and Questions of Context,” Ramon Llull y Los Lulistas (Siglos XXIV-XX), ed. Rafael Ramis Barceló, Colección Instituto de Estudios Hispánicaos en la Modernidad (IEHM), (Madrid: Editorial Sindéresis, 2022), 1069-1082.• • “Dante a St Lucia: Echi del Purgatorio nell’Omeros di Walcott,” with Simona Bertacco, Testimonianze, nos. 1-2, 535-536 (2021), 263-270.
• "Language and Orthodoxy: the Latin Translation of Llull's Llibre contra Anticrist," in Actes del Congrés de Clausura de l’Any Llull. «Ramon Llull, pensador i escriptor». Barcelona, 17-18 de novembre de 2016, ed. Lola Badia, Joan Santanach i Suñol i Albert Soler i Llopart, "Col·lecció Blaquerna" 13 (Barcelona / Palma: Universitat de Barcelona / Universitat de les Illes Balears, 2018) 327-345.

Mikayla Fulton (Niagara University)
My name is Mikayla Fulton and I am a Campus Minister at my alma mater, Niagara University, where I earned my Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies. After completing my undergraduate studies, I pursued further education at Boston College, obtaining both a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) and a Master of Theology (ThM) degree. In addition to my ministerial duties, I am a professor for a course titled Religion and Art, which features a ten-day excursion to Rome, Italy, allowing students to immerse themselves in the study of religious art.

Asli Igsiz (Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University)
Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Trained as a comparatist, her work can best be described as a history of the present.
Her scholarship considers cultural politics within and about the Middle East, with a special focus on Turkey, and in connection with North American and European contexts, with a focus on Greece. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of political violence, cultural policy, and politics of representation, with a critical eye on the implications of the past in the present. Specifically, she is interested in the interconnections between the humanities and demographic engineering projects, and their afterlives.
Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018.  Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Within this framework, it explored the implications of liberal and historicist humanism and cultural policy, and what that entailed for demographic and territorial claims and projects.
Currently she is working on two projects: one on the notion of civilization and related cultural politics with demographic and territorial visions, and another one on post-1945 cultural politics and initiatives to reform Humanities curricula and to refute fascism and racism. Ultimately, she is seeking to understand the implications of economically and politically motivated attacks on the Humanities, and how the spaces vacated by the Humanities education in the public domain are refilled by neo-fascist discourse, policies, and movements to push their demographic agenda.
Iğsız is also co-editor of the Middle East e-zine Jadaliyya’s Turkey page.

Karen Klockner (Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Karen Klockner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation research focuses on mapping the medieval Mediterranean, considering themes such as wayfinding, the iconography of warnings on maps, and the indeterminacy of geographical boundaries. Prior to doctoral work, Karen was a literary agent and book editor working in trade book publishing. She has taught architectural history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and currently serves as an educator in medieval art and architecture at the Met Cloisters.

Susan McDonough (History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Susan McDonough, Associate Professor of history at UMBC, is a scholar of women, gender and sexuality in the medieval Mediterranean.  Her first book Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille appeared in 2013, and her co-edited volume Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honor of Paul Freedman in 2018. She is currently at work on two project,  a solo-authored book on sex workers, and, with Michelle Armstrong-Partida, a collaborative on singlewomen. McDonough’s single authored and collaborative work has appeared in multiple journals including, most recently, Gender & History, The American Historical Review, Speculum, and Past & Present.

Marina Rahlin
For the past 3 years I’ve been absorbing myself in art history at CSULB, focusing on marks of identity and the marginalized communities represented in the European art of the Medieval world. I know first hand what it’s like to be an outsider;  I spent the first years of my life in suppressive Ukraine, grew up in Israel, and immigrated to Los Angeles in 2007 on my own, as an international student, to attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.  In the Soviet Union, my family’s Jewishness made us the Other. In Israel, our Sovietness earned us a similar treatment. The journey from being a minority in Ukraine to an immigrant in Israel and ultimately finding a home in California, made me an observer, taught me resilience and has given me a unique, wider perspective on the world. Currently I'm working on my grad school application and essay for an MA in art history at UCLA or UCR. My essay focuses on the negative Jewish representation in the Cantigas De Santa Maria.

Patricia Zalamea (Art History, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)
Patricia Zalamea has a BA in art history (1997) from John Cabot University in Italy and an MA and PhD in art history from Rutgers University (2007). She is Associate Professor of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities between 2015 and 2021. In addition to developing the first art history undergraduate program in Colombia (2010), she is one of the founders and board members of the Colombian Chapter (CCHA) of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), as well as an advocate for public policies on cultural heritage, experimental humanities and the place of liberal arts in Latin American higher education. Her fields of study include Colonial Latin American art, Global Renaissance art, the reception of Classics in a Colonial context, history of the print, and portraiture.
Recent publications include:
- a book titled Originales multiples (Original multiples): El grabado en los albores de la imprenta (Uniandes 2023).
- a chapter titled “Mapping Space and Time in Apocalyptic Representations in Latin American Colonial Art.” In Worlds Ending - Ending Worlds. Understanding Apocalyptic Transformation, eds. Jenny. Stümer and Michael Dunn in collaboration with David Eisler, 99-115. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
-an article titled “The Drawings of the Cacique de Turmequé: Reclaiming Justice in a Colonial Context.”Miradas.  Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Heidelberg, 2023).
- a diachronic study of the portrayal of an Andean chieftain, titled “Narratives of Sacrifice in the Nuevo Reino de Granada: Doubting Sugamuxi and Muisca Conversion in a Colonial Context” in Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard U. Press, 2022).
- two chapters and one article on the Classical tradition as reinterpreted by humanist circles in 17th-century Lima and Cuzco, one of which appeared inRe-inventing Ovid’s Metamorphoses,1300-1700(Brill, 2020).