2024 Howard S. Schwartz Memorial Annual Lecture Series Graduate Workshop
“Echoes of Social Life in Illuminated Manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”
Nina Rowe, Professor of Art History, Fordham University
Friday, March 8th, 2024 | 12:15–1:45pm CT | Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Hagen Room #150
*Email Professor Thomas Dale at tedale@wisc.edu to RSVP for the workshop and obtain the readings.
Abstract:
Standard narratives of western European medieval art history tend to focus on images and structures connected to the church or the court. As a result, clerics and nobles are centered and the daily experiences of city dwellers often are ignored. This workshop explores objects and methods that can help us fill out the picture. We will examine images and texts in Middle High German illuminated manuscripts and consider how they register interests and practices also depicted in monumental sculptures and paintings, as well as in the new medium of engraving, targeted to patently lay and urban audiences.
Biography:
Nina Rowe specializes in the art of northern Europe in the high and late Middle Ages (twelfth to fifteenth century). Her recent research examines illuminated World Chronicle (Weltchronik) manuscripts, created in southern Germany and Austria circa 1330 to 1430. Another facet of her scholarship examines images of Jews and Judaism in settings ranging from monumental cathedral façade sculpture to hand-held carved ivories. Her scholarship also addresses the production and reception of illuminated manuscripts in the medieval and modern eras.
Professor Rowe’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016–17), the American Council of Learned Societies (2016–17), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007–08). She was awarded the Karen Gould Prize from the Medieval Academy of America in 2023 for her book The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City (Yale UP, 2020). She served as President of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), 2020–23.
Image caption: Dancers and Musicians, illumination in a manuscript of Der Renner, Tirol (Austria), ca. 1460 or later. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.763, fols. 145v–146r.
