Full Description
Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court.
Contents
Contents
Introduction
Eva Frojmovic and Catherine E. Karkov
Part 1 The language of the postcolonial
Chapter 1. Decolonising gold bracteates: From Late Roman medallions to Scandinavian Migration Period pendants
Nancy L. Wicker
Chapter 2. The Franks Casket speaks back: The bones of the past, the becoming of England
Catherine E. Karkov
Chapter 3. Camouflaging and echoing the Latin mass in an illuminated French-language missal
Margaret E. Hadley
Part 2 The location of the postcolonial
Chapter 4. Mandeville's Jews, colonialism, certainty, and art history
Asa Simon Mittman
Chapter 5. Conquest and coexistence in sixteenth-century Granada: Imposing orders in the Alhambra's Mexuar
Lara Eggleton
Chapter 6. Beyond Foucault's laugh: On the ethical practice of medieval art history
Roland Betancourt
Part 3 The ambivalence of the postcolonial
Chapter 7. Postcolonising Thomas Becket: The saint as resistant site
Alyce A. Jordan
Chapter 8. Defining a merchant identity and aesthetic in Pisa: Muslim ceramics as commodities, mementos, and architectural decoration on eleventh-century churches
Karen Rose Mathews
Chapter 9. The Muslim warrior at the Seder meal: Dynamics between minorities in the Rylands Haggadah
Jane Barlow
Chapter 10. Neighbouring and mixta in thirteenth-century Ashkenaz
Eva Frojmovic
Bibliography
Index
