ARTH 363 Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture

• Instructor: Dr. Vanessa Parent

This course examines art and architecture from the 12th to the 15th century in Europe situating this rich period of cultural production against the backdrop of tremendous social and political shifts including urban revival, demographic disasters, holy wars, the development of an increasingly wealthy merchant class; the rise of mendicant orders, and the centralization of state power. As the title suggests, the course is specifically interested in investigating the centrality of the body to medieval epistemology and devotional practices, contrasting sharply with a post-enlightenment logocentric focus on disembodied reason.  Earthly, divine, decaying or whole, the body occupied a double-bind as both locus of anxiety and salvific material. This corporeal focus is evident in images (prints, books of hours), material objects (relics and reliquaries), rituals (the eucharist) and spacial practices (pilgrimage, construction of Cavalries, relic translation), all of which point to a deeply embodied and multi-sensory devotional focus while also disrupting our modern understanding of space and place which in the middle-ages was more dynamic, fluid and defined by experiential encounters and symbolic meaning.

Finally, students will explore how late medieval concerns about the body as well as its role in religious practice expose and/or problematize issues surrounding subjectivity, gender, ritual and community, and in doing so discover if or how our contemporary concerns regarding the same issues may be inherited from our medieval ancestors.