These essays examine art on the borders of the medieval world, from China to Spain. They engage three related issues: margins, frontiers, and cross-cultural encounters. Historiographic problems and pedagogical questions weave through the essays and the editors introduction.

This volume approaches the problem of the canonical “center” by looking at art and architecture on the borders of the medieval world, from China to Armenia, Sweden, and Spain. Seven contributors engage three distinct yet related problems: margins, frontiers, and cross-cultural encounters. While not displaying a unified methodology or privileging specific theoretical constructs, the essays emphasize how strategies of representation articulated ownership and identity within contested arenas. What is contested is both medieval (the material evidence itself) and modern (the scholarly traditions in which the evidence has or has not been embedded). An introduction by the editors places the essays within historiographic and pedagogical frameworks. Contributors: J. Caskey, K. Kogman-Appel, C. Maranci, J. Purtle, C. Robinson, N. Wicker and E.S.Wolper.

Where are the limits of medieval art as a field of study? What happens when conventionally trained art historians disregard the chronological, geographical, or cultural parameters that both direct and protect their scholarship? Beginning with Thelma K. Thomas and Alicia Walker’s acute assessment of the need for a “medieval art history for now,” the essays in Out of Bounds ask what happens when the study of medieval art disregards boundaries that it once obeyed. The volume focuses on questions surrounding the production of knowledge and on how scholarly investigation beyond the conventional thematic boundaries of medieval art history is changing, demonstrating how the field can address the ethics of scholarship today by positing a global turn in response to growing demands for socially responsible medieval studies. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate how “going out of bounds” can transform modern understanding of the people, traditions, and relationships that gave rise to medieval works. As such, this book argues for the necessity of reshaping scholarly discourse about the nature and significance of medieval art and generates fresh scholarly interpretations and important new critical tools for teaching and researching the Middle Ages. The contributors to this volume are Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Michele Bacci, Jill Caskey, Eva Frojmovic, Sarah M. Guérin, Christina Maranci, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Thelma K. Thomas, Michele Tomasi, and Alicia Walker.

It is here at the edge--of the monastery, the cathedral, the court, the city--that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for glossing, parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it. Viewing marginalia in their proper social and cultural context, Camille reveals scandalous and subversive aspects, as well as apparently paradoxical stabilizing functions. He rejects oppositions such as high and low, profane and sacred, and instead projects a vision of medieval culture in which marginal resistance, inversion, and transgression play an integral, even necessary, role.

Across the nine thematic chapters of Experiencing Medieval Art, renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler considers functional objects as well as paintings and sculptures; the circumstances, processes, and materials of production; the conflictual relationship between art objects and notions of an ineffable deity; the context surrounding medieval art; and questions of apprehension, aesthetics, and modern presentation. He also introduces the exciting discoveries and revelations that have revolutionized contemporary understanding of medieval art and identifies the vexing challenges that still remain. With 16 color plates and 81 images in all—including the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, the mosaics of San Marco, and the Utrecht Psalter, as well as newly discovered works such as the frescoes in Rome’s aula gotica and a twelfth-century aquamanile in Hildesheim—Experiencing Medieval Art makes the complex history of medieval art accessible for students of art history and scholars of medieval history, theology, and literature.

Honouring Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds analyzes aspects of the constructed narratives and reconstructed realities of the visual-material record of diverse Mediterranean faith communities from medieval into contemporary times.

This beautifully produced survey of over a thousand years of Western art and architecture introduces the reader to a vast period of history ranging from ancient Rome to the age of exploration. The monumental arts and the diverse minor arts of the Middle Ages are presented here within the social, religious, and political frameworks of lands as varied as France and Denmark, Spain and Turkey. Marilyn Stokstad also teaches her reader how to look at medieval art-which aspects of architecture, sculpture, or painting are important and for what reasons. Stylistic and iconographic issues and themes are thoroughly addressed with attention paid to aesthetic and social contexts.