The first history of the Biblical heroine Jael (Judges 4), a blessed murderess and fertile moral paradox in medieval and Renaissance art.

Winner of the 2019 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication In The Riddle of Jael, Peter Scott Brown offers the first history of the Biblical heroine Jael in medieval and Renaissance art. Jael, who betrayed and killed the tyrant Sisera in the Book of Judges by hammering a tent peg through his brain as he slept under her care, was a blessed murderess and an especially fertile moral paradox in the art of the early modern period. Jael’s representations offer insights into key religious, intellectual, and social developments in late medieval and early modern society. They reflect the influence on art of exegesis, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, humanism and moral philosophy, misogyny and the battle of the sexes, the emergence of syphilis, and the Renaissance ideal of the artist.

Jovinianus, about whom little more is known than what is to be found in Jerome's treatise, published a Latin treatise outlining several opinions: That a virgin is no better, as such, than a wife in the sight of God. Abstinence from food is no better than a thankful partaking of food. A person baptized with the Spirit as well as with water cannot sin. All sins are equal. There is but one grade of punishment and one of reward in the future state. In addition to this, he held the birth of Jesus Christ to have been by a "true parturition," and was thus refuting the orthodoxy of the time, according to which, the infant Jesus passed through the walls of the womb as his Resurrection body afterwards did, out of the tomb or through closed doors.

In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson demonstrates how garden imagery defined bodily desire as a fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake.

The Shroud at the Court analyses the ties between the Shroud and the Savoy court from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, when rituals, ceremonies, and images made the relic an essential source of legitimacy and propaganda for the Savoy dynasty.

A Companion to Medieval Lübeck offers a new archaeological, historical and art historical as well as architectonical perspective on the medieval history of the city of Lübeck from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

Picturing Death: 1200–1600 brings together essays considering four key centuries of imagery related to human mortality, from tomb sculpture to painted altarpieces, from manuscripts to printed books, and from minute carved objects to large-scale architecture.