A late ninth-century Latin manuscript, Paris BnF Lat. 5095, preserves the unique copy of Anastasius Bibliothecarius’s so-called ‘Collectanea’. This collection of texts documents the tribulations of Pope Martin and Maximus the Confessor, put on trial by Emperor Constans II in Constantinople in 655 in the course of the monothelite crisis. This chapt…[Read more]

One of the characteristics of Francia under Carolingian rule was an increase both in church conciliar activity and in the written records for this activity. This chapter examines the manuscript transmission of the records of one particular council, that which met in Aachen in 862 to discuss King Lothar II’s marriage. It assesses its the i…[Read more]

Unpaginated AAM

Unpaginated submission version of published book chapter (‘Competing for the Holy Spirit: Humbert of Moyenmoutier and the Question of Simony’, in Francois Bougard, Philippe Depreux and Régine Le Jan (eds.), Compétition et sacré au haut Moyen Âge: entre médiation et exclusion (Brepols, Collection du Haut Moyen Age: Turnhout, 2015), pp. 327–34)

Identifies the book held by the Priests and Scribes in the Temple on a capital in the cloister of Santa María la Mayor in Tudela as an extremely early representation of an Islamic envelope-flap binding, the earliest evidence of such a technique in the northern Iberian peninsula, and interprets its significance for a monastic community in the…[Read more]

Traces the legendary and visual roots of a well-known tale of the Little Jewish Boy in the Cantigas de Santa María.

For historians of medieval Iberian art and architecture, María Rosa Menocal’s most important legacy lies in her work’s normalization of a culturally decentralized, multidisciplinary frame through which medieval visual objects became part of a broadly shared network of cultural production that was unrestricted by firm boundaries between part…[Read more]

An unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa María (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural tr…[Read more]

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

Unpaginated version of book chapter published in Christine Kleinjung and Stefan Albrecht (eds.), Das lange 10. Jahrhundert – Struktureller Wandel zwischen Zentralisierung und Fragmentierung, äußerem Druck und innerer Krise (Mainz, 2015), pp. 49–59