Monstrous iconography was a major, even central, element of the visual arts throughout the entire medieval period, Early Christian through late Gothic, east and west, north and south. There are few—if any—medieval cultural traditions that do not rely on monstrous imagery for vital cultural functions. Within this catchall category, often def…[Read more]

“Robed in Martyrdom: The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew in the Laudario of Sant’Agnese,” with Christine Sciacca, Flaying in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Larissa Tracy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017)

This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris’s Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir j…[Read more]

Our focus is a remarkable object – or, rather, a collection of objects, in turn housed within another object, which bears on it representations of yet other things: a reliquary box, once held in the treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace, containing bits of stone, wood, and cloth, labeled with locations from the “Holy Land”. The b…[Read more]

Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, “Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket,” with Susan Kim, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, ed. K Ellison and S Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017)

The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up…[Read more]

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (o…[Read more]

The Vercelli map, bluntly put, is in very poor shape (Tav. VIII). The map was found by Carlo Errera in 1908, while he was «putting in order the archive of the Chapter of Vercelli: Nobody before had paid attention to it, because it was inventoried by a hand of the eighteenth century as an old sketch of a synoptic picture»1. It has survived the p…[Read more]

The expression P3,0 refers to one class of parsimonious voice-leading transformations between seventh chords introduced in a 1998 article by Jack Douthett and Peter Steinbach as Pm,n (Journal of Music Theory 42 (2): 241–63). In addition to tones that may be held in common, the subscripts indicate the number of voices that move by half step (m) o…[Read more]

This article provides a detailed examination of Hauer’s late 12-tone compositions, identifying the practices and procedures employed across a body of more than 100 pieces.

This article explores the influence of sources outside the institutional framework of organized religion (“occult” sources) on Schoenberg’s aesthetic thinking and writing, especially with regard to the musical idea..

This article examines the spiritual dimension of early twelve-tone theoretical writing, with a focus on the writing and music of Arnold Schoenberg and Josef Matthias Hauer.

This article explores the influence of mysticism in early 20th-century Vienna on the palindromic designs that can found n Berg’s music.

This article explores the sources of what Dahlhaus calls Schoenberg’s “aesthetic theology” in the philosophical, literary, and mystical writings of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.

This chapter examines Schoenberg’s theoretical ideas on musical structure with particular emphasis on his Variations for Orchestra, op 31.

This chapter traces the development of the twelve-tone idea in twentieth-century music theory.

This article explores Schoenberg’s engagement with organicism, casting it as an aesthetic ideal.

This chapter provides a biographical sketch of Hauer’s life and music.

This article traces the reception of Schoenberg’s theoretical ideas in the English-language music theory community.

I want to touch the Middle Ages. I want to hold all of the works of art in all the museums. I want to turn the pages, not by touching a screen or mouse in the Brit- ish Library’s Turning The PagesTM app, but by touching vellum in the British Li- brary’s reading room. I want to open and close the wings on altarpieces, to feel ivories warm in my han…[Read more]