Middle Ages

Alison Locke Perchuk, past Member in the School of Historical Studies (2018-19), has authored the first interdisciplinary account of the Monastery of St. Elijah, built circa 1122-26 near Rome. It includes archaeological and historical readings of the monastery’s architecture, frescoes, and sculpture, with an eye toward epigraphy, liturgy, theology, memory, and landscape.

In 2020–21, Carissa M. Harris, Member in the School of Historical Studies and Associate Professor at Temple University, is exploring how anger became feminized in the late medieval English popular imagination, focusing particularly on the figure of...

On November 1, 2019, Cord Whitaker, Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member in the School of Historical Studies, gave the talk "Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking—and Why It Matters."

Whitaker...

In 2019–20, Cord J. Whitaker, Member in the School of Historical Studies and Associate Professor at Wellesley College, is interested in the history and development of race and racism in medieval English literature.

On December 12, 2018, Eric Michaud, Directeur d’Études at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and former Member in the School of Historical Studies, gave a public lecture on "The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art,"...

An arcane topic to most people, Syriac sources help shed a more complex light on the history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. They reveal a non-imperial epoch and its rich contributions to the cultural and religious history...

Brill Academic Publishers has published Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2014) edited by Patrick Geary, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and Gábor Klaniczay. These essays focus...

Brandeis University Press has published Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages (2013) by Patrick Geary, Professor in the School of Historical Studies. The book, which is based on Geary’s Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures to the Historical...

It is known that mathematicians see beauty in mathematics. Many mathematicians are motivated to find the most beautiful proof, and often they refer to mathematics as a form of art. They are apt to say “What a beautiful theorem,” “Such an elegant...

Religious art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe was marked by the creeping presence of the prosaic, the concrete, the familiar, the everyday. Vivid descriptions of furniture and clothes, local flora and landscapes, hometown buildings...