Notes on the Contributors
David S. Areford
is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (2013) and The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (2010). He is coauthor of Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (2005); and coeditor of Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences (2004). He has published articles in Studies in Iconography and chapters in From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History (2012), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe (2009), and The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture (1998). His current book project is Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints.
Mette Birkedal Bruun
is Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen and Director of The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (2017–2023). She was PI of the collective research project SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century (2013–2017) (ERC). Her research interests include early modern devotion, the monastic movement, representations of the history and topography of salvation. She is the author of The Unfamiliar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) between Withdrawal and Engagement (Copenhagen: 2017) and Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography (Leiden – Boston: 2007). She has edited, among other volumes, The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order (Cambridge: 2013), Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period I (with David Cowling) (Leuven: 2011), and Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (with Stephanie Glaser) (Turnhout: 2008).
AnnMarie M. Bridges
is a doctoral candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She holds an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from The University of Chicago. She specializes in Christian theological writings from late antiquity to early modernity. Her dissertation explores the intertwined roles of visual perception and reading in John Calvin’s 1559 Institutio christianae religionis against the backdrop of early modern European visual culture. In addition to her work in visual culture, her research interests include idolatry and iconoclasm, the history of the book and reading, and the role of language, imagination, and temporality in theological writing.
James Clifton
is Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator in Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has published essays on European art and culture from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. His curated and co-curated exhibitions include The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150–1800 (1997); A Portrait of the Artist, 1525–1825: Prints from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2005); The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500–1825, from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2009); Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (2009); Elegance and Refinement: The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst (2012); and Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael (2015). He is co-editor of Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (2014) and A Golden Age of European Art: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2016).
Anna Dlabačová
is postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. Her research focuses on the role of vernacular texts and (illustrated) books in late medieval religious culture of the Low Countries. Previous publications include Literatuur en observantie. De Spieghel der volcomenheit van Hendrik Herp en de dynamiek van laatmiddeleeuwse tekstverspreiding (2014); the volumes Mobility of Ideas and Transmission of Texts. Religion, Learning, and Literature in the Rhineland and the Low Countries (ca. 1300–1550) (2015); and Piety in Practice and Print. Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape (2016).
Wim François
is Research Professor of the Special Research Fund of the KU Leuven (Belgium) and a member of the Research Unit of History of Church and Theology. His field of research is the history of Church and theology in the Early Modern Era (1450−1650), the Council of Trent, and Tridentine Catholicism. He has published extensively on the place of vernacular Bible reading in the life of the faithful, and is currently working on Bible commentaries edited by the Louvain and Douai theologians during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Catholic biblical scholarship (1550−1650). Other research interests relate to the Bible and the visual arts, rhetoricians’ plays in the Low Countries, and other areas of early modern ‘biblical culture’.
Matthew Havili
graduated in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Brigham Young University and is currently a student at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. His primary research interests are in Roman and late medieval amber and the paintings of Anthony van Dyck.
Robert L. Kendrick
teaches music history and ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, working in early modern sacred repertories. His most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (2014).
Aden Kumler
is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (2011). Her research interests center on how the material conditions of life, including artistic and artisanal works and practices, shape possibilities for thought, imagination, and action.
Noria Litaker
is an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A cultural historian, she specializes in early modern religious history and material culture with a focus on German-speaking lands. Litaker graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and is currently revising her dissertation, Embodied Faith: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints in the Duchy of Bavaria, 1598–1803, for publication as a monograph.
Lars Cyril Nørgaard
is a church historian and currently holds a research grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. He is affiliated to the Centre de Research du Château de Versailles and to the Centre for Privacy Studies, housed at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on spiritual direction in the early modern period and, specifically, on the direction of Louis XIV’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. In broader terms, this research involves themes such as the tension between religious seclusion and societal engagement, the relationship between text and image, the ambiguous nature of pre-modern privacy and the complexities of representing sacred rulership in the late 17th century and first half of the 18th century.
Donna L. Sadler
received her BA from Boston University and her MA and PhD from Indiana University. She has spent most of her career teaching at Agnes Scott College and her research focuses on medieval sculpture ranging from Reims Cathedral to the art commissioned by Philip the Bold to late medieval sculptures of the Entombment of Christ, and most recently, carved retables. Her publications focus on issues of royal and ecclesiastical patronage, performative piety, dogs in tomb sculpture, ritual, and audience reception. Her books include Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral: Royalty and Ritual in 13th-century France (Ashgate, 2012/ Routledge, 2018); Stone, Flesh, Spirit: The Entombment of Christ in late medieval Burgundy and Champagne (Brill, 2015); and Touching Heaven – Seeing the Late Medieval Altarpiece through the Eyes of Faith (Brill, 2018).
Alexa Sand
is Professor of Art History at Utah State University. Her research centers on the intersections of manuscript culture, gender, vernacular texts, and religiosity in late-medieval francophone Europe. Her book, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Gesta, Word & Image, Yale French Studies, Different Visions, and numerous volumes of collected essays. She is currently completing a book on the pictorial tradition of La Somme le Roi, material upon which she draws for her essay here.
Tanya J. Tiffany
is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her first book, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (2012), received an honourable mention for the Eleanor Tufts Book Award, which recognises outstanding English-language publications in Spanish and Portuguese art history. More recently, she co-edited (with Giles Knox) a collection of essays, Velázquez Re-Examined: Theory, History, Poetry, and Theatre (2017). Her current research focuses on the intersection between feminine devotion and visual culture in the early modern Spanish world.
Geert Warnar
(PhD 1995) is a senior lecturer (and former director of studies) of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. His published work mainly focuses on medieval Dutch literature in its religious, intellectual and international contexts. He led and coordinated research projects on ‘medieval Dutch literature and learning’ and on the ‘mobility of ideas and transmission of texts in the late medieval Low Countries and the Rhineland’. He is now conducting a research project on the ‘effectiveness of dialogue in forms of communication, past and present’.
Bronwen Wilson
teaches early modern art history at UCLA. She has published on print, cartography, costume, portraiture, and co-edited several volumes. She writes on the history of Venetian art, the subject of her book The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity, and she has published articles on European images of Ottoman Turks and Turkish costume. A recently-completed book, The Face of Uncertainty, turns to increasing doubt about the trustworthiness of the human face in Northern Italy. A third book, Inscription and the Horizon in Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Imagery, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. She is also co-editor of a book series, Early Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, and Transformations in Early Modern Europe and its Worlds.
Elliott D. Wise
is Assistant professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Brigham Young University. His research and publications focus on the devotional function of late medieval and early modern art. In particular, he is interested in art and liturgy, representations of the Eucharistic Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the visual culture of the great mendicant and monastic orders. He received a Ph.D. in Art History from Emory University, having spent a semester at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a year in New York City as a fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.