Acknowledgments
My heartfelt gratitude, together with that of all contributors to this volume, is owed first and foremost to the Catedral Primada de Toledo, the Archivo Capitular, and the Museo de Tapices y Textiles, especially the dean Juan Pedro Sánchez Gamero and the Chapter of canons, along with Juan Miguel Ferrer Grenesche and María del Prado López, who are responsible for caring for the cathedral’s extraordinarily rich patrimony. The generosity with which they accommodated the Treasury Project’s multiple research campaigns cannot be overstated; we trust that the present volume goes some way toward repaying our debt of gratitude.
Further thanks also go to Beatriz Campderá and Paloma Otero for allowing us to study multiple artworks and coins at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid; to Dylan Smith and Emily Pegues of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for fruitful collaborative research on the Chalice of Abbot Suger from the Abbey of Saint-Denis; to Florian Meunier and Philippe Malgouyres of the Musée du Louvre in Paris for giving me access to other objects from the treasury of Saint-Denis; to Evelin Wetter at the Abegg-Stiftung, Riggisberg, for close looking at textiles; to Luis García Gutiérrez and Raquel Jaén of the Museo de San Isidoro de León for ongoing access to their collection, with which the first Treasury Project began; to Joan Piña Pedemonte at the Cathedral of Girona, where further research is pending; to Julia Perratore and Griffith Mann at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and to the librarians at the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás of the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CSIC, Madrid), who helped with the borrowing or acquisition of many publications essential to this volume. Special thanks go to Luis Manuel Cuña Ramos, former archivist and Delegado de Patrimonio at the Cathedral of Ourense for his unstinting facilitation of our work during a series of intensive research campaigns on the wonderful treasures held there.
Research funding for this phase of the Treasury Project (2019–2022) was mainly provided by a Spanish national grant: The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond (Ministry of Science and Innovation, RTI2018-098615-B-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”). The first phase (2016–2018) had been funded by The Medieval Treasury across Frontiers and Generations: The Kingdom of León-Castilla in the Context of Muslim-Christian Interchange, c.1050–1200 (Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, HAR2015-68614-P). I am also grateful for the publication subvention awarded by the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Additionally, a grant from the International Center of Medieval Art provided sponsorship for the panel I organized in 2021 at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, “Materials, Manufacture, Movement: Tracing Connections through Object Itineraries,” at which several team members presented their work in progress.
I am especially beholden to the authors in this book, who include members of the Treasury Project—Xosé-Lois Armada, Silvia Armando, Ana Cabrera Lafuente, María Judith Feliciano, Julie A. Harris, Jitske Jasperse, and Shannon L. Wearing—as well as invited scholars Francisco J. Hernández, Ignacio Montero-Ruiz, and Tom Nickson. It was a true pleasure to learn from them all, both during research campaigns and in the course of editing their studies. Further, I want to single out for acknowledgement two project members, Verónica Carla Abenza Soria and Alicia López Carral, for their hard work on research campaigns and assistance with the review of inventories. Additional thanks go to the rest of the Treasury Project team who contributed wisdom with collegiality along the way: Jordi Camps, Amanda W. Dotseth, Romain Jeanneret, Eduardo Manzano, Pierre Alain Mariaux, Christian Raffensperger, Laura Rodríguez Peinado, and Mariam Rosser-Owen.
Over the years, I have benefitted from the generous sharing of expertise among scholars, including Pamela Patton and her staff at the Index of Medieval Art on researching hard-stone chalices; Amanda Dotseth on the display of medieval objects; Heidi Gearhart on niello in the writings of Theophilus; Genevra Kornbluth, Elise Morero, and Marcus Pilz on rock crystal and other hard stones; Esra Akin-Kivanc, Razan Francis, and María Antonia Martínez Núñez on Arabic inscriptions; Inés Calderón on Portuguese inventories and wills; Louise Bourgeois on Italian metalwork; Mariam Rosser-Owen on silverworks and ivories; and especially Ana Rodríguez and José Luis Senra, my sounding boards on matters of Iberian history and art. Esperanza Alfonso in Zamora and Rina Leonard in Paris and Coimbra provided essential help that made research trips both fruitful and fun. During internships at the Instituto de Historia, Universidad Complutense students Ángela Ansensio-Wandosell, María López Ransanz, and María Gángara assisted especially with images research. Finally, I am indebted to colleagues at the University of Sarajevo, University of Warwick, and Universidad de León who invited me to give presentations on the enigmatic candelabrum reliquary discussed in Chapter 1 and provided useful critiques of my work.
At Brill, Marcella Mulder is always a joy to work with, and the enthusiastic reception of my proposal by Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand, series editors of Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as the thoughtful critiques by the anonymous reviewers they chose, have made this volume a pleasure to produce. If it ended up taking longer to appear than one would have hoped, this is down mainly to the global Covid-19 pandemic, which postponed or cancelled many of our planned team research trips and international conference participations during 2020 and 2021. This second phase of the Treasury Project had commenced in 2019 during my Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and it concluded in 2022, long before we were able to process the enormous amounts of exciting new information amassed during multiple post-pandemic research campaigns in Spain, but also in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. That wealth of accumulated research is our scholarly treasure, which we will continue to both draw on and build up in the coming years.