IMC 2017: Sessions

Our section wants to draw attention to different kinds of late medieval (and also early modern) devotional jewellery with images on their exterior (and often interior). Until now their artistic potential and variety of functions such as amulets, media of devotion, courtly gifts, and representative jewellery have not been adequately studied. We will discuss reliquary pendants, book-shaped pendants, and clasps, especially morse clasps, under the aspects of their miniaturizing larger media such as triptychs, and also the spatial experiences of their users. Objects of jewellery and their small images shall become comprehensible as instruments for concentrated and intimate experiences of sight, mediating between image and the wearer's body, external world and interiority, thus functioning as 'switchboards' for different acts of seeing and touching. Our papers draw on knowledge from recent research on reliquaries and devotional images, on the debate concerning demarcations between secular and religious art, on cultural studies regarding materiality and objecthood, critically reflecting its theories in the light of new objects and thus being able to contribute new knowledge in return. Together with the session proposal 'Medieval Jewellery, I' by Dr. Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie and Dr. Maria Stürzebecher - a collaborative idea by the network 'Ornamentum: Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery' in which most of the sessions speakers are organised - we would like to draw attention to medieval jewellery as an emerging topic of research by introducing a hitherto underestimated and multifaceted genre of the visual arts into the current discourses of medieval studies.