What do we gain by understanding medieval art objects and the people who interacted with them as actors within an event? Using the paradigm of “social sculpture,” a term introduced by performance artist Joseph Beuys in the late 1960s, the essays in this special issue rethink approaches to medieval art and performance practices. In so doing, they reframe extant materials as only one actor within the greater collage of embodied participation—imbued with overwhelming scents, sounds, and sights—that collectively shaped religious, political, and social communities.

https://doi.org/10.61302/PQGP8071

Contents

 

I. Introduction

Ariela Algaze, Johns Hopkins University, and Kris Racaniello, CUNY, Introduction: What is Medieval Social Sculpture?
 

II. Social Sculptures: Animate Objects in the Middle Ages

Michelle Oing, Pomona College, Sculpture in the Deceptive Mode? The Shifting Social Sculptures at Bern and Boxley

Dagmar Preising, Performative Sculptures of the Virgin Mary in the German-Speaking Lands during the Late Middle Ages: Animated versus Self-Acting Figures

Jordan Koel, University of Michigan, Statue Marriage and Medieval Iconophilia
 

III. The “Social Organism as a Work of Art”

Lucy Freeman Sandler, New York University, The Candlemas Procession in the Bedford Hours and Processions in Medieval Paris

Holly R. Silvers, Independent Scholar, Anti-Social Sculpture: Sonic Assault and Synaesthetic Disharmony in the Imagined Performances of Corbel Musicians in Romanesque Saintonge

Catrin Haberfield, Stanford University, User Journeys on the Ruthwell Cross: Conceptualizing Sculptural Encounters through User Experience Theory

Sophie Durbin, UHI Orkney, Choreographing Around Earth and Stone: The Prehistoric/Medieval Dynamic in Orkney, Scotland
 

IV. Social Sculpture After the Middle Ages: Medievalisms and Beyond

Lieke Smits, Leiden University, Material Entanglements and Flows of Life: The Madonna Lactans as Social Sculpture

Martin F. Lešák, Norwegian Institute in Rome, Healing Old Wounds, Forging Strong Alliances: Transferring Sainte Foy’s Relics from Conques to Agen in 1879

Johanna Abel, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin, Enter Idolatry: The Social Sculpture of Sor Juana’s Processional Theater

Kris N. Racaniello, Sculpting Race: Tracing Resistance Heritage in Black and Indigenous Subversions of the Santiago Matamoros Imaginary