Medievalism II: Fragments, Fictions, Futures

Following our first special issue, Encountering Medievalism, this second volume in the two-part series further investigates art historical medievalisms, with a focus on how medieval visual and material culture has been imagined, collected, adapted, and deployed in contexts shaped by fantasy, nostalgia, or revivalist aesthetics, as well as by colonial, orientalizing, and nationalist agendas.

We welcome contributions that examine the confessional, personal, anecdotal, whimsical, or nostalgic dimensions of medievalism—modes that can themselves be fraught or problematic, yet also reveal much about the power of “the medieval.” At the same time, we seek contributions that grapple with the enduring legacies of these frameworks and their implications for both public perception and scholarly understanding of the Middle Ages. Essays may focus on art, architecture, design, display practices, and other visual traditions—especially those shaped by or responding to imperial or appropriative narratives. We encourage contributions that highlight how medievalism has been a site of pleasure, play, imagination, and creativity, while also critically engaging with the power structures—economic, racial, gendered, and political—that have underpinned the making and circulation of medievalisms. Contributors are encouraged to think expansively and critically about “the medieval” as a mutable and contested category. Click here to learn more!

Medieval Art History Tomorrow: A Whiteboard Session

Issue Fourteen, Open Issue: Call for Submissions

Issue fourrteen of Different Visions is the second of the journal’s open issues, which contain peer-reviewed essays on a variety of timely topics that are published when they are ready. We welcome the submission of individual articles and projects. Different Visions aims for inclusive publishing and welcomes a variety of approaches and topics reflecting the diversity of medieval visual and material culture. It publishes work that engages with all forms of critical theory, including Premodern Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, the global Middle Ages, and Medievalism. It also welcomes projects that work at the intersection of medieval art history and the digital humanities. In addition, it seeks integrated, socially-engaged, or pedagogical projects that examine the role of medieval visual culture in our contemporary world. Please see our submissions page for more information.

Special Issue: Points of Friction

If the mission of art history is to make sense of visual and material cultures, then what can be learned from objects that resist art historical study? How can medieval art history benefit from the methodological frictions this resistance generates? Scholars of medieval art may expect to encounter ‘friction’ from archives, individual artworks or methodologies. This Special Issue, edited by Dr Millie M. Horton-Insch (hortonim@tcd.ie) and Dr Lauren Rozenberg (l.rozenberg@uea.ac.uk), invites contributors working across the medieval period to reflect on artworks that they find compelling, but which they feel they have “failed” to satisfactorily engage in art historical study. Abstracts due March 3, 2026. Click here to read more!