By Stephen Murray (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) In this groundbreaking work, Stephen Murray seizes a rare opportunity to explore the relationship between verbal and visual culture by presenting a sermon that may have been preached during the second half of the thirteenth century in or near the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Amiens, whose sculptural program was … Continued
By John Beldon Scott (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) The famed linen cloth preserved in Turin Cathedral has provoked pious devotion, scientific scrutiny, and morbid curiosity. Imprinted with an image many faithful have traditionally believed to be that of the crucified Christ "painted in his own blood," the Shroud remains an object of intense debate and notoriety … Continued
By Stephen Murray (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear on a new approach to understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Plotting Gothic positions the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of … Continued
By John Philip Thomas (NHC Fellow, 1984–85) Private religious foundations were prominent features of the ecclesiastical geography of the Byzantine Empire throughout its history. Since the hierarchy of the church generally lacked the financial resources necessary for undertaking ambitious building programs, laymen took the initiative in providing churches, monasteries, and philanthropic institutions such as hospitals … Continued
After the ancient Roman Empire embraced Christianity, the empire’s culture and politics were significantly transformed. In this podcast, Dennis Trout shares insights from his interdisciplinary study of poetic inscriptions found throughout ancient Rome. He considers the way these epigrams were embedded in the city's architecture and displayed to an empire in transition, and he suggests they go beyond considerations of religion, literature, and culture to illuminate the ways that visual and textual cues were used to send messages to a diverse audience in the ancient world.