Joan A. Holladay – författare

With 446 entries examining some 550 works of figural, architectural, and decorative sculpture in 27 museums and public institutions, this volume continues the Census of Gothic Sculpture in America started by Dorothy Gillerman in 1989. In addition to such large and well-known collections as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Glencairn Museum, smaller collections and those not known for their medieval works, like the Barnes Foundation and the Explorers Club, are also inventoried. Generously supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Foundation, this book includes entries by 35 individual specialists.

Images and image cycles with genealogical content were everywhere in the high and later Middle Ages. They represent families related by blood as well as successive office holders and appear as family trees and lineages of single figures in manuscripts, on walls and in stained glass, and in sculpture and metalwork. Yet art historians have hardly remarked on the frequency of these images. Considering the physical contexts and functions of these works alongside the goals of their patrons, this volume examines groups of figural genealogies ranging across northern Europe and dating from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century. Joan A. Holladay considers how they were used to legitimize rulers and support their political and territorial goals, to reinforce archbishops' rights to crown kings, to cement relationships between families of founders and their monastic foundations, and to commemorate the dead. The flexibility and legibility of this genre was key to its widespread use.