Early Drama, Art, and Music – serie

This volume celebrates the storied career of Stephen N. Fliegel, the former Robert Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Authors of these essays, all leading curators in their fields, offer insights into curatorial practices by highlighting key objects in some of the most important medieval collections in North America and Europe: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Louvre, the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Getty, the Groeningemuseum, The Morgan Library, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, of course, the CMA, offering perspectives on the histories of collecting and display, artistic identity, and patronage, with special foci on Burgundian art, acquisition histories, and objects in the CMA.

With little scholarly attention having been given to the late medieval iconography that features on rood screens in the southwest of England, the significance of the figures painted at Berry Pomeroy has long been underappreciated. The unlocking of their meaning by the author has led to the discovery of a unique iconographic program. The gestures adopted by many of these figures belong to a common visual culture in the art and drama of the medieval church. The iconography, which reflects a Gothic Mannerist style of the early sixteenth century, displays a marked theatricality giving expression to the mysteries of the faith in the form of a drama. The narrative recorded has notable similarities to that found in a dramatic trilogy which was once performed in Cornwall called the Ordinalia. This book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the genre of mysticism in art and to our understanding of popular devotional practices on the eve of the Reformation.

This interdisciplinary and transhistorical collection of essays examines the subject of violence and gender in dramatic works and performances from the premodern period.The essays feature approaches grounded in intersectional literary, performance, feminist, masculinity, queer, and violence studies. The collection as a whole participates in current field concerns regarding disciplinarity and periodization, with particular attention to how the false divisions of periodization too often flatten or otherwise obfuscate important ongoing trends and social constructions and contexts that influence performance activity in living communities.Through an approach that includes essays crossing methodologies and the artificial boundaries of periodization, as well as essays that engage with similar concepts in different genres and across national divides in an era in which France and England were decidedly influencing one another, this book provides a single-volume starting point for (re)considering periodization, genre, and the representation of gender according to social contexts.These investigations offer new approaches to premodern drama and gender studies, and situate well-known texts alongside non-canonical counterparts.

This book builds on the foundational studies of Schlosser, Panofsky, Garin, Baxandall, and Blunt who traced the intellectual emancipation of the visual arts in Renaissance Italy, while responding to more recent scholarship on rhetoric, pedagogy, and art theory (Van Eck, Dressen, Ames-Lewis).Unlike earlier treatments that isolate individual authors or emphasise social history, this study reframes Renaissance art treatises – by Cennini, Alberti, Leonardo, Varchi, and Vasari – as a coherent sub-genre of humanistic educational literature. By highlighting their pedagogical, rhetorical, and Aristotelian foundations, it uncovers the ways these texts forged a new ontological system that integrated the visual arts into the liberal arts.The book’s contribution lies in bridging art history, intellectual history, and literary studies, demonstrating how artistic literature both drew from and reshaped humanist discourse. In doing so, it addresses disciplinary fragmentation and repositions Renaissance art theory within the broader genealogy of the Humanities.