Unholy Light Leuven

[Kayleen]

EditorsRalph Deconinck, Marie-Christine Claes, Barbara Baert

Series: Art & Religion, 13

Summary: This volume is dedicated to the study of late medieval and early modern liturgical objects, once known as ornamenta sacra. It encompasses a wide range of objects made of various materials and techniques which are not only essential for the rites, but also hold a central position in the religious and artistic production of the past. The contributions to this volume understand them at the heart of a system of complex relationships which make them contribute to their religious functions, but also to their aesthetic, symbolic and social ones: relationships with the men who commissioned, produced and manipulated them, but also with liturgical time and space; relationships too between these different objects, as also with the prescriptive and spiritual frameworks which dictate or accompany their uses. It is the life of these objects that is here recounted, objects invested with value at one and the same time religious, financial and aesthetic.

To order, follow this link: -leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=9789042948280&series_number_str=13&lang=en

Barbara Baert is Professor of Art History at KU Leuven. She teaches in the field of Iconology, Art Theory & Analysis, and Medieval Art. Her work links knowledge and questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and shows great sensitivity to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts.

On 14 October 2021, ENID member Jacolien Wubs successfully defended her PhD thesis To Proclaim, to Instruct and to Discipline. The Visuality of Texts in Calvinist Churches in the Dutch Republic at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). This project was supervised by Prof. Raingard Esser (Groningen) and ENID member Justin Kroesen (Bergen). ENID member Prof. Henning Laugerud (Bergen) was a member of the evaluation committee.

The traditional image of the Dutch church interior is that of a whitewashed, serene space: the strong emphasis on the Word after the Reformation resulted in the thorough removal of imagery from the formerly Catholic churches. However, this study of text panels and text paintings in Dutch Calvinist church interiors in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the Word did not completely rule out the visual in Reformed church interiors. In fact, the Word itself was turned into an image, and text decoration became a means in the adaptation of churches for Reformed use.

The thesis includes a comparison of forms of text decoration in churches of different protestant denominations around the North Sea, including England and Norway (Jacolien Wubs spent a semester as a guest researchjer at the University Museum of Bergen in 2018).

Our member Salvador Ryan is currently guest-editing a special issue of the journal Religions, on Representations and Interpretations of the Passion and Death of Christ: Global Perspectives. Please follow this link for all relevant details: _issues/passion_death_Christ Readers may also be interested in some of the articles that were published in the last special issue, on Material Religion, Popular Belief and Catholic Devotional Practice in the Age of Vatican II (c. 1948-c. 1998): Global Perpectives, which is now available online: _issues/mrpb

Northern European Reformations

James E. Kelly, Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan (eds.), Northern European Reformations. Transnational Perspectives. Palgrave MacMillanThis book examines the experiences and interconnections of the Reformations, principally in Denmark-Norway and Britain and Ireland (but with an eye to the broader Scandinavian landscape as well) and discusses instances of similarities between the Reformations in both realms. The volume features a comprehensive introduction and provides a broad survey of the beginnings and progress of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations in Northern Europe, while also highlighting themes of comparison that are common to all of the bloc under consideration, which will be of interest to Reformation scholars across this geographical region.

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