Reassessing Alabaster Sculpture in Medieval England

Jessica Brantley
Medieval Institute Publications
December 2020
978-1-5015-1812-6

This volume offers fresh approaches to both the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. Devotional alabaster images, too often thought of as “folk art” and narrowly English, were avidly collected and appreciated throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages, and this collection of essays seeks to help integrate them into the current discourse on materiality, the role of seriality in the changing modes of artistic production of the late Middle Ages, and the broad debate about whether it is useful to draw distinctions between elite/high and folk/low culture.

Edited by: Jessica Brantley, Stephen Perkinson, and Elizabeth C. Teviotdale