Laura Tillery

Call for Papers: CFP: The Global North: Medieval Scandinavia on the Borders of Europe

An ICMA-sponsored session at International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 8-11 May 2020

The field of medieval studies recently denounced White Nationalism’s misuse and misappropriation of Scandinavian Norse mythology and the Viking era as a constructed ideal of a (white) medieval Europe. Indeed, premodern Scandinavia was a global enterprise dependent on the interactions, transactions, and mobility of many cultures and religions. This panel seeks to examine the cross-regional and -cultural connections of premodern Scandinavian art and architecture in a global context.

Not only is understanding medieval Scandinavian art important for addressing such outstanding misrepresentations today, but extant Scandinavian objects can provide valuable information about the medieval world broadly. For example, there remains a rich corpus of painted altar frontals and sculptures preserved in modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, despite the fact that such extant objects from medieval Scandinavia remain on the margins of scholarship. In this panel we aim to explore how medieval Scandinavian art and architecture contribute to our wider knowledge of the medieval world. We are especially keen on papers that promote interregional artistic relationships, as well as issues of race and identity in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages.

We conceive of Scandinavia broadly, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, as well as the Baltic and North Sea areas, and we define the Middle Ages in Scandinavia from the Viking Age through the sixteenth century. We welcome papers across geographic, temporal, and material contexts that address Scandinavian artistic and visual cultures in the Middle Ages. Materials may include, but are not limited to: architecture, sculpture, maps, manuscripts, woodcuts, and the visual arts of liturgy and pilgrimage.

Participants in ICMA-sponsored sessions must be ICMA members and may also be eligible to receive travel funds, generously provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. For more information please see: http://www.medievalart.org/kress-travel-grant.

Please send paper proposals of 300 words to the Chair of the ICMA Programs Committee, Beth Williamson (beth.williamson@bristol.ac.uk), and the co-organizers Ingrid Lunnan Nødseth (Ingrid.nodseth@ntnu.no) and Laura Tillery (laura.tillery@ntnu.no) by 3 September 2019, together with a short C.V., and a completed Participant Information Form, to be found at the following address: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions#papers.
Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to the Congress administration for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.

The ‘Late Gothic’ is a term traditionally used by art historians to categorize works of art produced after the ‘High Gothic,’ before the ‘Renaissance,’ and which feature stylistic motifs adapted from earlier Gothic forms. In short, the Late Gothic describes a wide variety of media that is chronologically, geographically, and stylistically inconsistent.  This paper will use fifteenth- and sixteenth-century carved wooden altarpieces made in Lübeck, Germany to interrogate the concept of the ‘Late Gothic’—a term always used to describe these works simply because there is not a more accurate one. I propose a more nuanced reading of the ‘Late Gothic’ in a northern European and Baltic context that is sensitive to style, but also considers the more complex phenomena of trade, function, and reception that inform the so-called Late Gothic forms of Lübeck altarpieces.

In 1491 the Hans Memling workshop in Bruges completed a multi-winged painted altarpiece destined for Lübeck, Germany. Now titled Passion Altarpiece or Greverade Altarpiece (Lübeck, St. Annen-Museum), the retable was commissioned by the Greverade merchant family to be installed in the family’s private chapel in the Lübeck Cathedral. Memling’s Passion Altarpiece was undoubtedly the most prestigious and ambitious retable in late medieval Lübeck. Yet the arrival of Memling’s painted altarpiece in Lübeck coincided with a prolific period of artistic patronage by the city’s mercantile elite in the late fifteenth century.
Like the Greverade family, Lübeck’s mercantile elite also used altarpieces to self-fashion themselves. Lübeck, as the leading member of the Hanse trade organization, was connected to mercantile ports in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. By the end of the fifteenth-century, Lübeck prevailed as a major center of artistic production and exchange in northern Europe; carved and painted altarpieces and wooden sculpture were commissioned, produced, and transported across the Hanse region in and out of Lübeck. This paper examines the corporate patronage of altarpieces by urban associations in fifteenth-century Lübeck. Lübeck’s community was socially organized into mercantile and civic companies, confraternities, and guilds, which performed annual processions, served in the civic government, and commissioned works for private chapels. In my paper, I look at the altarpieces produced for merchant spaces in Lübeck—spaces for the interwoven viewing communities of local merchant and civic leaders—in order to assess how these works trace trade connections and assert civic identity.

This paper examines the painted and printed city views of Lübeck from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in order to assess the pictorial role that cartography played in the formation of civic and Hanseatic identities. Focusing on how late-medieval and early modern artists used various visual means to represent Lübeck, this paper seeks to explain the cultural value of urban images for the patrician elite and Hanse mercantile communities. In particular, I will consider such works as Bernt Notke’s cityscape in his Lübeck Dance of Death, Hartmann Schedel’s “Lubeca” in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, woodcut), and Elias Diebel’s oversized woodcut View of Lübeck (1552).

This article examines painted and printed city views of Lübeck, Germany, from ca. 1465 to 1540 as a lens to examine the corporate body of Hanse merchants and towns in the Baltic late-medieval urban environment. Previous studies on painted views of Lübeck in the background of Bernt Notke’s Lübeck Dance of Death and Hermen Rode’s Altarpiece of Sts. Nicholas and Viktor interpret the cityscape as a marker for the dominance of Lübeck in the Baltic Sea. In identifying the manipulated monuments and spatial distortions in representations of Lübeck, this article draws upon the social context of patronage and recent studies on the Hanse network to argue that city views of Lübeck attest to the shared urban group and cultural practices between Hanse merchants and towns. The Lübeck city view, displayed locally and extraterritorially, and further proliferated in early printed geography books, catered to the Hanse collective of intertwined consumers and markets.