Three new books by our faculty members—CMRS Director Massimo Ciavolella, and Professors Sharon Gerstel and Matthew Fisher—have just been published. All three are based on the proceedings of conferences that were sponsored and organized by the Center.
Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel, originated with our conference “Heaven and Earth: Perspectives on Greece’s Byzantium” which was convened in conjunction with exhibitions at the Getty museums in May 2014. The papers in this volume focus on the artistic legacy of Byzantine culture in Greece providing a foreground for the important role of this region.
St. Albans and the Markyate Psalter: Seeing and Reading in Twelfth-Century England, edited by Kristen Collins and Matthew Fisher, originated with our conference in February 2014. This conference was also associated with a Getty Museum exhibition and brought together an international group of scholars in a discussion about the intersections of art, literacy, and the readership of images in medieval England.
Savage Words: Invectives as a Literary Genre, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Gianluca Rizzo includes papers from the conference in February 2009. Invective is one the most antisocial spheres of language—a sphere one might expect to be ungoverned by conventions of genre, mere scathing ridicule or animated anarchy. On closer examination, invective reveals itself to be a tightly regulated literary genre. This volume delineates the rules of invective, shows its evolution and expressive ductility, and analyzes the texts.