Publication News
You will find updates about new publications by Department staff in this section of the website. More information about publications can also be found in the individual staff profiles.
Professor Liz Prettejohn
Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War
With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National Gallery in London, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian England as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velázquez, and others, British artists elevated contemporary art to new heights through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyses the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Covering the arc of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, this volume traces the ways in which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past and produced some of the greatest art of the later 19th century.
Professor Jane Hawkes
'Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World'
Interdisciplinary studies are increasingly widely recognised as being among the most fruitful approaches to generating original perspectives on the medieval past. In this major collection of 27 papers, contributors transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new approaches to a number of themes ranging in time from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages. The main focus is on material culture, but also includes insights into the compositional techniques of Bede and the Beowulf-poet, and the strategies adopted by anonymous scribes to record information in unfamiliar languages.
Contributors offer fresh insights into some of the most iconic survivals from the period, from the wooden doors of Sta Sabina in Rome to the Ruthwell Cross, and from St Cuthbert's coffin to the design of its final resting place, the Romanesque cathedral at Durham. Important thematic surveys reveal early medieval Welsh and Pictish carvers interacting with the political and intellectual concerns of the wider Insular and continental world.
Other contributors consider what it is to be Viking, revealing how radically present perceptions shape our understanding of the past, how recent archaeological work reveals the inadequacy of the traditional categorisation of the Vikings as ‘incomers', and how recontextualising Viking material culture can lead to unexpected insights into famous historical episodes such as King Edgar's boat trip on the Dee.
Professor Helen Hills
'The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity.'
This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro's miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.
If you are interested in Helen's book please download an order form here: Matter of miracles (PDF 
, 143kb)
Professor Helen Hills
Helen Hills' Rethinking the Baroque has been selected by Routledge for release as paperback. In this book leading scholars from art history, philosophy, literature studies -- including Mieke Bal, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Tom Conley, and Alina Payne -- reconsider the potential of ‘baroque’. The book was the outcome of an interdisciplinary conference held at York and Castle Howard in 2006 and was first published by Ashgate in 2011 with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Here are a few clips from reviews:
- 'Rethinking the Baroque from a serious, scholarly point of view, is a well-needed enterprise, and this collection of essays by some of the most important thinkers of our time marvellously tackles the task'. (Renaissance Quarterly);
- ‘Hills’s purpose in assembling such a vibrant and diffuse collection of essays on the baroque was to ‘trouble the smooth waters of a linear historicism’ (p. 91), and this collection certainly succeeds in doing that, building on Walter Benjamin’s complicating notions of historical time and the nature of fate, as well as expanding understandings of baroque culture and rejecting early modern pre-eminence.’ EV Devlin (Univ of Cambridge), The Seventeenth Century 28:1, 100-103: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2012.760948
- ‘This book’s greatest contribution is that it prompts historians of Baroque art and architecture to look again at the term and its implications, and with the aid of Deleuze’s ‘fold’ reassess the period through the prism of its very construction and history as an archive worthy of study.’ (Burlington Magazine).
You should be able to purchase the book directly through Routledge’s website or through its customer service department.
Professor Anthony Geraghty, Dr Richard Johns and others
'Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture 1660-1735' (2016).
This volume has emerged from the collaborative research project Court, Country, City: British Art, 1660-1735, run by the History of Art department at York, and Tate Britain, with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Edited by former Head of Department Mark Hallett, with Nigel Llewellyn and Martin Myrone, the book features essays by Anthony Geraghty and Richard Johns, as well as Emily Mann, and former Postdoctoral Researchers with the department Lydia Hamlett and Richard Stephens, and alumna Caroline Good.
Published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Professor Liz Prettejohn, Dr Richard Johns and Dr Jane Hawkes
The first edition of 'British Art Studies' (2015) reflects York's strong expertise in this field.
Published three times a year, this new digital open-access and peer-reviewed journal produced by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art has contributions from several York academics and students. The Conversation Piece: 'There's no such thing as British Art' was coordinated by Richard Johns and evolved from a conference convened by Richard in York last year. Contributors include Richard Johns, Liz Prettejohn, Jane Hawkes, former PhD student Cora Gilroy-Ware and current PhD student Amy Tobin.
Dr Cordula van Wyhe
Margaret van Noort: Spiritual Writings of Sister Margaret of the Mother of God (1635–1643) edited by Cordula van Wyhe (2015). The book is Volume 39 of The Toronto Series: The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe published by ACMRS Publications. The Spanish texts of Margaret of the Mother of God have been translated by Susan M Smith.
Dr Hanna Vorholt
'Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel', edited by Hanna Vorholt and Renana Bartal (2015).
This volume analyses how Jerusalem is translated into the visual and material culture of medieval, early modern and contemporary Europe, and in what ways European encounters with the city have shaped its holy sites. It also demonstrates methodological shifts in the study of Jerusalem in Western art by mapping the diversity of concepts that underlie imaginations of the city as an earthly presence and a heavenly realization, as a physical and a mental space, and as a unique location which is multiplied and re-imagined in numerous copies elsewhere.
Other contributors include Lily Arad, Pnina Arad, Barbara Baert, Neta B. Bodner, Iris Gerlitz, Anastasia Keshman Wasserman, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Ora Limor, Galit Noga-Banai, Robert Ousterhout, Yamit Rachman-Schrire, Bruno Reudenbach, Alessandro Scafi, Tsafra Siew, and Victor I. Stoichita.
Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel is available in print and in electronic editions.
Dr Jane Hawkes et al
The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World (2015) is a new publication edited by Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes & Melissa Herman.
This volume challenges traditional perceptions of the Medieval, exploring the many ways in which it was actively transformatory and how ideas of change are reflexively understood within academic discourse. The Medieval was long viewed as an unenlightened counterpoint to the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Renaissance’, being perceived as static and monolithic compared to their pivotal dynamism. Despite this, the Medieval period witnessed immense transition and transformation, change and development, producing significant and challenging material. Here, the wider debate about cultural crossroads and understandings in the Medieval period is readdressed, to ask what the Medieval was, is and might be.
Meg Boulton is a freelance art historian awarded her doctorate by University of York. Jane Hawkes is reader in the Department of History of Art, University of York. Melissa Herman is currently pursuing her PhD at University of York.
Dr Emanuele Lugli
Emanuele Lugli's first book, 'Unità di Misura: Breve storia del metro in Italia' (Unit of Measure: A Short History of the Meter in Italy) tracks the spreading of the metric system under Napoleon and the way it slowly transformed architectural practices and the perception of artworks. (2014)
Sarah Brown
'Apocalpyse: The Great East Window of York Minster' (2014) is a book written by Sarah Brown as she oversees the restoration of the 'Sistine Chapel of stained glass' at York Minster.
Dr Emanuele Lugli
Emanuele has published an article in a new book by Ashgate, as well as translating another in the same volume.
Emanuele's article, 'Squarely Built: An Inquiry into the Sources of Ad Quadratum Geometry in Lombard Architecture between the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries', appears in a new book published by Ashgate, Space in the Medieval West: Places, Territories, and Imagined Geographies. In the same edition he has translated an article, 'From Plebs to Parochia: the perception of the Church in space from the ninth to the twelfth century' into English from the original French. (2014)
Dr Cordula Van Wyhe
"The Making and Meaning of the Monastic Habit at Spanish Habsburg Courts" in Early Modern Habsburg Women: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities, edited by Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino (Ashgate 2013). 243-275
Dr Jane Hawkes
Making Histories, a collection of 32 essays arising for the 6th International Conference on Insular Art in 2011, edited by Jane and including essays by Jane and several York PhD students. More information and to order: Making Histories (PDF , 284kb)
Professor Jason Edwards
"'By Abstraction Springs Forth Ideal Beauty?’: John Gibson’s Modernity" in Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in Britain, 1768-1848 (Ashgate, 2013), 195-220.
Dr Michael White
Virgin Microbe (Northwestern University Press 2013)
Dr Richard Johns
Turner & The Sea (Thames & Hudson 2013)
Dr Anthony Geraghty
The Sheldonian Theatre Architecture and Learning in Seventeenth-century Oxford (Yale University Press, 2013)
Dr Michael White
Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (Yale University Press, 2013)
Professor Helen Hills
New Approaches to Naples c.1500–c.1800 (Ashgate, 2013)
Dr Tim Ayers
The Medieval Stained Glass of Merton College, Oxford (British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2013)
Professor Richard Marks
Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (Pindar, 2013)
Dr Jo Applin
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (London and Cambridge, Mass: Afterall and MIT Press, 2012)
Dr Jo Applin
Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012)
Dr Cordula Van Wyhe
Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, edited by Cordula van Wyhe, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, (Madrid 2012). The fourteen authors of this in-depth study bring a considerable diversity of approaches, methods and perspectives to our understanding of the infanta as a political and cultural figure – from her childhood at the Spanish court to her death as a widow. She comes alive not only as a historical person on the broader diplomatic stage of early modern European politics but also in the specific visual, devotional and ritual practices, which underpinned female sovereignty. As the first publication of its kind, this book will prove essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. Available in English and Spanish.
Dr Michael White
Hans Janssen and Michael White, 'The Story of De Stijl / Het verhaal van De Stijl' (Ludion Press, Antwerp, 2011). Written in collaboration with a senior curator at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Michael White's new publication accompanies the major, new permanent display there on Mondrian and De Stijl, which opened in September 2011
'Strange Encounters: Claes Oldenburg's "Proposed Colossal Monuments" for New York and London', Art History, 34:4 (September 2011), pp. 838-857
(ed.), Rethinking the Baroque (Aldershot: Asgate, 2011).
Rethinking the Baroque flyer (PDF , 69kb)
This important volume is now out.
William Etty: Art & Controversy (London: Philip Wilson Publishers in association with York Museums Trust, 2011) accompanies a major exhibition on William Etty at York Art Gallery. It contains essays by four members of the department, Dr Sarah Burnage, Professor Jason Edwards, Professor Mark Hallett and Dr Sarah Victoria Turner.
Dr Nicholas Chare
'Writing Perceptions: The Matter of Words and the Rollright Stones', in Art History 34:2 (April 2011), pp. 244-67
Professor Jason Edwards
'"Tell Me Not Wherein I Seem Unnatural”: Queer Meditations upon Coriolanus in the Time of War', in Madhavi Menon, ed., Shakesqueer (Duke University Press, 2010).
Dr Jo Applin
‘Productive Fictions: Eva Löfdahl’, in Ann-Sofi Noring (ed) Eva Löfdahl (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2011)
Dr James Boaden
'Black Painting (with Ashville Citizen)', in Art History, 31:1 (Feb 2011), 166-191
James Boaden's article (PDF , 1,218kb)
Dr Jeanne Nuechterlein
Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric
Dr Nick Chare
Auschwitz and After images: abjection, witnessing, and representation
Dr Sarah Victoria Turner
'Stone, Sex and Empire: Direct Carving and "British" Sculpture', in Modern British Sculpture
