New Publication co-edited by Jessica Richardson

Posted on 20 July 2022

Many congratulations to Jessica RIchardson on her new co-edited volume, Fashioned from Holy Matter (a special issue of the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics) which has just been published!

The volume explores how the beliefs in the sacred value of materials intersect with aesthetics, contributing to the use and activation of images in devotional and ritual practices, in a cross-cultural and interreligious perspective, from eighteenth-century Chinese paintings on Bodhi tree leaves, Native American Dakota stone sculpture, to Deccan reliefs, Ottoman relics, Byzantine icons and holy liquids from the Holy Land. The volume includes Jessica's co-authored editorial ‘Holy Matter and the Semantics of Image-Making’, and her own article, ‘Beneath: Image-Making and the Poetics of Wood in Thirteenth-Century Italy’. The latter brings together for the first-time paintings on holy trees or wood deemed holy, raising issues about the ontological relationships between materials, making and ideas of sacred presence.

Further details are available here.