Convivium Supplementum

Conques has been an important node a singularity within many entangled histories from late antiquity to the present. This volume publishes papers expanding on the second conference of the project “Conques in the Global World. Transferring Knowledge: from Material to Immaterial Heritage” (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange H2020). Held in October 2023 at the Centre européen in Conques the workshop brought together international experts from a variety of disciplines and geographies indicating the directions future studies of this site might take and reflecting on its material literary and historiographical legacy.

The collected essays in this volume reflect scholarly and artistic fascination with Conques. They question open and reopen important dossiers bringing fresh insights and perspectives on the site’s material literary and performative culture. These range from Bernard of Angers’s Miracles of Sainte Foy and the scholarly reception of this text to charged discussions of the architectural sources and models for the abbey-church and its role in regional and interregional dynamics. From the heated architectural history the essays segue into the other hot topic of Conques: rethinking the elusive Majesty of Sainte Foy. Essays examine its fabrication history its specific perception during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and its staging and geographical anchoring. These analyses give way to an essay devoted to Conques’ nineteenth-century reconstruction. The present volume closes with a text devoted to the mediation of medieval literary culture within contemporary contexts. In their disciplinary diversity this volume unites scholarly traditions opening new avenues for the study of a medieval site which through its entangled histories captivates scholars around the world.

During the Middle Ages new past narratives emerged but several of these narratives are not based on the archaeological rediscovery of a lost history. On the contrary in many cases that impression of a unique grandiose and ancient past is partly the result of accurate dissimulation. Yet it would not be exact to consider the myth of Venice as a fiction or somehow as a fabricated invention – an apocryphal creation that does not include any historical component. Instead the myth of Venice has been generated through an intricate operation of composing unconnected pieces through a process of attributing new meanings to previously unconnected pieces of different histories or objects from other pasts. The result is a patchwork that through the longue durée has been articulated around both new and ancient stories local and foreign myths reconstructed or rediscovered objects and narratives. By the late Middle Ages Venice becomes the main stage of a national and international myth: while enhancing its historical role in the past the city demonstrates the legitimacy of its role in the present. In light of such phenomenon this volume will try to demonstrate that Venetian past narratives bring together heterogeneous materials to achieve a common result: that of celebrating Venice’s triumph and erasing its weaknesses and defeats.

This book questions the place of Armenian visual and material culture in the period known as Late Antiquity at a time when Armenia is usually presented as an in-between space defined by surrounding external entities: the Roman and the Persian and later Arab world. The volume includes articles that confront this notion both from the perspective of art history architecture and archaeology and from a historiographical point of view which examines the reception of Armenian arts by scholars from Italy Russia and France. The articles in this richly illustrated volume aim to reposition Armenia as one of the forces of artistic creation and mediation to be reckoned with within the Mediterranean and Eurasian space of Late Antiquity. This project draws on the papers presented at the conference “Re-Constructing Late Antique Armenia (2nd–8th Centuries CE). Historiography Material Culture Immaterial Heritage” that took place in February 2022 at the Center for Early Medieval Studies in Brno Czech Republic.

The contributions of this special issue - proceedings of the conference on royal nunneries that took place in Prague in July 2020 - focus on the monasteries connected to the ruling houses which were endowed with special privileges and enriched by royal and aristocratic donations often serving as instrumenta regni. They are introduced as active cultural hubs stages for royal and courtly promotion and places of personal and dynastic self-representation. This includes female monasteries the agency of female élites in medieval society and their role as patrons and addressees of works of art.

The thematic framework of this special issue is an examination of the impact Russian émigrés had on the humanities and art. From art history to philosophy artistic creation to ecumenical dialogue the volume is dedicated to figures who through their emigration from Russia transformed their places of arrival and relevant fields. The articles in the volume assess these topics from an interdisciplinary point of view extending the usual horizons of Convivium to other fields as well. The volume was published as the proceedings of the conference Transformed by Emigration. Welcoming Russian Intellectuals Scientists and Artists 1917-1945 held at the Hans Belting Library in February 2019.

The thematic frame of this issue is the anthropological notion of liminality applied both to physical as well as imaginary places of transition in medieval art. The volume is thus dedicated to the phenomenon of the limen the threshold in medieval culture understood mainly as a spatial ritual and temporal category. The structure of the book follows the virtual path of any medieval visitor entering the sacred space. While doing so the visitor encountered and eventually crossed several "liminal zones" that have been constructed around a series of physical and mental thresholds. In order to truly access the sacred - once again both physically and metaphorically - many transitional (micro)rituals were required and were therefore given particular attention within this volume. The volume was published as proceedings of the Liminality and Medieval Art II conference which was held in October 2018 at the Masaryk University in Brno. Authors were supposed to conceive their contributions in pairs in order to reflect on the selected topics with an interdisciplinary approach. In the end the very same pattern was also maintained for the final publication.

The volume serves as an introduction to what its editors have chosen to call the “artistic cultures” prevalent during the Middle Ages in the region of the South Caucasus. Although far from comprehensive in terms of material chronology and geography the volume intends to raise awareness of a region whose artistic wealth and cultural diversity has remained relatively unknown to most medievalists. Stretching from Eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East and from the snow-capped Great Caucasus mountain range in the north to the Armenian highlands in the south medieval southern Caucasia was originally divided into the kingdom of Caucasian Albania Greater and Lesser Armenia and western and eastern Georgia that is the kingdoms of Lazica (Egrisi) and Iberia (Kartli) respectively. Together these entities made the South Caucasus a true frontier region between Europe and Asia and a place of transcultural exchange. Its official Christianization began as early as in the fourth century even before Constantine the Great founded Constantinople or had himself been converted to Christianity. During the subsequent centuries the region became a well-connected and strategic buffer zone for its neighboring and occupant Byzantine Persian Islamic Seljuk and Mongol powers. And although subject to constantly shifting borders the medieval kingdoms of the South Caucasus remained an internally diverse yet shared and distinct geographical and historical unity. Far from being isolated these cultures were part of a much wider medieval universe. Because of the transcultural nature and elevated artistic quality of their objects and monuments they have much to offer the field of art history which has recently been challenged to think more globally in terms of transculturation movement and appropriation among medieval cultures.