Last night the lecture theatre at the King’s Manor was packed to capacity for the York Medieval Lecture delivered by Professor Bianca Kühnel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the paper, she examined the influence of holy architecture in Jerusalem upon Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel built at Aachen.
We would like to thank both Professor Kühnel for her excellent lecture and for the seminar that she ran today for our postgraduate students, and also Dr Hanna Vorholt of the Department of the History of Art who has organized these events.
Professor Kühnel and Dr Vorholt are the leaders of a research project entitled Projections of Jerusalem in Europe: A Monumental Network, which is funded until April 2015 by the European Research Council. The project documents and examines visual translations of Jerusalem across Europe, including such famous examples as the Temple Church in London or the Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy, but also a multitude of lesser-known sites which have hitherto been studied only at a regional level.
The research group at York (Dr Hanna Vorholt, Dr Laura Slater and Claudia Jung) focuses on Jerusalem translations in Great Britain and the Low Countries, as well as on Western medieval maps of Jerusalem.
They will be holding a conference in York on 20-21 March 2015, entitled ‘The Politics of Visual Translations of Jerusalem’. Considering the ways in which Jerusalem and its holy places were imagined, visually represented, and replicated across the medieval, early modern and modern periods, the conference will ask: What political interests or regimes have become invested in the recreation of Jerusalem? How have local or wider political events impacted on Jerusalem translations and their histories, for example with regard to iconoclasm and politically-motivated acts of vandalism and destruction? As such, the conference will examine political dimensions in the construction, use, appropriation, and reception history of visual translations of Jerusalem, seeking to establish a productive scholarly dialogue between place, period and political agenda.
Medieval Studies at York 