Assistant Professor, George H. and Ilene H. Forsyth Professor
About
Tina Bawden specializes in the art and material culture of the western European Middle Ages. Her research follows two interests, manuscript illumination and the arts of the threshold. For her current book project, she studies early medieval illuminated manuscripts from northwestern Europe from around 800 to 1100 and the way in which layout and structuring steps of manuscript preparation implicate constructions and conceptions of pictorial space. In addition to manuscript imagery and its historical and cultural contexts, this has led to questions of codicology and historiography, color, and the production of manuscripts.
Thresholds, liminal spaces and their images are a second focus. They were the topic of her PhD thesis and first book, Die Schwelle im Mittelalter: Bildmotiv und Bildort (Böhlau, 2014). Studying thresholds means engaging with some of the central art forms medieval buildings are known for – portal sculpture and reliefs, screens, and historiated doors made of wood or bronze. It enables approaching these with a variety of perspectives, for example notions of space and place, ritual, perception, performance, techniques of pictorial narrative and material. Recent articles have considered further hardware and materials that shaped and articulated medieval spaces of transition: door knockers, the more common but less-researched ironwork doors, and textiles.
Through both these topics, Tina Bawden has become interested the way in which planned and spontaneous or added images and traces of intervention and touch accrue (not only) within spaces of transition and manuscripts in the form of wear and polish, repair and reframing practices, and phenomena such as paradrawings. Further interests explored through teaching include techniques of pictorial narrative in the Middle Ages and beyond, ecologies and ecological perspectives of medieval art, and the role of monumental stone carving in northern Europe (Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia).
Tina Bawden’s work has been published in the journals Convivium, Different Visions and 21: inquiries, and she has contributed chapters to several collected volumes.
Recent publications:
Palms, Power, and Polished Metal. Medieval Door Knockers Up Close. 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual 3/2023, Issue Distanz, ed. by Anna Degler and Jan von Brevern, Fall 2023. https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2023.3.99099
Shifting grounds and shifting perspectives in the Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale MS Y 6 (274)). Different Visions, Issue 9 On Unstable Ground, ed. by Rachel Dressler and Benjamin Tilghman, Spring 2023. https://differentvisions.org/shifting-grounds/
Channeling the Gaze: Squints in Late Medieval Screens. In Medieval Art at the Intersection of Visuality and Material Culture: Studies in the ‘Semantics of Vision’, ed. by Raphaèle Preisinger, Turnhout: Brepols 2021, 211–238.
