Elizabeth Sears Professor and Director of Graduate Studies PhD Yale University

Elizabeth Sears specializes in European representational arts from the eighth through fourteenth century. Much of her research involves close study of manuscripts and precious objects, but her work is characteristically thematic and problem-based. Current projects range from the investigation of French guild regulations as a source of information about the medieval critical eye to the study of Carolingian notions of the divisions of time to a consideration of the place of the Beatitudes in twelfth-century art and religious life. Recently she has devoted herself additionally to investigations of art-historical thought and its history. Her early training in the tradition of Aby Warburg has led her to make the Warburgian heritage an area of study and teaching. She is at present working on a book concerning art history in the 1920s and 1930s.

Books:

Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 2002 (co-edited with Thelma K. Thomas)

Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling. Oxford University Press, 2000 (editor).

The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Articles:

"Scribal Wit in a Manuscript from the Châtelet: Images in the Margins of Boileau's Livre des métiers (BNF, MS fr. 24069)." Festschrift for Lucy Freeman Sandler. Ed. K. Smith and C. Krinsky. London: Harvey Miller Press (forthcoming).

"The Afterlife of Scribes: Swicher's Prayer in the Prüfening Isidore." In: Pen in Hand. Ed. M. Gullick and R. Rosenfeld. London: The Red Gull Press (forthcoming).

"Portraits in Counterpoint: Jerome and Jeremiah in an Augsburg Manuscript." In: Reading Medieval Images. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

"Ivory and Ivory Workers in Medieval Paris." In: Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, exhibition catalogue, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997, 19-37.

"Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival." In: Medicine and the Five Senses. Ed. W. Bynum and R. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 17-39.

"The Iconography of Auditory Perception in the Early Middle Ages: On Psalm Illustration and Psalm Exegesis." In: The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgment from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. Ed. C. Burnett, M. Fend, P. Gouk. London: Warburg Institute, 1991,19-38.