Dr Beth Williamson
Senior Lecturer
MA (Oxford and London), PhD (London)
FSA
Office: 2.30, 9 Woodland Road
Phone: +44 (0)117 954 6047
Email: beth.williamson@bristol.ac.uk
Beth Williamson studied at the University of Oxford (B.A. in Modern History) and at the Courtauld Institute of Art (M.A & Ph.D). Before joining the History of Art department at Bristol in 1998, she taught at the University of East Anglia, University College London and the Courtauld Institute.
Current projects include a book The Embodiment of Devotion: Art, Music and Affect in Late Medieval England (for which she has received an AHRC Fellowship for the academic year 2010/11), and a joint research project entitled ‘The Effect of the Arts’, with Professor Emma Dillon (Music, University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Stephen Jaeger (German and Comparative Literatures, Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Recent publications include an essay on 'How Magnificent was Medieval Art?', in S. Jaeger (ed.), From Magnificat to Magnificence: the Aesthetics of Grandeur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Forthcoming publications include an edited volume Medieval Art and Architecture at Bristol Cathedral: An Enigma Explored arising from the conference 'An Enigma Explored' (University of Bristol, September 2008), to be published by Boydell and Brewer in 2011.
Research interests
- Italian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
- Netherlandish painting of the fifteenth century
- Iconography of the Virgin Mary
- Altarpieces and their functions
- Relationships between liturgy, devotion and visual culture
- Relationships between art and authority, politics and patronage
- Relationships between different artistic media
- Issues of iconography and reception
- The body, including: the bodies of the Virgin Mary and of Christ
- Attitudes towards, and treatment of, the human bodies of saints
- The ways in which clerics, worshippers, pilgrims and others use their own bodies in the performance of religious and devotional activity
Her most recent book, The Madonna of Humility: development, dissemination and reception, explores the iconography and development of the image of the Virgin seated on the ground, the assimilation and translation of the image between different cultural milieux, and its function and reception.
Beth Williamson is interested in supervising students undertaking research in any of the areas listed above, and in later medieval art and architecture more generally. She currently supervises students working in diverse range of areas, including fourteenth-century Sienese, Florentine and Paduan painting, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting, the paintings of the Order of St John in Malta, the depiction and meaning of gloves in British portraits of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Publications
Books
- The Madonna of Humility: development, dissemination and reception, (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009)
- Christian Art: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: OUP, 2004)
- (Edited with Joanna Cannon) Art, Politics and Civic Religion in Central Italy c.1261-c. 1352, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
Articles
- ‘Site, seeing and salvation in medieval Avignon’, Art History, 30:1 2007, 1-25
- ‘Medieval artists: masters in directing the artist’s gaze’, (with Ute Leonards, Roland Baddeley, Iain D. Gilchrist, Tom Troscianko and Patrick Ledda), Current Biology, 17:1, 2007, R8-R9
- ‘Locating Religious Experience: the interaction of images and architecture, space and action, Art History, 29:5, 2006, 931-7 (reviewing Janis Elliott and Cordelia Warr (eds.), The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina: Art, Iconography and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Naples (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) and Robert Maniura, Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004))
- ‘Altarpieces and Images: Liturgy and Devotion’, Speculum: the International Journal for Medieval Studies, 79.2, April 2004, pp. 341-406
- ‘The Cloisters Double Intercession: the Virgin as Co-Redemptrix’, Apollo, vol. CLII, November 2000, pp. 48-54
- ‘The Virgin Lactans as Second Eve: image of the Salvatrix’, Studies in Iconography, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 105-138
Contributions to books
- ‘Mirrors in Art: Images as Mirrors’, in Miranda Anderson (ed.) The Book of the Mirror (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 132-150
- ‘Liturgical Image or Devotional Image?: The London Madonna of the Firescreen, in C. Hourihane (ed.), Objects, Images and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 298-318