Studies in Iconography 39 (2018)

Dr. Gil Fishhof teaches medieval and crusader art history in the Department of Art History at Haifa University. He specializes in French Romanesque art and devotes his research to questions of Romanesque architecture in Burgundy; patronage; art within the order of Cluny; and the meaning of models in Romanesque architecture. He has dedicated his dissertation to the Church of Saint-Hilaire in Semur-en- Brionnais (Burgundy) and to its castellan patrons, investigating the manifestation of patronage on the church's architecture and sculptural cycles. His second area of research is crusader art, and his recent studies were dedicated to the mural cycle of the church of Emmaus (Abu-Gosh) and its Hospitaller patrons, as well as to the church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. His publications appeared in Mediaevistik, Arte Medievale, Annales de Bourgogne, and Viator, among others.

Jitske Jasperse (PhD, Art History, University of Amsterdam, 2013) currently holds a postdoctoral position (Juan de la Cierva-Formación) at the Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, where she participates in the project "The Medieval Treasury across Frontiers and Generations: The Kingdom of León-Castilla in the Context of Muslim-Christian Interchange, c. 1050-1200." She is a founding Member of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Amsterdam, as well as the Treasurer and an Executive Committee Member of CARMEN The Worldwide Medieval Network. Among her publications are "Women, Courtly Display and Gifts in the Rolandslied and the Chanson de Roland," Mediaevistik (2017)" and "Matilda, Leonor and Joanna: The Plantagenet Sisters and the Display of Dynastic Connections through Material Culture," Journal of Medieval History (2017). Her forthcoming book Power and Material Culture in the Twelfth Century: Matilda Plantagenet's Treasures (ARC Humanities Press) offers a fresh reading of both the visual and written sources connected to Princess Matilda and her contemporaries. By crossing the limits of traditional approaches and investigating both women and their objects within a dynamic interdisciplinary context this book demonstrates how artworks facilitated elite women's active roles in medieval society and politics.

Elizabeth Lastra received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Her work on the city of Carrión de los Condes and region of Palencia in northern Spain investigates questions of urbanization, pilgrimage and its infrastructure, and the dynamics of economically and culturally diverse communities. She is also dedicated to expanding our means of viewing and studying medieval art through new visualization technologies; her website, RomanesqueSpain.com, provides virtual access to Romanesque sites with three dimensional modeling and gigapixel photography. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Casa de Velázquez, and the Fulbright Program.

Nurith Kenaan-Kedar (1938-2015) received her D.Phil. from the University of Basel in 1964 and was Professor of Art History at Tel Aviv University. She published on Crusader art in the Holy Land, Romanesque and Gothic marginal sculpture in France, Eleanor of Aquitaine as patron of the arts, tradition and innovation in nineteenth- and twentieth century Christian art in the Holy Land, and crafts and arts in twentieth-century Israel. Her posthumously published works include "Pictorial and Sculptural Commemoration of Returning or Departing Crusaders," in The Crusades and Visual Culture, ed. Elizabeth Lapina (Farnham, 2015); "Marginal Sculpture - Where New Identities Emerge. The 48 Sculptures of Laon Cathedral," in The Sides of the North. An Anthology in Honor of Yona Pinson, ed. Tamar Cholcman and Assaf Pinkus (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2015); "Decorative Architectural Sculpture in Crusader Jerusalem: The Eastern, Western and Armenian Sources of a Local Visual Culture," in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian J. Boas (London and New York, 2016); and "The Architectural Sculpture of Montfort Castle Revisited," in Montfort: History, Early Research and Recent Studies of the Principal Fortress of the Teutonic Order in the Latin East, ed. Adrian J. Boas (Leiden, 2017).

Maria G. Parani, D.Phil. (2000, Oxford University) is Associate Professor in Byzantine and Post Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Cyprus, where she has been teaching since 2005. Her research interests comprise daily life in Byzantium and the exploration of alternative sources for the study of Byzantine material culture to supplement archaeological data, such as written texts and artistic representations; Byzantine dress; light and lighting in Byzantium; Byzantine imperial ceremonial and interregional exchange in the field of court culture; concealment and revelation in imperial and religious ritual; and, the art and material culture of Byzantine and Frankish Cyprus, especially from the eleventh century down to the fifteenth. She has participated in numerous international conferences in Cyprus and abroad and has published on Byzantine art, material culture, and imperial ceremonial. Currently, in addition to co-ordinating an interdisciplinary project involving the study of the history, art, and architecture of the medieval church of the Transfiguration at Sotera (Famagusta District, Cyprus), she is co editing the volume of the proceedings of the international conference "The Art and Archaeology of Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus (1192-1571): Recent Research and New Discoveries", which took place in Nicosia in December 2014.