Medieval Studies in Prison
Convivium IV.1

Art Historians Facing Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Other Totalitarianisms in Europe during the 20th Century (1917/18 – 1989/1991): Official Art History, Collaboration, Resistances

Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Soviet Union, Spain, Yugoslavia...

Editors: Xavier Barral i Altet, University of Rennes 2 and University of Venezia Ca’ Foscari / Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rom & Ivan Foletti, University of Brno and University of Lausanne

The goal of this thematic issue of the Journal Convivium is to study the relationship between the writing of medieval art history and the personal and political positions of the art fistorians facing twentieth-century totalitarianisms:

Papers could deal with a period, a thematic question, a biographical approach or a punctual episode, always concerning the Middle Ages.

Some topics to be treated are:

- Writing of medieval art history and official power
- Inventing a “new” medieval past
- Middle Ages serving a regime’s propaganda
- The role of a regime’s official art historians
- Different ways of collaboration
- The role of religion: state religion, anticlericalism
- The racial riscourse
- Colonialism and the study of the medieval past around the Mediterranean littoral
- Repression. Exclusion from universities, museums and other institutions.
- Exile
- Expropriations, spoliations, restitutions
- New “medieval” architecture and iconography serving a regime
- What happened after the “official” end of the totalitarian regimes?

Send proposals of no more than one page before 31 July 2016 to: veronikaearlymedievalstudies.com. The deadline for the final version of the articles is 31 November 2016. Convivium IV, 1 will be published in March 2017.