Funerary Art, Memory, and Contexts in Medieval Iberia: Bishops and Cathedrals.

Studies on cultural memory are revolutionising ongoing scholarly debates in Premodern art history and heritage. The Middle Ages in Spain offer countless examples of overlooked figures, settings, and sources barely studied from this point of view in the country. Bishops were at the centre of this phenomenon. They were prolific patrons of the arts, and many cathedrals were prime settings and unparalleled repositories of both written testimony and spaces of belief and performance. The death of a famed bishop became a window into a carefully conceptualised world of ritual, visual, and textual remembrance, planned often years in advance and with implications far beyond this individual figure.

This IMC panel, part of the project FUNART (University of León / PIs: Prof. María Dolores Teijeira Pablos & Prof. Jose Alberto Morais Morán, Website: https://pam-ule.es), aims to bring together scholars from all different career stages to analyse the intrinsic relationship between art and memory in regards to bishops, their patronage, and cathedrals in Iberia, c. 1000-1500.

Please, send a paper proposal of no more than 500 words, alongside a short bio, to Dr. Jesús Rodríguez Viejo (j.rodriguez.viejorug.nl) before September 20, 2025.