Please register for and plan to attend the Index co-sponsored Symposium Athonite Collections and their Challenges: Scholarly Access and Digital Surrogates, taking place on September 25-26, 2026. For more details about the schedule, please visit the conference website. We look forward to seeing you!
The Index of Medieval Art is eager to hear from scholars who have published or plan to publish edited volumes, print and/or digital, in our sponsored round table “Boosting the Volume: The Norms, Forms and Future of the Edited Collection” at the 62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (May 13 – 15, 2027). Especially given ongoing changes in academic publishing and the rapid encroachment of AI tools in online research, we look forward to hearing how you are thinking about, or rethinking, your approach to such edited works.
Session description: In a rapidly evolving scholarly landscape, the edited volume remains an enduring yet adaptable medium. This round table, convened to mark the tenth anniversary of the Signa book series published by the Index of Medieval Art with Penn State University Press, invites perspectives on the format and its future. What makes an edited volume succeed? How does it reach its readership? How might online publishing and digital search tools (including AI aggregators) affect how authors and editors present their work? We invite 5-minute contributions from editors and publishers to prompt discussion with authors and readers at all stages.
The due date is September 15, and the call for submissions can be found here. We hope to hear from you!
Please plan to join the Index either in person or via livestream for the November 21 conference “Thinking with Medieval Images.”
The proliferation of medieval images via digital collections, online publications, and social media platforms places them at the center of scholarly and public discourse about medieval culture—as well as in the crosshairs of those seeking control over modern interpretations of the past. In this they are indeed worth a thousand words. As representations of people, things, and ideas from deep history, they claim a truth value that is easily challenged; they reflect historical actions, ideas, and attitudes but could shift radically in meaning; and they speak in multiple medieval voices yet remain susceptible to modern manipulation, especially as generative AI tools muddy their relevance to truthful historical exchange.
The situation raises an age-old question: what can medieval images do for those who research the Middle Ages? How and why do we think with them? Answering this requires action on many fronts. We must look critically at how scholars deploy images to support historical arguments. We must reevaluate the promise and limitations of visual evidence, recognizing how their significance could transform along with the context and expectations of their makers and viewers. We must call out their scholarly and popular misuse while reflecting on our own responsibility and impact when we use them.
“Thinking with Medieval Images” invites eight scholars from multiple disciplines, from art history and musicology to history and comparative literature, to launch this conversation. What can we expect to learn from medieval images? What historiographic and methodological guardrails have guided our inquiry, and how well have they served us? How do we address the multivalency and shifting reception of images, both in the Middle Ages and in the present? When is our faith in images misplaced, and how far can modern discourse take them?
Find the speaker roster and current information by following the conference website.
If you’re a regular Index user, you might have noticed slowdowns in the database recently. This stems from extremely high bot traffic that is difficult for our complex system to handle. We appreciate your patience as we work with our technology manager to mitigate the problem.
This satirical post was first published on April Fool’s Day, 2026.
If you loved the Super Bowl LX halftime performance by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny, you’re already a fan. And if you knew that in addition to being an award-winning rapper, singer, and record producer, the King of Latin Trap also dabbles in pro wrestling and won a WWE 24/7 Championship in 2021, then you surely are a superfan. But did you know that Bad Bunny’s name was likely inspired by a childhood love of medieval art?
In public interviews, the artist explains his choice of name as a reference to a childhood photo that captured a young Benito wearing a rabbit costume and looking grumpy. But according to his favorite aunt, there’s another, cuter reason. In a recent conversation, Tía Fabiola reports that Benito was an avid childhood reader and especially loved books about the Middle Ages. His favorite one was a pop-up book full of pictures inspired by medieval manuscript miniatures.
Those pictures sparked an interest that continued when he was student in audiovisual communications at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. It was likely at the Biblioteca UPRA that he discovered the miniatures that would inspire his musical persona.
Rabbits are everywhere in medieval art, especially in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, where they participate in just about every aspect of medieval life, from baking to music-making. However, as Eleanor Jackson of the British Library explains in a 2021 blog post, many of these “fluffy ruffians” are not merely frolicking. Many are wreaking subversive havoc, turning normal power relationships upside down in scenes where aggressors become cowards, prey turn on their predators, and the weak defeat the strong.
The intrepid rodents harass hunters, fence with hounds, and attack fully armored knights—the last probably the inspiration for the famous Monty Python killer rabbit. In short, these bunnies were baaaaad.
It doesn’t take much to understand the appeal of these lively Leporidae for a young Benito, a performer whose boundary-bending performances would also become famous for speaking truth to power. Their influence might even be discerned in certain details of his recent Super Bowl show. While the unique sights, sounds, and traditions of Puerto Rican culture were the most important inspiration for this iconography, one can’t help but wonder if Bad Bunny’s boyhood love of medieval rabbits gave some of them a little extra meaning. But don’t take our word for it; judge for yourself!
Workers cutting sugar cane. This opening sequence of the Super Bowl show made obvious reference to the centrality of the sugar industry to the historical colonization and exploitation of Puerto Rico by global powers. Might our artist also have had in mind this medieval bas-de-page miniature in which a rabbit captures his overseer in the middle of a harvest?
El Morro and its garitas. This sixteenth-century castle with its distinctive sentry boxes has been a symbol of Puerto Rican culture for many. Could Bad Bunny’s inclusion of these round towers in the Super Bowl wedding scene have resonated with his memories of medieval manuscripts like this one, in which feisty rabbit armies hold their ground against would-be canid colonizers?
Concho the Crested Toad. “Concho,” an animated version of the sapo concho, a critically endangered crested toad that’s native to Puerto Rico and has been a part of Bad Bunny’s larger brand, appeared on the big screen during the Superbowl show and is featured in his NFL-related merch. Could the musician’s affection for this beloved native reptile have been fostered by manuscript images like this one, where a toad joins a bunny and a bull in an idyllic floral setting at the bottom of a sixteenth-century book of hours?
Only Bad Bunny himself can say whether his persona was inspired by childhood memories of those revolutionary rabbits in the margins of medieval manuscripts. But on this April 1, the possibility has our imaginations hopping.
The Index of Medieval Art is happy to announce the publication in both print and e-book of Fragments: Medieval Makers, Modern Responses as the fifth volume of the series “Signa: Papers of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University,” co-published with Penn State University Press. Edited by Catherine A. Fernandez and Pamela A. Patton based on a scholarly conference of the same name, the volume brings together seven distinguished authors—Patricia Blessing, William Diebold, Shirin Fozi, Silvia Gianolio, Gregor Kalas, Henry David Schilb, and Susanne Wittekind—to consider the risks and rewards of working with fragments in the study of medieval culture. Their insights into how fragments are perceived and repurposed across time is certain to encourage critical reflection on the fragment as both obstacle and opportunity in reconstructing medieval worlds.
The co-published Signa series was launched in 2018 as a partnership between the Index of Medieval Art and Penn State University Press to produce high quality, peer-reviewed publications of Index-sponsored scholarship. The series includes the following titles, all available via the Penn State University Press website and in many university libraries:
Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages
Edited by Pamela A. Patton
2025
Out of Bounds: Exploring the Limits of Medieval Art
Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Maria Alessia Rossi
2023
Iconography Beyond the Crossroads
Image, Meaning, and Method in Medieval Art
Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Catherine A. Fernandez
2022
The Lives and Afterlives of Medieval Iconography
Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Henry Schilb
2021
As 2025 draws to a close and we look toward a new year, we wish all our friends and researchers a season of restoration, peace, and hope. We look forward to seeing you in our new space on the third floor of the Princeton University Art Museum in late January 2026.
The Index of Medieval Art is pleased to continue a series of blog posts that delve into the history of the organization through interviews with senior scholars in the field of art history. The “Guest Book Series” takes its name from the Index guest books, which have been signed by hundreds of art historians who have consulted the Index files over the past century. We’ve enjoyed reading their recollections and warmly thank Elizabeth Sears, George H. Forsyth, Jr. Professor emerita of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Acting Director of the Index (1987-88), and longtime friend of the Index for her time and responses.
Please tell us a little about yourself and your work. Where did you study? What inspired you to become a medievalist?
I became an iconographer/iconologist, trained in Hamburg-based, “Warburgian” method, well before it occurred to me even to consider becoming a medievalist. This happened at Duke University, where William Heckscher, one of Panofsky’s last students in Hamburg, had recently arrived as Professor and Director of the Duke Art Museum. He had left Hamburg in 1936 as part of the great exodus of “non-Aryan” scholars from Nazi Germany, and his postwar career had taken him to Iowa, to Utrecht, and as a last stop, to Duke. I volunteered as an intern my first year as an undergraduate, 1970, and I wrote what was probably my first art history paper for him, as an extracurricular exercise, on a crucifixion scene decorating the Renaissance bronze plaque by Moderno in the museum. The essay was trivial but important for me as I, in time, received from him the only (spectacularly excessive!) line-by-line critical reading of a text that I would receive as a student at Duke or later at Yale—and this experience, I think, informed my writing, teaching, and editorial work ever after.
I took classes with guest professors at Duke whom Heckscher had taught in the past and who would inculcate me in method. For Dario Covi (trained at Iowa), in a course on Northern Renaissance Art, I wrote on Dürer’s encounters with non-European artifacts, for Karla Langedijk (trained at Utrecht), in a two-semester seminar on “Iconological Problems” (which I later recognized as being pure Warburg), I wrote papers on the function and decoration of early Florentine Deschi da parto and on color symbolism in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (Duke possessed an early printed edition of the work): I remember earnestly creating a handwritten index of every mention of a color in Ripa’s descriptions of personifications (Abondanza to Zelo) as a start. It was at this point I began to feel that I had discovered my path, that art history could be combined with the other subjects I had studied (history, literature, religion, anthropology, philosophy, psychology). The medieval component had entered in when I did a junior year abroad in Athens, there studying and visiting Byzantine as well as ancient monuments. A trip to Italy over Christmas break, with visits to the catacombs and early Christian churches of Rome, as well as the monuments of Ravenna, impressed me greatly. Yet, at the same time, I was doing summer internships at the Guggenheim Museum and might well have opted for early twentieth-century art had Heckscher not said: “Yes, you could study modern art, but would it be enough?” At Yale, I split my coursework between ancient and medieval art, working especially with J. J. Pollitt, John Clarke, and Walter Cahn—the last a student of Harry Bober, who was a student of Panofsky. Cahn had spent time at the Warburg Institute during the Gombrich era and was well-versed in its methods. My seminar papers as a graduate student, as I look back, seem always to have been somehow iconographical, treating the forms of content in their cultural contexts.
When was your first visit to the Index in Princeton? Where was the Index located? With whom did you work there? Do you remember anything especially interesting about your visit?
Graduate students at Yale, as those in other programs in the mid-1970s, would routinely make their way to the Index as part of their study of “style and iconography.” It was easy for me, as my family lived an hour’s drive away in northern New Jersey. I certainly visited in 1974-75 when working both on a Venetian panel in the Yale Art Gallery depicting Mary Magdalene for a class by Charles Seymour (his last I believe) and on the Beatitudes in a life-changing seminar by Walter Cahn treating twelfth-century Mosan Art. I would visit the Index again in 1978 for “Ages of Life,” the theme of my doctoral dissertation—a multifaceted topic which Walter Cahn and I landed upon, in part, as a means to get me to the Warburg Institute. At that point I spent four years in London, and I still return to the Institute just about every year. My first teaching appointment was at Princeton (1982-89), and it was then that I properly came to know the Index and its learned staff.
Have you made any great iconographic discoveries related to your research using the Index? Have you used the Index for teaching as well as for research?
Here I must go a little beyond the questions posed, owing to my faculty appointment at Princeton and the fact that in the year I was going up for tenure, after Nigel Morgan had left the position, I was asked to serve as Acting Director of the Index (1987-88). Moreover—I suppose I can say it at this point—when the tenure decision came down from Princeton’s “Committee of Three,” I was asked by the Index Committee if I would consider staying on at Princeton in the role of Index Director. I chose another path, grants taking me to Europe, mostly Germany, for four life-changing years. I suppose I had various eureka moments at the Index as both teacher and Acting Director, as it became necessary for me to grasp the structure of the Index in its development from 1917 to the present. This involved thinking about how iconographical knowledge is captured, described, stored, retrieved, and mobilized. In those days the members of the Index Committee, chaired by Michael Curschmann, were concerned about the ICA’s future. It was a time of tumultuous methodological shift (“the crisis in the discipline,” the “New Art History,” the “Social History of Art”) and the worry was that the Index could become irrelevant, questions being posed that it was not designed to answer. It was the era of computerization (pre-www). At one point I met with the Princeton-trained David Packard, of Hewlitt-Packard, who had earlier arranged that a database of classical literature be created. He saw the inherent difficulties of computerizing the Index and, while declining to take it up as a project, offered advice. Nigel Morgan had earlier started in, at a time when Irving Lavin at the Institute for Advanced Study was interested in how the structure of the Index differed from Iconclass, the Dutch system of iconographical classification, wondering if it might provide alternatives.
My mandate was to give the problem of computerization a good hard look. The staff met regularly with a university computer programmer, the poor man embroiled in a project far more complicated than he had anticipated, but the conversations around the table were themselves fascinating. Adelaide Bennett Hagens knew the classification system inside-out of course. Lois Drewer, new to the Index, showed a rare brilliance in grasping structures and identifying the complicating factors. After a time it became clear that it was impossible to do what many were doing when it came time to transfer data from card indexes to databases: shipping the paper records offsite, even to far-off lands, to Malaysia or wherever, to have the data keyed in. It had emerged, as I remember it, that the links between primary and secondary cards were not retrievable (since the secondary motifs described and highlighted on the former had not been cast in the form of the controlled subject headings used on the latter), and so the data would all have to be freshly entered into newly devised templates. I recall a visit to the Jewish Museum in New York to see a demonstration of the computerized Index of Jewish Art given by Bezalel Narkiss. After my time, I heard that the IJA’s Aleph program, devised in Tel Aviv, was adapted for use at the Index of Christian Art for a good while.
While at the Index, I believe I became more methodologically aware. It fell to the director to share in the task of answering iconographical queries, which made me more knowledgeable about the Index system, and while sitting in the corner office in McCormick Hall, I had need and opportunity to examine historical files. This was the juncture at which, independently, I was beginning to develop a second line of study, disciplinary historiography. In those years I wrote my first such essay: “The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher: Some Petites perceptions” (1990). Heckscher had settled in Princeton after retirement, so I saw him regularly and could formally interview him. I began to think of writing something on the Index itself and started gathering information. Some years later, with Adelaide Bennett Hagens, I interviewed the great former director, Rosalie Green, at her home. Her recollections enabled me to write the article “Under Miss Green’s Watch: Three Decades of Art History at the Index of Christian Art” for Adelaide’s Festschrift (2017), which celebrated her 50 years at the Index.1
When at Princeton, I routinely used the Index in teaching. It served graduate students as a tool, but one they learned to examine critically. I found that undergraduates, through use of the Index, could be introduced to the pleasures of conducting research with primary materials. Nigel Morgan and Robert Melzak both helped by suggesting feasible topics. Among the most memorable papers I received was one on the marginal motif of wrestling figures, this theme tackled by a muscular undergraduate on Princeton’s wrestling team. His approach was to analyze postures and holds and his conclusion was that these were impossibly fictional, that the wrestlers would have fallen over.
Have you attended or presented at an Index conference? Which conferences were particularly memorable or helpful to your work?
I have presented at two. One was the excellent conference Romanesque: Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, organized by Colum Hourihane as a tribute to Walter Cahn. I delivered the opening talk, on “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn,” having earlier made my way to New Haven with a tape recorder to interview him. He had on that occasion spoken openly about his life, and accordingly I incorporated biographical details into an attempt to define what was “Cahnian” in his published work. He, his wife, and his brother were present at the event, along with friends, colleagues, and students, which was daunting. But I had never before had so rapt an audience. As many afterward said, they had known virtually nothing about his childhood and adolescence in Germany and France. The second conference in which I participated was Iconography Beyond the Crossroads: Image, Meaning, and Method in Medieval Art, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Index and its rechristening as the Index of Medieval Art. My opening lecture “Iconography and Iconology at Princeton” formed something of a prequel and pendant to Madeline Caviness’s concluding talk, “Iconography Deconstructed, from Mâle to the Alt Right.”2
Do you have any observations about the evolution of the Index files and database over the last three decades? Where do you think Index work should go next?
In many ways, in view of the ever-shifting currents in the field and the constant change in university and departmental administrators, the endurance of the Index from 1917 to the present is astonishing. The present team at the Index seems to be playing an increasingly prominent role in medieval studies writ large, in a wholly admirable way, and the database seems to be now radically rationalized. Back in 1938 it was thought that the Index could be “completed” in 10 years’ time, which now seems comical, but the goal of systematic coverage in given categories, I would think, remains key. In the early days, pre-computer, when iconographical study rested on the discovery of sources and analogues, whether to track motifs over time or to decipher pictorial programs, art historians would often say they went to the Index only to see if they had missed something. But onsite visits also meant that cataloguers’ expertise and memory could be tapped, which was the really useful thing, allowing creative work. The staff took pride, for example, in helping Michael Camille gather strewn evidence for The Gothic Idol. The online database, I imagine, remains daunting to the neophyte. The Index team can only continue to do its all to teach teachers, as well researchers, how the Index may be played as an instrument—one making possible the discovery of imagery that can serve as witness to socio-religio-cultural beliefs and behaviors. It has always been a matter of ordering data to best align with questions that are being, or might be, posed.
In advance of our upcoming move to the new Princeton University Art Museum, we’ve been combing through our print photo cards to ensure that we have completed the research and online cataloging of some of the archival “Medium” categories in our backfiles. Ivory, Gold Glass, and Leather are already fully online, and we’re now happy to report all textiles recorded in the card catalog have now been added to the online database!
Some of our recent additions and highlights include:
There are over 2600 database records of medieval textiles in the Index database. They offer a representative selection of many different forms of textile arts, including works made in the specific materials of silk, linen, and wool, as well as the techniques of weaving, embroidery, brocade, tapestry, and more. Several ecclesiastical vestments can be found by browsing the “Work of Art Type” list by name, such as chasuble, cope, and pallium. Another useful type to browse is “Hanging,” which is used as a broad category for textiles displayed on walls.
Many thanks to all the research staff who pitched in to wrap up this category, and to Index Administrator Fiona Barrett for organizing the textile files still in need of research attention. We hope you find these recent textile additions to the Index database useful for your research. Please do not hesitate to send us an inquiry via this linked form with questions about your research in medieval art history. We wish you many happy iconographic discoveries, in textiles and beyond!
Please join us and register for the next virtual database tutorial with the Index on Tuesday, October 7, 2025 from 10:00 – 11:00 am EDT.
