The Jeweled Materiality of Late Antique
/ Early Medieval Objects and Texts

From Cloisonné to Stained Glass to Experimental Poetry (4th–9th Centuries)

International conference, November 11–12, 2024

Center for Early Medieval Studies, Masaryk University
Hans Belting Library, Veveří 28, Brno

Organizers: Alberto Virdis, Marie Okáčová

The interface among the material, visual, and literary cultures of the long late antiquity and beyond has become a topic of scholarly interest ever since the publication of the seminal 1989 book The Jeweled Style by Michael Roberts. The visual–verbal dialectics of this period of geopolitical and cultural transformation, as manifested in various instances of spoliation, patterns of fragmentation, and a preoccupation with (exquisite) detail in different cultural media, were subsequently studied especially by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato. The topical relevance of Roberts’ original concept more than 30 years after its invention is clear from, among other scholarly endeavors, the recent edited volume A Late Antique Poetics? The Jeweled Style Revisited (2023), which offers numerous insightful contributions on the topic across different genres, regions, and temporal contexts.

Following this fruitful line of scholarly discourse, this conference wishes to expand and collectively rethink the “cumulative aesthetics” of the long late antiquity ranging from the 4th to the 9th century by examining material artefacts and literary texts which are, in one way or another, rooted in what came to be called the “jeweled style”. The aim of the conference is to offer a shared interdisciplinary platform to study late antique aesthetic developments across different media and territories (especially late Roman and Merovingian Gaul, the British Isles, the Italian peninsula, Hispania, and Northern Africa) by bringing together specialists from different disciplines, including, but not limited to, art history, aesthetics, classical philology, and archaeology.

The conference will be held under the auspices of the project “Fragmented Images. Exploring the Origins of Stained-Glass Art” (GA23-05243S) funded by the Czech Science Foundation.