ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the product of a series of workshops and conference sessions organised between 2009 and 2011 as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded 'Postcolonising the Medieval Image' network. In 2001, Catherine Karkov had published a paper on the medieval Irish sculptures known as sheela-na-gigs that suggested the sculptures were intimately associated with land and history, and ultimately a postcolonial response to the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Nancy Wicker's essay unfolds a new social history of late Iron Age/early medieval Scandinavian art, centred on the translation of Roman medallions into Scandinavian bracteates. Byzantine art occupies an ambiguous position as simultaneously European-qua-Christian and yet one of Europe's exotic others. Karen Rose Mathews focuses on Islamic bowls that were used as architectural decoration on eleventh-century Pisan churches.