Anouk Busset and Adrián Maldonado are organizing a highly interesting session, “Sculptured stones as transgressive objects: carving liminality in early medieval north-western Europe”, at the EAA-conference in Maastricht. Call for papers is now open: http://www.eaa2017maastricht.nl
Please have a look at session #423.
Sculptured stones as transgressive objects: carving liminality in early medieval north-western Europe
Content:This session will discuss the role of early medieval carved stones as embodiments of liminality in north-western Europe (British Isles and Scandinavia). Carved stones are strongly associated with territorial boundaries, bridges, or entrances. But beyond demarcating the limit of a religious or secular estate or the passage between lay and consecrated ground, they can also be nodal places in their own right, where the mundane meets the supernatural, habitation meets wilderness, or the living meet the dead. We can go further and argue that sculptured stones can be seen as transgressive by their very nature, between natural rock and shaped stone. In many cases, the stone is itself consecrated, especially when marked by the sign of the cross, becoming neither natural nor handmade, but imbued with the supernatural. Stones can be skeumorphic, representing other materials such as wood and metal which play with or even reject the materiality of the physical object. This transitional essence may also be contained in the imagery or inscriptions carved or incised on the stone, as representations of distant places, ancient myths or names of the absent dead, embodying distant places, people and times. In this sense, carved stones can be seen as transgressive of place, time and substance. We invite papers which challenge a functionalist perspective on carved stones in early medieval north-western Europe and pose new questions on the lived experience of sculpture.
Keywords:sculptured stones northwestern Europe Christianity
Main organiser:Anouk Busset (Switzerland)
Co-organisers:Adrián Maldonado (United Kingdom)