SESSION: Reassessing Heroism in Medieval Art
This session seeks to interrogate the concept of heroism in medieval culture through the exploration and (re)evaluation of the forms and motifs associated with the heroic in medieval art.
Deeply rooted in ancient and medieval literary sources and frequently enmeshed with concurrent ideas of virility, chivalry and sanctity, notions of heroism have long served as the bedrock of both popular and academic formulations of medieval culture. Moving beyond representations of heroes or renderings of heroic texts, what configurations of heroic ideals did medieval viewers encounter and how did such depictions impact their various audiences? To what extent was heroism contextually constituted, and how did visual expressions adjust to contextual requirements? How were common visual strategies such as juxtaposition, repetition or typology used in the service of communicating heroic ideals, teaching lessons or imparting warnings?
Studies engaging any aspect of medieval visual or material culture are welcome. This session embraces a global Middle Ages and an expansive chronology, spanning late antiquity to early modernity. Especially encouraged are papers that consider issues of heroism in relation to gender, race and/or religion, explore aspects of the heroic beyond or as a foil to western European traditions, follow the transformations and mutations of “medieval” heroism in postmedieval artistic movements, or reflect on the impacts of medieval revivalism in shaping early scholarship on the heroic in medieval art.
Session Convenor:
Elizabeth Pugliano, University of Colorado Denver
Session Speakers:
Jodie Merritt, University of Leeds
Heroism Inscribed: Kings and Saints on the Irish High Crosses
This paper re-examines the articulation of heroism on early medieval Irish high crosses, arguing that these monuments work to stage kingship as a sanctified and heroic vocation. Concentrating on examples from the Ossory (Ahenny, Killamery) and Scriptures (Durrow, Clonmacnoise, Monasterboice, Kells) groups, it explores how royal patrons positioned themselves within sacred history through both image and inscription. Scenes of David, Daniel, and the triumphant Christ – all biblical paradigms of courage, fidelity, and divine election – are set in dialogue with depictions and names of contemporary rulers such as Máelsechnaill mac Domnaill and King Flann. On the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise, for example, the figures of King Flann Sinna and Abbot Colmán situated in proximity to the iconic image of the Crucifixion assert a visual and theological parity with these scriptural exemplars, presenting the Irish king not as a mere imitator of virtue, but as its living counterpart.
Attention is given to the capstones that crown these monuments. Too often dismissed as structural afterthoughts, the house-shaped and beehive-shaped forms emerge here as deliberate symbolic devices. Evoking reliquary shrines, monastic huts, and the Holy Sepulchre alike, they transform the cross into a microcosm of sanctity and sovereignty. In this context, the capstone functions as both reliquary analogue and celestial summit, binding local kingship to the architecture of salvation.
Read together, the imagery, inscriptions, and crowning forms of the Irish high crosses articulate a distinct political theology in which heroism, sanctity, and rulership are materially and visually coextensive.
Blanche Darbord, University of Cambridge
Featuring Violence in Manuscript Illumination: Alexander the Great and Chivalry
While tales of chivalric feats may appear to be all glory and valour, war is fundamentally violent, and this violence bears many tragic consequences. As one of the world’s greatest conquerors, Alexander the Great was a significant model of chivalric prowess, both in England and on the Continent. This paper focuses on images of warfare in manuscripts of the Alexander legend owned by an English audience from the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries: Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.9.34; British Library Royal MS 19 D. I; Bodleian Library MS 264; and Royal MS 15 E VI. The historian Richard Kaeuper has written extensively on the violent realities of chivalry, and literary scholars have repeatedly highlighted the ambiguity of Alexander as a hero in medieval vernacular romances. My aim is to analyse the visual representation of sieges and battles in illuminated manuscripts from Plantagenet England, understanding them in light of the texts themselves, as well as artistic traditions and contemporary discourse. The representation of casualties is a common feature in these images, and it can be difficult to distinguish elements that were simply a matter of style, a means of glorifying a crushing victory, or, in contrast, a more conscious commentary on the cost of warfare for human lives. Despite what appears to be an endorsement of violence in chivalric culture, there is evidence of a more critical stance, or at least a desire to show the weighty consequences of war, in illuminated Alexander romances.
Monica Walker Vadillo, Independent Scholar
The Death of Dragons: Heroism and the Art of Resistance in Books of Hours
In medieval art, the slaying of dragons was not confined to battlefields or hagiographic legend. Within the intimate pages of late medieval Books of Hours, dragons and demons appear not as external foes but as ever-present moral adversaries—adversaries to be resisted in the silence of prayer. This paper argues that the illuminated imagery of dragon-slaying saints such as Michael, Margaret, and George, when juxtaposed with marginal dragons, offered medieval viewers a model of everyday heroism: the quiet, habitual rejection of the Devil and of sin.
Examining selected fifteenth-century manuscripts from France, England, and the Low Countries, I propose that these visual programs transformed heroic struggle into an act of inner discipline. The reader of the Book of Hours was invited to participate in a devotional drama where triumph occurred not through sword or miracle, but through persistence, vigilance, and faith. Through juxtaposition and repetition—key strategies of the manuscript tradition—the dragon becomes less a mythic beast and more a mirror for the believer’s own moral battles.
This reframing of the heroic ideal relocates courage from the realm of public conquest to that of private conscience. It also gestures toward gendered and spiritual inclusivity, allowing women and lay practitioners alike to imagine themselves as moral combatants in the war against evil. In reassessing the “death of dragons,” this paper reveals how medieval art cultivated a theology of resistance in miniature—a visual catechism of heroism performed not in splendour, but in devotion.
Teresa Soley, University of Cambridge
Heroes, Crusaders, Martyrs: Tomb Sculpture and the Idealization of Portugal’s Moroccan Wars
Beginning with the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 and culminating in the disastrous Battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578, the Avis dynasty of Portugal fixated on the occupation of Morocco’s coastal cities as a dynastic and spiritual mission. To sustain the support of the nobility, the Papacy, and other Christian rulers for costly and often unsuccessful campaigns, the monarchy commissioned and promoted impressive works of art, architecture, and literature that appropriated chivalric themes and reinvented familiar iconography to romanticize and heroize these ventures.
This paper focuses primarily on the tombs of two distinguished knights, Pedro de Menezes Portocarrero (1370 –1437), and his son Duarte de Menezes (1414-1464). Through an analysis of these sculpted monuments, considered alongside literary sources such as royal chronicles and biographies, this paper explores how spectacular artworks were used to consciously construct idealized, heroic images of specific individuals as a way of promoting and legitimising the Portuguese Crown’s military exploits in North Africa.
By interrogating the artistic topoi of knighthood, martyrdom, and divine mission in these works, this study situates Portuguese tomb sculpture within broader medieval and early modern frameworks of heroism. In doing so, it illuminates how visual culture contributed to the formation of historical memory, aristocratic masculine identity, and early imperial ideology in fifteenth-century Portugal.