Definition: Early Medieval Art

The curriculum within which I teach this semester set the parameters of my Early Medieval Art course.  The medieval curriculum here at FSU (amazingly) includes: Byzantine Art; Late Antique/Early Christian Art; Late Medieval Art; and Early Medieval Art.  EMA therefore begins after Ravenna, ends before Romanesque, and sticks rather closely to Western Europe (although I could have probably ventured a bit further eastward- for example to medieval Croatia).  This curriculum accords with the history of art surveys of Gardner, Stokstad, and Adams (but not Honour and Fleming).  I will have more to say about these surveys at a later time.

I define my field of research more broadly and in an ideal world would call it the early medieval Mediterrannean.  As such, early medieval art includes the art of the following periods (some overlapping perhaps inevitable):

• Early Byzantium, from Constantine’s establishment of Constantinople as the imperial capital up to and including Iconoclasm
• The later Roman Empire in the west, from the moment of the earliest Christian art (mid 3rd C.) to the end of the Roman empire in the west (476)
• Coptic Egypt
• The Sassanian Empire
• The Umayyad Dynasty
• The Abbasid Dynasty
• Papal Rome from the time of Sylvester to the beginning of the eleventh century
• Ostrogothic Italy
• Longobard Italy
• Visigothic Spain
• Merovingian France
• Anglo-Saxon England (from Sutton Hoo to Alfred the Great to Aethelwold)
• The Spanish Kingdom of Asturias
• Umayyad Cordoba
• Mozarabic Spain
• Carolingian Europe
• Ottonian Europe