The Department of History of Art & Architecture invites you to the 2025-2026 HAA Guest Lecture Series

Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the HAA Guest Lecture Series brings together historians of art and architecture specializing in diverse fields and genres. Prominent scholars and museum professionals are invited to share their latest work with the BU community in a lecture followed by a Q&A.

The 2025/2026 HAA Guest Lecture Series is organized by graduate students: Rachel Kline & Isaline Lefrançois

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Upcoming Lecture

Thursday, October 23rd at 6:00 PM in CAS 132
Dr. Gregory Bryda
Assitant Professor of Art History, Barnard College
Title:“Higher Ground: Medieval Foundations and the Formation of Heathen Prehistory”

This talk argues that in the Middle Ages, Christians used art to exaggerate a pagan affinity with the land to invent a false contrast, which enabled a redefinition of the landscape through a Christian lens. From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, as Christianity spread eastward across northern Europe in successive waves, artworks in wood sculpture, monumental stone carving, manuscript illumination, panel painting, and woodcut consistently portrayed non-Christian peoples as nature-bound idolaters—tree-worshippers, grove-dwellers, keepers of wells and stones. Scholars have long mined these representations for traces of authentic pagan ritual, frequently construing them as proof of syncretism in the process of conversion. I contend that the artworks portray retrospective fictions. Produced after Christianity had taken root, these works were directed less at pagans than at other Christians. By portraying a primitive “other” bound to earth and nature, ecclesiastical communities of various stripes—parish churches, cathedral chapters, Cistercian monks, Teutonic Order knights—cast themselves as its opposite: orthodox, rational, divinely sanctioned. In doing so, they justified their authority, sharpened rivalries, and claimed stewardship over the land as a sacred trust. What has been read as proof of confrontation thus emerges instead as self-reflective, with patrons deploying the arts to reshape both the perception and the use of land to align with their own specific needs.

 

Archive of Past Lectures