Professor Gervase Rosser

I research and teach in the history of cities and of visual culture. As an urban historian, I have worked on the social history of neighbourhoods and groups, a theme which I began to explore in Medieval Westminster, 1200-1540 (Oxford, 1989) (Whitfield Prize) and have since pursued through study of English and European guilds and confraternities. This work has been brought together in: The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England 1250-1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). As a historian of art, I have published with Jane Garnett a study of miraculous image cults, Spectacular Miracles. Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2013) (Art and Christianity Enquiry - Mercers Prize). Please see the research tab for more details.

Research Interests

• Painting in medieval and Renaissance Italy
• Medieval urban history
• Social history of groups and communities

One strand of my work is concerned with the history of visual culture, both within and beyond the conventional range of 'high art'. I researched and published with Jane Garnett a book about cults of images believed to be miraculous: Spectacular Miracles. Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). We have also staged public exhibitions on this theme. My art historical research is focused on late-medieval and Renaissance Italy. I am interested in non-naturalistic elements in Renaissance painting, and explored Duccio's high altarpiece for Siena cathedral in this light. I am currently working on the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, partly as a means to critique the periodisation of 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' art. These interests relate to the history of vision, and in this connection I have also published on Dante and sight. The other major theme in my work is medieval urban history. Here my particular interest is in how inhabitants of cities cope – with urban life, and more particularly with one another. This began with Medieval Westminster (1989) and has continued in a series of studies of English and European guilds and confraternities. My book, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England 1250-1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), is in part a response to current political and philosophical discussion about the relationship between the state, the individual citizen, and voluntary associations.

See also my History of Art Department page: www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/staff/core-academic/grosser.html