Publisher's description:
This volume approaches the problem of the canonical “center” by looking at art and architecture on the borders of the medieval world, from China to Armenia, Sweden, and Spain. Seven contributors engage three distinct yet related problems: margins, frontiers, and cross-cultural encounters. While not displaying a unified methodology or privileging specific theoretical constructs, the essays emphasize how strategies of representation articulated ownership and identity within contested arenas. What is contested is both medieval (the material evidence itself) and modern (the scholarly traditions in which the evidence has or has not been embedded). An introduction by the editors places the essays within historiographic and pedagogical frameworks.

Table of contents:
Introduction:
I. Jill Caskey, Adam S. Cohen and Linda Safran, Surveying the Borders of Medieval Art
1 1. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Art and Cultural Exchange: Theoretical Perspectives
27 2. Cynthia Robinson, Towers, Birds and Divine Light: The Contested Territory of Nasrid and “Mudéjar” Ornament
80 3. Jill Caskey, Stuccoes from the Early Norman Period in Sicily: Figuration, Fabrication and Integration
120 4. Ethel Sara Wolper, Khiḍr and the Changing Frontiers of the Medieval World
147 5. Christina Maranci, Locating Armenia
167 6. Jennifer Purtle, The Far Side: Expatriate Medieval Art and Its Languages in Sino-Mongol China
198 7. Nancy L. Wicker, Would There Have Been Gothic Art Without the Vikings? The Contribution of Scandinavian Medieval Art