This volume addresses a vital point of intersection between images in the Middle Ages and those in the modern world: the potential of medieval works of art to convey messages of power and resistance. Provoked by the misuse of medieval imagery in modern discussions, the contributors to this volume assess how medieval images connect to discourses of power in both the past and the present.

The contributors each began with a single question: In the eyes of their makers and viewers, how were medieval images understood to assert or to resist forces of power? Their case studies come from a wide range of cultural, geographic, and historical contexts: the Byzantine, Ottonian, and Valois courts; the Umayyad and Castilian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula; the pluralistic military and commercial zones of the eastern Mediterranean; and the metaphorical as well as personal battlegrounds linked to medieval “courtly love” culture. Over eight chapters, the authors highlight patterns of visual rhetoric still evident in art today. They invite readers to contemplate how modern priorities and sensibilities might amplify, mute, or transform the discourses related to power and resistance that were threaded through the visual culture of the Middle Ages.

In addition to the editor, the contributors include Heather A. Badamo, Elena N. Boeck, Thomas E. A. Dale, Martha Easton, Eliza Garrison, Anne D. Hedeman, Tom Nickson, and Avinoam Shalem.

Assessing the presence of Black Africa in Iberia through medieval visual culture is complicated by the multiple identities and meaning that medieval artists and viewers assigned to the dark-skinned figures that are often read by modern viewers as unproblematically "African." This article examines a rare medieval attempt to represent African identity within a historical frame: the depiction of a black man among pilgrims at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, found in an illustrated manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María, made for King Alfonso X of Castilla in the late 1270s. Analyzing this image against the backdrop of changing European textual and visual traditions related to Ethiopia and Ethiopians, I suggest that unlike the more fantastical black stereotypes deployed elsewhere in the manuscript, this figure signals a growing Castilian awareness of the actual Ethiopian Christians who were present at the site and with this a new interest in the reality of black Africans as part of a shared world of faith, pilgrimage, crusade, and commerce.