by J J CohenOver breakfast at NCS last July, Debra Higgs Strickland told me about Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art. Web-based, open access, and peer reviewed, the journal presents an important new forum for theory-savvy medieval studies. Because it is electronic, Different Visions can also afford to be image-rich. Matthew Gabriel points out that the first issue is up. The journal's mission statement pretty much speaks for itself:
What a valuable addition to the electronic publishing landscape ... as well as to medieval studies more generally. The first issue contains essays from Kathleen Biddick, Madeline Caviness, and many others.Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art is a web-based, open-access, peer-reviewed annual, devoted to progressive scholarship on medieval art. Different Visions seeks to fill a significant gap in current publishing venues by featuring articles employing contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical frameworks to examine medieval visual culture. Authors are encouraged to explore the application of such approaches as feminist and gender analysis, historiography, semiotics, post colonialism and queer theory to works produced during the period from the fourth through the fifteenth century. The journal will also consider essays on medieval visual culture that emerge from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Different Visions offers a central publication to serve authors and readers interested in the full gamut of medieval objects and in contemporary critical theory. The journal covers the entire range of visual culture—architecture, manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, and portable arts—and accepts articles about Byzantine and Islamic cultures as well as central, eastern and western Europe. Its electronic format provides a low-cost delivery, allowing Different Visions to avoid a subscription charge and permits more illustrations at less expense than standard print media. It also offers new opportunities for such innovative features as audio clips and virtual tours of monuments.
I've known about this journal for some time now, ever since Kathleen Biddick told me about it. It looks fantastic. I would point out, too, that the second issue of the journal is going to be on "monstrosity" and will be edited by Asa Simon Mittmann and Debra Higgs Strickland, based on the papers given at Leeds this past summer on the four panels Asa and Debra organized on "the unnatural world," and this also means I am finally getting to publish part of my now booklength Guthlac project [yay].
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