I’m currently working on the choir book monograph and finding myself once again immersed in the dizzying chaos of connoisseurship, attribution, and the proliferation of convenient names for dozens of anonymous illuminators. There is Pacino di Bonaguida and his so-called (or supposed) workshop, bottega, atelier, compagni, consortium, or followers—then followers of followers, and followers of those.

Among the so-called “Pacinesque” illuminators, countless aliases abound: Maestro di Piteglio, Maestro della Natività, Maestro di Santo Stefano, Maestro di San Guglielmo, Maestro Pacinesco A and C (but, curiously, no B?), Primo and Secondo Miniatore Pacinesco, Master of the Trivulziana Bible, Maestro del Messale and assistant, Master of the Panegyric of Robert of Anjou, and Pacinesque Hands 1 and 2.

Within Pacino’s historical orbit—and his scholarly afterlife—are numerous anonymous Florentine illuminators: the Master of the Dominican Effigies (who goes by multiple other names and whose early work has been subsumed under the Biadaiolo Master), Maestro Daddesco (or pre-Daddesco), the Master of the Codex of Saint George, and the Master of Saint Cecilia, whose oeuvre is notoriously tangled. From Pistoia and Pisa come several others: the Master(s) of the Laudario (sometimes identified as Lippo di Benivieni or the Master of 1310), the Master of the Antiphonary of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas—and a frequently conflated pseudo-illuminator, whose hand I recently distinguished and renamed the Master of Montepulciano Gradual I-H/2—and finally, the Maestro del Dante di Petrarca, distinct from both Maestro Daddesco and the Maestro della Carità.

Together with Larisa Grollemond, this project explores how medievalism continues to shape both scholarly inquiry and contemporary culture. Medievalism has long been a productive lens for medievalists: the very emergence of medieval studies as an academic discipline in the 1800s often intersected with imaginative attempts to understand and inhabit the past. These efforts have taken many forms—photography, print and facsimile technologies, reenactments and revivals, and the creation of fantasy worlds that evoke the Middle Ages. Engaging with medievalism allows us to uncover flexible, nuanced approaches to scholarship, recognizing medieval art not as a relic of the past but as a living presence in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This work treats medievalism as a scholarly praxis, using contemporary recording and performance artists as case studies for how medieval visual language functions in popular culture. Historical nostalgia shapes modern expression: far from merely reproducing medieval aesthetics or themes, these motifs are transformed, subverted, and mobilized for conceptual and cultural ends. Artists including Lil Nas X, Halsey, Lady Gaga, Janelle Monáe, Sam Smith, FKA Twigs, Florence Welch, and Zendaya deploy medieval-inspired imagery to interrogate race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American and global culture. This deliberate engagement with the Middle Ages enters into a productive dialogue with current scholarship on the same urgent topics.