Acknowledgements
A two-day international workshop titled “Licht aus dem Osten? Natural Light in Medieval Churches Between Byzantium and the West,” which took place 26–27 November 2020, sits at the foundation of this volume. The aim of the workshop was to share new research and discuss how natural light was deployed to underscore theological, ideological, and symbolic statements in medieval churches from across Europe and the Mediterranean area. We thank the workshop participants for their thoughtful presentations and the stimulating discussion.
This project expands on the ongoing efforts of Fr. Gabriel-Dinu Herea, whose observations of the ‘dance’ of sunlight inside the fifteenth-century church of the Holy Cross in Pătrăuți, Romania, led to the realization that in this less-explored area of the late medieval world, Western and Byzantine models of deploying sunlight were combined in innovative ways, thus opening a new chapter in the study of light in medieval sacred spaces. The image on the cover of this volume offers a compelling detail of the observed light effects captured on one of the murals inside the church during Herea’s tireless work.
The Dahlem Humanities Center of Freie Universität Berlin graciously hosted the workshop that led to the creation of this collective volume. We have also received support for the research, writing, and revising stages of this project from the following institutions and organizations: the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tufts University, and the Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura at the Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio.
The authors who contributed to this volume have been tremendous along the way, and we thank them for their patience and openness through the revision and production phases. In addition to most of the workshop participants, this volume features the work of scholars who have been separately invited to contribute to the book in efforts to enrich the content and issues explored. The critical and thoughtful feedback from the two anonymous reviewers has helped our authors improve the individual chapters and has informed our revisions on the project as a whole. We thank them for taking the time to read and comment on earlier versions of the text. We are also indebted to Florin Curta and Dušan Zupka as series editors for accepting our project for publication, and are grateful to Alessandra Giliberto and the rest of the production team at Brill for their support in bringing this work to light. Finally, we are deeply grateful to Rileigh K. Clarke for proofreading the final text, and to Sever J. Voicu for creating the index for this publication.
Whether they presented a paper at the workshop, enriched this volume with a chapter, or provided precious feedback at various stages of development, we are grateful to the many colleagues who contributed to this project. Given the rapidly evolving methodology for the study of sunlight, both dialogue and the sharing of ongoing research are essential for improving working methods and developing new ideas. We have been thrilled to see the willingness and enthusiasm of our colleagues to discuss, share, and learn along the way. There is more work that remains to be undertaken, and it is our hope that this volume will serve as a springboard for future research on the study of natural light in churches from across the Middle Ages.