BIO

Beate Fricke teaches European Medieval Art. Her research focuses on the history of images using perspectives from philosophy, cultural anthropology, the natural sciences, and theology, with a special emphasis on theories of art and the image.

Her first book, Ecce fides. Die Statue von Conques (2007), investigated key issues in medieval religious imagery and culture: idolatry, veneration and medieval theories of images and relics. Through a historical investigation of objects and texts between the 9th and 11th centuries, the book outlines a western history of image culture, visuality and fiction.

Currently in press is an edited anthology of articles on the relation between image and collective [Bilder und Gemeinschaften, Fink 2010, ed. B. Fricke, M. Klammer and S. Neuner], probing the impact of images on the formation of communities from late antiquity until the 21st century.

Other recent publications focus on subjects at the "Margins of Culture", such as incest and anthropophagy, by exploring how "Kippfiguren" and other marginal insignia defined "culture" during the High and Late Middle Ages.

Ecce fides. Die Statue von Conques, Götzendienst und Bildkultur im Westen, Paderborn 2007

Schaumgeburten. Zur Topologie der creatio ex nihilo bei Albrecht Dürer und ihre Vorgeschichte, in: "Medio Mare. Zu einer Ikonologie des Meeres", hg. von Hannah Baader und Gerhard Wolf, Zürich 2009 (in print)

Fingerzeig und Augenblick. Galileo Galileis Finger zwischen Fetisch und Reliquie, Denkbild, in: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte III/1 (2009), S. 80-94

together with Tanja Klemm: "Conceptio – perceptio. Das Weimarer Blatt von Leonardo da Vinci", in: Modernisierung des Sehens, hg. von Kai-Uwe Hemken und Matthias Bruhns, Weimar 2008, pp. 82-99