About

Aden Kumler is an Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College at the University of Chicago. She studies and teaches the history of European medieval art and material culture. Kumler's first book, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England, was published by Yale University Press in 2011 and received recognition through a Medieval Academy of America Book Subvention and a short-listing for the ACE/Mercer's International Book Award. Her scholarship includes essays published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Cabinet Magazine, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Studies in Iconology, and Gesta, among others. She is also a co-editor of the Viewpoints book series, published by the International Center for Medieval Art and Pennsylvania State University Press. Kumler's research interests are broad but anchored in a deep interest in how material conditions influence thought, imagination, and action, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches within Europeanist medieval studies. She is completing a book titled The Multiplication of the Species, which examines the material forms and theorizations of coins, seals, and the eucharist across the Middle Ages, and is working on another project re-envisioning medieval art and material culture in relation to practices of abstraction. Kumler earned her BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the University of Toronto, a PhD from Harvard University, and a Licentiate from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. She is actively involved in academic service and has received numerous fellowships and awards for her research and teaching.

Research topics

• Visual arts
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Art
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Programming language

Selected publications

• Painting Shadows in the Middle Ages

  2025-02-17

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “All form is a process of notation”

  Brepols Publishers eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Programming language

  Inspired by “Fluxperson” and intermedial artist Dick Higgin’s concept of the “exemplativist” work of art, this essay explores the dynamics of “multiplicity in singularity” at work in Hrabanus Maurus’s ninth-century work of visual poetry, In honorem sanctae crucis (In honor of the holy cross). Responding to Higgins’s own writing on In honorem, and his dictum that “all form is a kind of notation”, I examine how Hrabanus’s work models a powerful hypostasis of word and visual figure, poetic form in poetic form, and singularity in multiplicity that at once abstracts and instantiates the cross in its rigorous series of cruciform compositions.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing on the world beyond the page: medieval inscriptions as facta and ficta

  Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte · 2023-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries texts proliferated upon the surfaces of objects, monuments and architecture, ensuring that medieval people lived with texts, even if they never turned a page. Examining a series of inscribed objects, monuments, and buildings, this article focuses upon three constitutive features of this large-scale dynamic: epigraphic prosopopoeia, the use and effects of deixis in medieval inscriptions, and the device of the banderole. It concludes by examining the twelfth-century Bridekirk baptismal font: an epigraphic monument in which all three devices are skillfully deployed, to remarkably self-reflexive ends. The article aims to show how the design of epigraphic texts added not only new textual-material facts to the world, but also textual-visual ficta or fictions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2 Whose Iconography?

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 7. Lyric Vessels

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022-07-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction:

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2022-05-20

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Narration / abstraction : réflexions croisées entre médiévistes et contemporanéistes

  Perspective · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  International audience

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2. Abstraction’s Gothic Grounds

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2021-02-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Abstraction’s Gothic Grounds

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Art
  • Philosophy

  Book Description: Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of image from what it purports to represent, abstraction as a vehicle for signification, and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.

  PublisherDOI

• Periculum and peritia in the late medieval “ars market”

  Codex aquilarensis: Cuadernos de investigación del Monasterio de Santa María la Real · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  espanolEste ensayo examina varios relatos textuales del “mercado del arte” de la Baja Edad Media, en particular, el contexto comercial de la venta y compra de objetos fabricados artisticamente en la Europa de los siglos xiv y xv. Desde un trabajo magistral de teologia pastoral, pasando por ordenanzas y reglamentos legales para los artesanos, hasta un econmium escolar en Paris, las fuentes textuales discutidas revelan como la pericia de los artistas y artesanos y la fuerza cautivadora y persuasiva de las obras de ars fueron valoradas y escudrinadas en el periodo tardomedieval. Aunque fueron escritos para diferentes propositos y dispares audiencias, los textos examinados entienden el mercado de ars de la Baja Edad Media como un foro en el que la mezcla de experiencia artistica, atractivo estetico, fraude, riesgo y credulidad planteaba considerables desafios al juicio humano EnglishThis essay examines several textual accounts of the late medieval “ars market,” the commercial context of selling and buying artfully made objects in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. Ranging from a magisterial work of pastoral theology, to legal ordonnances and reglemens for crafts, to a scholastic econmium to Paris, the textual sources discussed reveal how the expertise of artists and artisans and the captivating, persuasive force of works of ars were both valued and scrutinized in the later Middle Ages. Although they were written for dissimilar purposes and different audiences, the texts examined nonetheless understand the late medieval ars market as a forum in which the mingling of artistic expertise, aesthetic allure, fraud, risk, and credulity posed considerable challenges to human judgment.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Rainer Meinicke

  Berkeley College

  9 shared

• Carl Brandon Strehlke

  University of Basel

  9 shared

• Aurea Klarskov

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  9 shared

• David Kim

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  9 shared

• Arnold Nesselrath

  9 shared

• Laurence B. Kanter

  Berkeley College

  9 shared

• Urte Krass

  University of Basel

  9 shared

• An- Dreas Lammer

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  9 shared

Labs

• Department of Art HistoryPI

Awards & honors

• Medieval Academy of America Book Subvention