Sonja Drimmer, ‘As if: Scopic Regime Change and the Wars of the Roses’

What does it mean to “see politically”? Is there a distinct form of visuality that is solicited by images and objects relating to governance and its proper realm of action? This presentation will focus on rare survivals of ephemera produced during the Wars of the Roses. This ephemera altered the ways in which the empowered elite and the disenfranchised classes not only communicated with each other but also saw the world they inhabited and envisioned possibilities for its future.

Sonja Drimmer is associate professor of medieval art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sonja Drimmer’s teaching ranges widely across the period of c. 500 to 1500 to cover art produced in Europe, western Asia, the Levant and northern Africa. Her monograph, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), is the first art-historical study dedicated to the emergence of the Middle English literary canon as an illustrated corpus. It is the recipient of an ICMA-Kress Research and Publication Grant, a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Publication Grant, and a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant.