In March 2022, Oliver Coulson traveled to Spain to speak at the conference, The Traces of the Colorful Souls: Visual & Material Arts in the Chromatic Middle Ages. 

Hosted at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, this conference explored the role of color in medieval life, as emerging research pushes back against collective associations between the Middle Ages and darkness. Papers written in English, French, Italian, and Spanish examined the artistic, documentary, material, technical, and symbolic dimensions of medieval colors over the course of three days. Below is Oliver's summary of his paper, “Polychromy and Symbolic Order in the Angel Roofs of East Anglia.”

Out of reach of iconoclasts, a small number of angel roof sculptures retain their original 15th-century colour, having survived the destruction and whitewashing that struck English churches during the Protestant Reformation. Whilst existing scholarship has focused on stylistic dating, these sculptures offer a unique opportunity to reimagine the importance of colour in communicating powerful symbolic meaning in pre-reformation parish churches. Using the case study of St. Agnes church in Norfolk, my paper argued that the polychromy of the angels in this church opposed the iconophobic position of Lollard heretics and fortified the concept of a celestial hierarchy.

During the 2021-2022 academic year, Oliver has been conducting dissertation research in England, and the Department is delighted to see all that he has accomplished abroad.