Conrad Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at UCR, was named a Fellow of The Medieval Academy of America.
In medieval studies (history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, art history, etc.) this is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a medievalist in the United States. Founded in 1925, The Medieval Academy of America is the largest organization in the U.S. promoting excellence in the field of medieval studies.
Rudolph has recently completed a book-length study (and digital reconstruction, http://mysticark.ucr.edu) of Hugh of Saint Victor’s Mystic Ark (c. 1125-1130), a forty-two page description of the most complex individual work of figural art of the Middle Ages, a painting also known as The Mystic Ark. The purpose of the painting was to serve as the basis of a series of brilliant lectures undertaken by Hugh at Saint Victor, a Parisian abbey of Augustinian canons. The purpose of the text was to enable others outside of Saint Victor–teachers, students, scholars, monks, canons–to undertake similar weeks-long discussions themselves by providing the information necessary to produce the image, something that was repeated again and again over the centuries. Depicting all time, all space, all matter, all human history, and all spiritual striving, this highly polemical image deals with a series of cultural issues crucial in the education of society’s elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.