Speculative Imagemaking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art: Festschrift in Honor of Reindert L. Falkenburg

This book in honor of Reindert Falkenburg’s major contribution in the field of visual studies gathers twenty-four essays of scholars willing to engage with key aspects of his scholarship. Falkenburg has dedicated his scholarship to the study of late medieval and early modern images as machina—in its instrumental sense but also, as a figurative trope—that instigated speculative thought, which is to say, reflective and imaginative speculation on key themes geared toward changing persons for the better. This collaborative volume conveys the authors’ sense of how impactful Falkenburg’s scholarship has been, both in intensity and scope, over the last four decades in the field of late medieval and early modern visual studies.

About the Author :
Ingrid Falque is a Research Associate of the FNRS and Professor of Medieval Art History at the UCLouvain. She is co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). Her research focuses on the relationships between art and spirituality in Northern Europe during the late Middle Ages. Her book Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting was published by Brill in 2019.

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. He is author of three monographs and a critical edition of Karel van Mander’s Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting (winner of the 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art History), editor or co-editor of many volumes, and has published more than one hundred articles. His book Praying through Prints: Israhel van Meckenem’s Great Passion and the Transformation of the Manuscript Prayerbook will be published in Spring 2026.

Frits Scholten is senior curator of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum and holds the Chair of the History of Western Sculpture at the University of Amsterdam. His book The Modeller. Adriaen de Vries in Search of the ‘viva figura’, has been published by Brill in 2025.

Michel Weemans is Professor of Art History at the University of Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne. His scholarship has focused on Flemish landscape and the hermeneutics of the image in early modern Netherlandish art. He is the author of Le paysage extravagant (2009), Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme (2013), and Bruegel (2018), co-written with Reindert Falkenburg.