Profile

Biography

Philippa's principal research interest is late medieval religious art and devotional culture, particularly in the context of ecclesiastical spaces. Her AHRC-funded doctoral thesis examines devotional images of saints in English cathedrals c.1300 - c. 1540. The thesis focuses on the popular media of sculpture and wall painting, most examples of which were destroyed or defaced in bouts of iconoclasm during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, or fell victim to subsequent changes in religious and aesthetic tastes. Her work therefore uses a combination of documentary and surviving physical evidence to trace the locations, iconographies, and functions of images within cathedrals, suggesting how analysis of these factors modifies our understanding of the meanings of both devotional images and the cathedrals themselves.