Alixe received a BA in History and Medieval Studies from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada before obtaining a MA and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She began her career as a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, working on a project that has evolved into the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, and she joined the University of Kent in 2005. Here, her teaching focuses on the art and cultural history of Europe in the later Middle Ages.

Themes running through her work are pictorial narrative, word-image relations, the role of the visual arts in public ritual and private devotion, and the rhetorical and didactic functions of images. She has published on topics including literature, law, genealogy, medicine, devotion, and the liturgy, drawing especially in British, Netherlandish, French and Italian sources made between c. 1200-1500. Her most recent publication is the monograph Jean de Carpentin's Book of Hours: The Genius of the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book (Paul Holberton, 2011), which explores a remarkable yet little-known Netherlandish devotional manuscript of the early 1470s through its patronage, production, iconography, and controversial 20th-century provenance.

Alixe is the director of the University's Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, which offers a taught MA as well as research degrees. In 2009, she convened the conference of the British Archaeological Association in Canterbury, the proceedings of which are forthcoming, and she is Hon. Transactions Editor for the Association.

In 2008, she presented In Search of Medieval Britain, a six-part series for BBC4 that was broadcast as part of the channel’s Medieval Season.

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Selected Publications

Books

• Jean de Carpentin's Book of Hours: The Genius of the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book (Paul Holberton Press, 2011). 247 pp. ISBN 9781903470954.
• Under the Influence: The Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. John Lowden and Alixe Bovey (Brepols, 2007), with introduction by Alixe Bovey, ‘Influence and Illumination’, pp. 1-10). ISBN 2-503-51504-5.
• The Tacuinum Sanitatis: An Early Renaissance Guide to Health, (Sam Fogg, 2005) [exhibition catalogue] 80 pp. ISBN 0-9549014-3-6.
• The Chaworth Roll: A Fourteenth-Century Genealogy of the Kings of England (Sam Fogg, 2005) [exhibition catalogue] 46 pp. ISBN 0-9549014-1-X.
• Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (The British Library/University of Toronto Press, 2002). ISBN 0802085121.

Articles

• ‘The Wollaton Antiphonal: Kinship and Commemoration’, in The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers, ed. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (York Medieval Press, 2011), pp. 30-40
• ‘Renaissance bibliomania’, Viewing Reniassance Art, ed. Kim W. Woods, Carol M. Richardson and Angeliki Lymberopoulou (Yale University Press, 2007) pp. 93-129
• ‘A Pictorial Ex Libris in the Smithfield Decretals: John Batayle, Canon of St Bartholomew’s, and his Illuminated Law Book’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700: Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts 10 (2002) pp. 60-82

Shorter Contributions

• Cat. no. 108, ‘The Smithfield Decretals’, in Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, ed. Scot McKendrick, John Lowden, and Kathleen Doyle [exhibition catalogue] (British Library Press, 2011), pp. 324-325
• ‘Bestiaries’ and ‘Books of Hours’, in The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. M. F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• ‘The Chronicles of England: Lambeth Palace Library MS 6’, Lambeth Palace Library: Treasures from the Collections of the Archbishops of Canterbury [exhibition catalogue], ed. Richard Palmer and Michelle P. Brown (Scala, 2010), no. 18, p. 75
• ‘Picturing Romance’, The History of British Art 600-1600, ed. Tim Ayers (Tate and the Yale Centre for British Art, 2008), p. 136
• Cat. nos. 20, 91, 131, 137, 253, in Gothic Art for England 1400-1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson [exhibition catalogue] (V&A Publications, 2003)

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TBC

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Undergraduate

• HI5041 - Gothic Art: Image and Imagination in Europe, c.1140-1500

Postgraduate

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