Dr Alixe Bovey

Alixe Bovey is a historian who specialises in the visual culture of the later Middle Ages and is the director of the University’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, which offers a taught MA as well as research degrees.

Alixe is on research leave throughout the 2013/14 academic year.

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. 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.

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 monograph Jean de Carpentin's Book of Hours: The Genius of the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book (Paul Holberton, 2011), explored a remarkable yet little-known Netherlandish devotional manuscript of the early 1470s through its patronage, production, iconography, and controversial 20th-century provenance. In 2009, she convened the conference of the British Archaeological Association in Canterbury, the proceedings of which were published in 2013, and she is Hon. Transactions Editor for the Association.

Alixe has served as the director of the University's Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and she is currently running Material Witness, a skills training programme for PhD students in the CHASE consortium.

Selected Publications

Books

• (Editor) Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Canterbury. British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions XXXV (Maney Publishing/British Archaeological Association, Leeds, 2013). ISBN 9781909662209.
• 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.

• External Member and Advisor, Research Degrees Committee, Courtauld Institute of Art
• Member, Advisory Council, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• Hon. Transactions editor, British Archaeological Association
• Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Member, The Bibliographical Society
• Member, British Archaeological Association

Dr Bovey is on study leave throughout the 2013/14 academic year