Michael Camille

Michael William Camille (6 March 1958 – 29 April 2002) was a British art historian and academic, who was an influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages. He was Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago.

In The New York Times obituary of Michael Camille, The New York Times writes, "Mr. Camille was noted for bringing contemporary critical theory and social perspectives to the study of medieval art. Using anthropological, psychoanalytic, semiotic and other approaches, as well as traditional art historical methods, he described the Middle Ages as a time of complex social and political ferment with similarities to modern experience." Camille's new approach marked "a departure from the more popular conception of the period as a remote and static 'age of faith.'''^[1]

The New York Times obituary of Michael Camille is titled "Michael Camille, an influential and provocative scholar of medieval art at the University of Chicago, died on April 29. He was 44."^[1]

"Camille's first article in the English journal Art History (1985) brought him immediate attention."^[2] Camille applied himself to "the traditional field of medieval manuscript illumination," but with new perspectives.

His work is translated into "Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean," and his book Image on the Edge "was reviewed by publications ranging from the Burlington Magazine to the Wall Street Journal." ^[3]

Life

Michael Camille was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, on 6 March 1958.^[4] He studied English and Art History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduating with a first class honours degree in 1980 and with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1985.^[5] His doctoral thesis was titled "The illustrated manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville's 'Pelerinages', 1330-1426".^[6]

Immediately after obtaining his doctorate he began work at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his short career. He was best known for applying post-structuralist ideas to questions of medieval art history. In 1996 he visited Medieval Times with Ira Glass for a segment of This American Life.^[7] In 2001 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[8]

He died of a brain tumor on 29 April 2002.^[4]

Works

• The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ISBN 978-0521424301
• Image on the Edge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). ISBN 978-1789140064
• Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). ISBN 978-0300064575
• Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Abrams, 1996). ISBN 978-0135701775
• Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). ISBN 978-0226092409
• The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Abrams, 1998). ISBN 978-0810915442
• "Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing." In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 197–223. ISBN 978-0521652223
• The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0226092454

References