BA, MA, PhD University of Virginia

Anne L. Williams is a specialist in late medieval and early Renaissance art. Before joining HKU, she taught at William and Mary and the University of Richmond. Several of her publications investigate the intersection of satire, subversion, and the sacred in altarpieces, painted panels, frescoes, and manuscripts, including her first book, Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550. In other publications, she addresses the art of popular devotion through the lenses of marginality, masculinity, and sanctity. Her work has been supported by the Renaissance Society of America, the International Center of Medieval Art, and the German-American Fulbright Commission, among other institutions. She is currently writing her second book on humor, irony, and rhetoric in fourteenth-century art and devotion.

Selected Publications

“Imago humilis: Humor, Irony, and the Rhetorical Wit of the Sacred in the Arena Chapel, Padua.” Gesta, 61, no. 1 (2022): 57-80.

“Sanctity, Anti-Judaism, and the Early Market Economy.” In Religion in the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace, ed. Kristin M.S. Bezio and Scott Oldenburg (New York: Routledge, 2021), 125-50.

“Joseph of Nazareth in Sixteenth-century New Spain: An Elderly Saint and Popular Devotion.” IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 14 (2021): 325-36.

Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.

“Satirizing the Sacred: Humor in St. Joseph’s Veneration and Early Modern Art.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 10, no. 1 (2018): 1-43. DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2018.10.1.3

“Medieval Multivalence: Subversion, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Bartolo di Fredi’s Adoration of the Magi.” In “Lo profano en el arte sagrado medieval,” ed. Gerardo Boto Valera, Alejandro Garcia Avilés, Herbert Kessler, and Pedro Luis Huerta. Special issue, Codex Aquilarensis 33 (2017): 155-70.