Ethan Matt Kavaler

My research addresses the arts in northern Europe of the late medieval and early modern period, especially that of the Low Countries across all media. I am presently concerned with issues of devotional practice and affective engagement, ornament, embodiment, performance and theatricality, identity formation, and artistic mode. My past research has treated the vital and continuing tradition of Gothic design during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century and the problems of secular imagery in the work of Pieter Bruegel and his Netherlandish contemporaries. I have served as Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and am cross-appointed to the Centre for Medieval Studies.

Selected Publications

• The Spencer Album: Drafting Netherlandish Sculpture in the Sixteenth Century, with Krista De Jonge (Turnhout: Brepols). In press. 
• Actors Carved and Cast. Netherlandish Sculpture of the Sixteenth Century, College Park: Penn
  State University Press, 2024
• Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century. Studies in European Urban History, vol. 41. Edited with Anne-Laure Van Bruaene. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017.
• Renaissance Gothic. Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470–1540. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
• Le Gothique de la Renaissance. Monque Chatenet, Krista De Jonge, Ethan Matt Kavaler, and Norbert Nussbaum, eds. Paris: Picard, 2011.
• Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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