A contribution by

Pamela Patton
Director of the Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University 

The Index at 100

The 2016 retirement of Adelaide Bennett Hagens, a much-beloved manuscript scholar whose expertise enriched the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University for fifty years, coincided closely with the 100th anniversary of the archive’s 1917 founding as the Index of Christian Art. This volume was conceived as a tribute to Bennett Hagen’s career, and its varied contributions, presented in three sections entitled “Images and Their Viewers,” “Images and Their Histories,” and “Images and their Secrets,” open a broad perspective on the question most central to the mission of the Index: how images gained meaning in the eyes of medieval viewers. The volume will be presented to on October 14, 2017 at the conference “The Index at 100: Iconography in a New Century”. The conference, which illustrates the expansiveness and versatility with which art historians today conceive of iconographic studies, will celebrate both the centennial of the Index founding and the launch of a redesigned, much more accessible online database for Index records, so many of which were shaped by Bennett Hagens’s half-century of work.

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Tributes to Adelaide Bennett Hagens 
Manuscripts, Iconography, and the Late Medieval Viewer