Madeline H. Caviness


Madeline Harrison Caviness, FMAoA, FSA, is a scholar of European medieval art, and an expert on glass painting and medieval women as viewers of art. She is a Professor Emeritus at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Education

Caviness attended Cambridge University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1959 and a master's degree in 1963. She earned her Ph.D. in fine arts from Harvard University in 1970.

Career

Caviness is a Professor Emeritus at Tufts University. She is considered an expert on European medieval stained glass. She has participated in efforts to find and catalog stained glass works that were collected by Americans. Some of the earliest pieces she has discovered in the United States date back to the 12th century.
Caviness was president of Corpus Vitrearum, an international scholarly organization dedicated to the study of medieval stained glass, from 1987 to 1995. She served as president of the Medieval Academy of America from 1993 to 1994.
Caviness's contributions to the study of medieval art were celebrated in the collection The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, edited by Elizabeth Carson Pastan and published by Routledge in 2017.

Selected works

Books

Caviness has contributed over 1400 images of stained glass to the Artstor Digital Library.

Awards and honors

Caviness was appointed Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an elected member of the Society of Antiquaries in London and the Medieval Academy of America. Caviness has been the recipient of the John Nicholas Brown Prize and the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America.