Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

• Published in: Speculum 2012-07, Vol.87 (3), p.980-990
• Main Authors: Rouse, Mary, Rouse, Richard, Kolve, V.A., Sandler, Lucy Freeman, Tax, Petrus W., Tennant, Elaine C., Simon, Eckehard, Menocal, María Rosa, Armistead, Samuel G., Snow, Joseph T., Hartmann, Wilfried, Van Engen, John, Pennington, Ken
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Memoirs of Fellows; Varia
• ISSN: 0038-7134; 2040-8072
• DOI: 10.1017/S0038713412003090

Ruth Mellinkoff, a distinguished student of medieval art and iconography, died in Beverly Hills, California, on February 26, 2011, at the age of eighty-six. At the time of her election as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy, she had already published three scholarly books, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (1970), The Mark of Cain (1981), and The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1988), books generously received and widely admired, but her most productive period was still to come. Over the next twenty years, from 1991 to 2010, Ruth published four more studies: Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, in two massive volumes (1994); Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Germany (1999); Averting Demons: The Protective Power of Medieval Visual Motifs and Themes, again in two volumes (2004); and together with Christine Sellin, From Unholy to Holy: The Four Female Ancestors of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew (2010). Shortly before her death a volume of eighteen further essays, The Collected Writings of Ruth Mellinkoff, appeared.