This volume presents a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the apocryphal writings and their reception in the Middle Ages, especially in connection with visual representation. It aims to bridge what often remains disconnected, the visual art and the written text, the early Christian roots and medieval reception, the East and the West, as well as methodologies of various disciplines.

The studies in this volume firstly investigate issues related to the Virgin Mary, and through them, also the status, function, and identity of women. Mary and the female element thus represent significant models and/or background figures in fields pertaining to theology, religious studies, textual studies, manuscript studies, and art history in a trans-disciplinary perspective. Secondly, the studies focus on the apostles and the Last Judgment, their visual representations and the use of apocryphal sources. The volume is divided in two parts according to two major topics: Part I dealing with Mary in the Apocrypha, and Part II focusing on the Apostles and the Last Judgment.

STANISLAVA KUZMOVÁ is currently a researcher at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava (Department of Slovak History). She earned her PhD in Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. She worked on international collaborative projects at Central European University in Budapest (ESF project Symbols that Bind and Break Communities) and at the University of Oxford (ERC project Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Memory and Identity in Central Europe). She is the author of the monograph Preaching Saint Stanislaus: Medieval Sermons on St. Stanislaus of Cracow, His Image and Cult (Warsaw: DiG, 2013), awarded Stefan Krzysztof Kuczyński Prize of the Studia Źródłoznawcze Journal for best publication in historical sources and auxiliary sciences in Poland in 2014. Her research interests include the cults of saints, hagiography and sermon studies, and medieval religiosity.

ANDREA-BIANKA ZNOROVSZKY received a Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities Research Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, in collaboration with Universität Salzburg, Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Starting with September 2018, she functions as a researcher at the Universita Ca'Foscari, Venice, Italy, as a recipient of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-Individual Fellowship (IF), financed by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014- 2020.

She received her PhD magna cum laude in Medieval Studies from the Central European University in Budapest in 2016. Her doctoral dissertation, Between Mary and Christ: Depicting Cross-Dressed Saints in the Middle Ages (c. 1200-1600), explored the iconographic development of cross-dressed saints in relation to their cult in Western Europe. She also holds a Masters Degree in Medieval Studies from the Central European University, Budapest. In 2016-2017 she functioned as an Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, where she taught academic writing (First Year Seminar) and art courses (Women in Art and Literature). 

Her research interests lie in the areas of signs and symbols of images, women in art and literature, women and gender in the Middle Ages. Currently, she is investigating the transition of Marian Apocryphal depictions from hagiographic collections to church space with particular emphasis on France (also Western Europe).