The Medieval Moon

Join Ayoush Lazikani and Jack Hartnell and for a conversation exploring The Medieval Moon, Ayoush Lazikani’s vivid new history of the moon across cultures.

Discover how medieval people across the globe, from China to South America, Korea to Wales, perceived the moon as at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate. Lazikani reveals how it inspired love, poetry, fear, and superstition, and draws connections to depictions of the moon in the National Gallery’s collection, offering a visual and global journey through our closest celestial neighbour.

Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

Jack Hartnell is Head of Research at the National Gallery, London, and Honorary Associate Professor of Art History at the University of East Anglia. He received his PhD in 2014 from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and has held fellowships at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Columbia University, and the Max‑Planck‑Institut in Berlin. His research focuses on late medieval and early modern visual culture - examining objects, science, medicine and art across Europe and the Middle East.