In short, everyone involved in creating this catalogue and the exhibition it records deserves praise. The volume covers a vast terrain, helpfully summarizing the current state of knowledge on a great many objects and providing a road map for further study by scholars and students of the material (and indeed of ?materiality? writ large). In doing so, the catalogue provides a stellar example of the benefits of stepping outside of the intellectual taxonomies that so often constrain scholarship: our assumptions about the firmness of divisions between stylistic periods, geographic regions, and categories of objects. It compellingly demonstrates that those boundaries are far more permeable than they often might seem, and that they can distract us from important commonalities that transcend them.? (Stephen Perkinson, in Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews, 09/2023) BIO Marjan Debaene is Head of Collections at Museum M in Leuven. SUMMARY Alabaster was a popular material in European sculpture, especially from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Its relative availability and easy to sculpt characteristic made it a highly suitable material for both large monuments and small objects, for mass production and individual works, from England to Spain and France to the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. This material has been the subject of multidisciplinary research in various European countries for several decades. The research combines material analyses with historical and art-historical approaches. This publication, made for the occasion of the large exhibition on the theme at M Leuven opening on October 14th, brings together all renown specialists on the material and sheds light on the many facets of alabaster, such as its physical and chemical properties as well as its translucency, its whiteness, its softness, and its beautiful sheen, all of which made it a popular material used in different types of sculpture from the middle ages to the baroque, all throughout Europe, ranging from bespoke tombs, funerary monuments and commissioned sculptures and altarpieces to commercially interesting formulas such as English or Mechelen alabaster reliefs. TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword M Leuven Peter Bary Foreword Musée du Louvre Laurence des Cars Preface Marjan Debaene and Sophie Jugie 1 Alabaster as a Material for Sculpture Introduction Sophie Jugie Rhetoric of Alabaster: The Material between its Affordances and Cultural Meaning Aleksandra Lipi?ska How to Distinguish Alabaster from Alabaster: Tracing the Material Back from the Artwork to the Quarry Wolfram Kloppmann ?Marbre d?alabastre?: Status of the Interdisciplinary Research Project on Marble and Alabaster Jude De Roy, Laurent Fontaine and Géraldine Patigny Catalogue nos. 1?21 2 Funerary Sculpture Introduction Sophie Jugie Alabaster as a Material for Funerary Monuments Jessica Barker Catalogue nos. 22?41 3 Alabaster Altarpieces Introduction Marjan Debaene and Michaela Zöschg The Rimini Altarpiece and Alabaster Sculpture in the Southern Netherlands, around 1430 Stefan Roller English Alabaster and the Continent Lloyd de Beer Alabaster Altarpieces in the Iberian Peninsula: From Gothic to Baroque Carmen Morte García Catalogue nos. 42?99 4 Sacred and Secular Introduction Michaela Zöschg and Marjan Debaene The Head of St John the Baptist in Alabaster: The Object in Context Soetkin Vanhauwaert Catalogue nos. 100?126 Epilogue: Alabaster Mentalis, Trinitas Terrestris Sofie Muller Catalogue nos. 127?128 Bibliography Index Lenders to the Exhibition Photographic Acknowledgements