Achim Timmermann

Achim Timmermann is a professor, specialising in Medieval and early modern art and architecture. He is Director of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Education Timmermann attended The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London between 1988 and 1991, studying for a B.A. in history of art. He completed his M.A. in European literary and historical studies (medieval studies) at King's College, University of London in 1992. Returning to Courtauld the same year, Timmerman began his PhD in history of art and started working on his dissertation Staging the Eucharist: Late Gothic Sacrament Houses in Swabia and the Upper Rhine, with the assistance of his supervisor Paul Crossley.

Timmermann served on the editorial board of ArtHist.net, in the role of reviews editor in 2001-2004.

Sacrament houses Timmermann developed his arguments on the architectural significance of sacrament houses (sometimes called sacrament towers) from his PhD dissertation . Architect and historian Steven J. Schloeder noted Timmermann's intervention that the politics of the medieval church may be seen in the design of sacrament houses. In his review of Timmermann's work, he summarises his arguments that "anti-Semitism, the Hussite Utraquist controversy (that the Eucharist must be administered under both species), and the later Protestant challenges shaped the display of the Sacrament into grand statements of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical unity".

Microarchitecture Timmermann's book, Real Presence: Sacrament Houses and the Body of Christ, c. 1270–1600 (2009) discusses microarchitecture, introducing his intervention "pointing out the close stylistic relation between micro- and macroarchitecture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that distinguished the Gothic phenomenon from previous uses".

Timmermann was subsequently invited to write the “Microarchitecture” entry for the Grove Dictionary of Medieval Art, edited by Colum Hourihane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Oxford Art Online.

Timmermann drew further attention to the importance of microarchitecture such as shrines in Memory and Redemption (2017).