[3] Caviness was president of Corpus Vitrearum, an international scholarly organization dedicated to the study of medieval stained glass, from 1987 to 1995.
[5] Caviness's contributions to the study of medieval art were celebrated in the collection The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, edited by Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, and Ellen Shortell, and published by Ashgate in 2009.
[6] Caviness's 1980s academic inference that 4 stained glass panels in Canterbury Cathedral predated others and a destructive fire was confirmed by technology in 2021.
[2] She is an elected member of the Society of Antiquaries in London (1980)[10] and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
[5] Caviness has been the recipient of the John Nicholas Brown Prize and the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America.