The Anthropomorphic and the Other: Medieval Holy Objects in Comparative Perspective
Fri, Nov 9, 2012
4:00 PM
Scholars in cognitive science, art history, a comparative religion have recently suggested that Christian devotional objects such as icons and panel paintings become sacred because of a human desire to see the world as anthropomorphic. Renowned historian Caroline Walker Bynum complicates this understanding of the holy object by showing that those materials most likely to be received as divine are in fact non-iconic, and non-anthropomorphic—objects such as the Eucharist, the most important material manifestation of the holy in the Western-European Middle Ages, which she uses in a comparative case study. Join Bynum as she develops a formulation of divine materiality more sophisticated than what current paradigms suggest.
https://vimeo.com/53635208Participants
Caroline Walker Bynum
Caroline Walker Bynum is professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and university professor emerita at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her work has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of medieval Christianity. Her path-breaking books, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom (1995), created the paradigm for the study of women’s piety that dominates the field today and helped propel the history of the body into a major area of pre-modern European Studies. Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood (2007) and in Christian Materiality (2011), is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century. She is currently working on medieval devotional objects in comparative perspective.