Please join us at 4:30 on Thursday, February 16, at the Baker-Nord Center (Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road), for the Graduate Work-in-Progress talk by Reed O’Mara, “Idol Viewing and Idle Viewing: Exploring Erasures in the Munich Rashi.” Reed will discuss one of the earliest extant illuminated Hebrew manuscripts from Europe, the so-called Munich Rashi, copied in Germany in the 1230s for a wealthy Jewish patron. The commentary has an incomplete image cycle and several of its surviving paintings have been partially erased. In her lecture, Reed will consider the manuscript’s images in dialogue, addressing the way that the erasures wrought upon these images may have affected medieval viewers, and their perception of both the divine and images of the divine.
On Friday, September 30, Reed O’Mara presented a paper on the Golden Haggadah at the VI Forum Kunst des Mittelalters in Frankfurt, in the session organized by Professor Gertsman and sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art. Speakers came from Austria, Israel, and the US to discuss the intertwinement of olfaction and memory in medieval material culture. The joint program was also represented by Dr. Lutz who organized a session on the Cleveland’s Table Fountain.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the pious Christian was constantly preoccupied with both the death of the earthly body and the subsequent survival of the soul. The fear of dying suddenly without repenting and confessing engendered images of death and the afterlife. Speakers in this session are encouraged to investigate late medieval representations of death as both an earthly and otherworldly matter. We welcome papers that explore the flourishing of these imageries especially in rural and marginal areas, which were extremely receptive to cultural exchanges, but which have not received proper scholarly investigation yet.
