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A Cultural History of Love in the Middle Ages arrives just in time for Valentine's Day! Co-edited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, prof. Gertsman's co-author on The Middle Ages in 50 Objects, it features prof. Gertsman's article, "Love in Art and Material Culture" that includes several Cleveland Museum of Art...
12:00 pm | Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road
Embodiment of paradoxes and prophecies, fragmented by metaphors, the heterogeneous, ever-shifting artifact that is the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, could hardly stand further from the natural world. Late antique and Byzantine authors described her womb was the bush that burns and is not consumed, her body as the throne and the altar of God, and her arms as the liturgical spoon. She is a virgin who lactates. Despite her extraordinary qualities, remote from the experiences of womankind, art historians who have attempted to interpret this last facet of a very complex subject – the nursing Virgin Mary – have commonly essentialized it by presenting modern western constructions of nursing and motherhood as ahistorical, self-evident truths that are realized in this image-type. While scholars in many fields have explored the implications of gender theory for well over two decades, little of this work has been directed at Byzantine, and none at Egyptian Christian, art history. The vast distance that separates women engaging in the biologically natural act of nursing from the social construction of a nursing female cult figure shrinks and even disappears in their writings. Elizabeth Bowman, Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts, was motivated by this historiographic pattern and uses this iconographic type as a vehicle for exploring the variability of assemblages of the Virgin Mary Galaktotrophousa, or ‘she who nourishes with milk,’ and her diverse audiences.
An informal lunch will be provided.
Registration is requested. Register HERE.
Congratulations to Zoe and Luke on getting their papers accepted to the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 27th Annual International Graduate Conference! Entitled “Byzantium and its environment,” it will take place on the 1st-2nd March, 2025, at the Faculty of History, George Street, OX1 2BE. The conference will also be available online; please purchase a ticket via Eventbrite here. The full program and abstracts of papers can be found on the OBS website.
This weekend, third-year doctoral student Rebekkah Hart and second-year MA student Sarah Frisbie traveled to Chicago to participate in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Pre-Modern Studies at the Newberry Library. Rebekkah served on the conference’s organizing committee and chaired a panel entitled “Oh, When the Saints…” Sarah presented a version of her MA Qualifying Paper, “’One God, One Light, One Cause’: Materialities of Stained Glass in an Auvergnois Trinity” at the panel “Visual Landscape of Faith.” Congratulations to Rebekkah and Sarah! Click below to see more photos.
Join us for a facsimile viewing session on Wednesday, January 29, at 11 am! Listen to graduate students and faculty talk about illuminated manuscripts — poetry collections, books of hours, festival books — written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Middle High German. All are welcome!
Please join on March 28 us for what promises to be a fantastic lecture by Professor Pamela Patton, the Director of the Index of Medieval Art and Princeton University Cantigas de Santa Maria is one of the most striking manuscripts produced in late medieval Spain, filled with extraordinary imagery...
January brings us three Art Talks presented by the department’s graduate students! All will be held in the Ingalls Seminar Room.
On January 23, at 1 PM, join us for two medieval art papers! Sara Frisbie will present “One God, One Light, One Cause’: Materialities of Stained Glass in an Auvergnois The Trinity” in preparation for the Multidisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Newberry Library, immediately followed by Cecily Hughes’s grant-winning paper, “The Measure of a Saint: Size, Landscape, and Meaning in St. Olaf Pilgrim Badges,” which she will deliver at the College Art Association’s conference in February. Also at the CAA conference, Jillian Kruse will present “Collective Labors: Collaboration as Motif and Method in Pissarro’s Prints,” and her Art Talk is scheduled for January 27 at 11 AM. We hope you can attend all three!
Congratulations to Cecily who was awarded the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art (HGSCEA) to present her paper, “The Measure of a Saint: Size, Landscape, and Meaning in St. Olaf Pilgrim Badges,” at the College Art Association’s annual conference this coming February!
We look forward to seeing you at another curatorial walk-through of the Creation and (Re)Birth exhibition with Prof. Elina Gertsman, Dr. Gerhard Lutz, and Dr. Sonya Rhie Mace on January 22 at 1 o'clock. Please meet in Gallery 115. Link to the exhibition description here.
Congratulations, everyone, on the fabulous prospectus-cum-QP session on Friday! Arielle Suskin, Clara Pinchbeck, and Claire Sumner presented their dissertation research, while MA students Sarah Frisbie, Sara Miller, Darren Helton, Megan Alves, and Sydney Collins took us on a dizzying visual tour that ranged from contemporary cyborg theory to medieval theology of light, and from ancient Etruria to Byzantine Rus. Pictured here with Prof. Gertsman wielding the Chicken of Power and Timekeeping.
The 50th Annual Cleveland Symposium was a rousing success! The event was co-organized by third-year PhD students Cecily Hughes and Madeline Newquist and presented by the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). The two-day symposium explored...