- Monday, February 22, 5:00 pm - Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles and Their Theorists
- Wednesday, February 24, 5:00 pm - Living Synecdoche: Parts and Wholes in Medieval Devotion
- Thursday, February 25, 5:00 pm - The Materiality of the Visual: How Did Medieval People See?
In the period between 1150 and 1550 a number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects--among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers--allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. In these three lectures, Prof. Bynum will describe the miracles themselves, discuss the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probe the basic assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She will also analyze what modern theorists call “medieval art” and argue that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that help explain both the animation of images and the iconoclastic resistance to them.
These talks are sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities' Humanities Lecture Series. Please contact Amy Lehman at iph@artsci.wustl.edu or (314) 935-4200 for more information.