University College Presents
“The Materiality of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages”
Caroline Walker Bynum
Professor of Medieval European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
University Professor Emerita, Columbia University
Tuesday, December 8
“Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles and Their Theorists”
Wednesday, December 9
“Living Synecdoche: Parts and Wholes in Medieval Devotion”
Thursday, December 10
“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.
December 8, 9 & 10, 2009
4:30 p.m., Room 140, University College
15 King’s College Circle, University of Toronto. View a map.
Reception in Room 240 following lecture on December 8
Members of the faculty, staff, students and the public are cordially invited.
No registration necessary.
Call (416) 978-3160 for more information.
About the speaker:
Caroline Walker Bynum studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century. She obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard in l969. She taught at Harvard from l969-76, at the University of Washington from l976-88, and at Columbia University from l988 to 2003. In January 2003 she became Professor of European Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She holds honorary degrees from thirteen American and foreign universities and in 1999 she was Jefferson Lecturer, the highest honor the U.S. federal government awards to a scholar in the humanities.
In the 1980s, her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval Studies. Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood (2007) and in her forthcoming Christian Materiality (Zone Books, 2010), is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century.
About the Priestley Lectures:
F.E.L Priestley retired in 1972 from his position as a Professor of English at University College in the University of Toronto after some fifty years of teaching. The F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas were established by several of his former students. The lectures are interdisciplinary and may focus on literature, economics, history, geography, philosophy, theology, science, political science, as well as business, law, and medicine. Three in number and given on successive days, the lectures reflect their namesake’s broad interest in the history of ideas, as well as his dedication to teaching and scholarship. |