Religion Department Annual Lecture

Religion Department Annual Lecture Sherry C.M. Lindquist, The Book of Hours and the Body: Technologies of Devotion and Identity Wednesday, March 26; Barrister’s Hall (Law School) This lecture investigates the ways in which aesthetically sophisticated objects like illuminated Books of Hours may function as “devotional technologies” or “identity machines.” The variety of familiar, idealized, monstrous, transcendent, and abject bodies visualized in these late medieval and early modern prayerbooks help us understand the interrelated mechanisms of self-fashioning and othering. Such objects enable infinite, fluctuating meanings through dynamic tensions between text and image, material and immaterial, icon and narrative, margin and center, human and divine, individual and society. Bodies in Books of Hours compel their viewers—past and present—to ponder, and perhaps to reconsider, what it means to have a body, what it means to be human. Sherry C.M. Lindquist is Professor of Art History at Western Illinois University. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Fulbright, Getty, Kress, and Mellon foundations, as well as the Newberry Library, Yale Center for British Art, and British Academy; she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis (2017-19).