Thursday, March 24th: Department of Religion Annual Lecture
Caroline Walker Bynum
Holy Beds and Holy Families: Encounters with Devotional Objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Boston University Department of Religion Annual Lecture and the Program in Scripture and the Arts are proud to present Caroline Walker Bynum, from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Professor Bynum is a preeminent scholar in the field of Medieval Christian Studies, and her work has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of medieval Christianity. In her lecture, on March 24, 2016 at 5:30 PM, she will present material thematically linked to her most recent publication, Christian Materiality. At an exhibit in Detroit fifty-five years ago, a much loved beguine cradle on loan from New York’s Metropolitan Museum was treated simply as a piece of furniture. But at the Met, the cradle, which once held a Christ child laid in it by the religious women in whose community it stood, points the viewer toward other works related to the holy family, all on display nearby but not usually considered together. Interpreting these devotional objects in their social and devotional context, Professor Bynum will argue that medieval images—both literary and material—evoked, even compelled, a far more complex, nuanced, and even contradictory sense of the holy than much recent work on materiality suggests.
