Reading Between Word and Image Lecture Series: “Holy Beds and Holy Families: Encounters with Devotional Objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” with Caroline Walker Bynum
Thursday, March 24, 2016
The Program in Scripture and the Arts is proud to present the second speaker in its 2015-2016 speaker series, Caroline Walker Bynum, from the 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 this lecture, 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.
Co-Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Free and Open to the Public with reception to follow
When: Thursday, March 24, 2016 at 5:30 pm, lecture with reception to follow
Location: The Questrom School of Business auditorium (595 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA, Room 105)
Transportation: Closest T stop is the B Line on the Green Line at Blandford St.
Closest public parking lot is at 665 Commonwealth Ave, at the corner of Granby St. and Commonwealth.