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Hortulus

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Hortulus

Category Archives: Exhibitions & Events

Hortulus Readers Presenting at Kalamazoo

05 Monday May 2014

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Please join us for the following presentations by Hortulus readers & reviewers at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, May 8-11, 2014:

Thursday, 3:30 pm
Session 125: Speech, Performance, and Authority in Later Medieval Religious Literature I
Schneider 1345
Jenny C. Bledsoe, organizer

Session 127: Monsters I: Parallel Worlds
Room: Schneider 1360
Melissa Ridley Elmes and Deva Fall Kemmis: “(Not) Solving the Mystery: The Complexity of the Melusine Legendary in Medieval French and German Traditions”

Thursday, 7:30 pm
Session 153: Speech, Performance, and Authority in Later Medieval Religious Literature II
Room: Schneider 1345
Jenny C. Bledsoe, organizer & presider

Session 154: Monsters II: Monstrous Gender
Room: Schneider 1350
Melissa Ridley Elmes, organizer

Friday, 10:00 am
Session 198: Carolingian Art and Artists
Room: Schneider 1275
Elizabeth Fischer, “‘The turtledove and the swallow and the stork watched for the time of his coming’: BIrds, Revelation and the Ideal Viewer in Early Medieval Gospel Books”

Friday, 1:30 pm
Session 257: Monastic Normativities
Room: Schneider 1345
Paul Brazinski, presider

Friday, 3:30 pm
Session 304: Between Europe and England: Early Middle English Sermons in a European Context
Room: Schneider 1255
Jennifer Illig, “Shaping the Words of the Gospel: Translation and Interpolation in English Wycliffite Sermons”

Session 311: Monks Going Wild
Room: Schneider 1345
Paul Brazinski, “Maximus the Confessor and Constans II: a punishment fit for an unruly abbot”

—Please join us in the courtyard of the wine reception from 5:00-6:00—

Saturday, 10:00 am
Session 347: Old English Hagiography
Room: Schneider 1125
Jenny C. Bledsoe, “Intercession and Devotion: Guthlac and Bartholomew in the Old English Prose Guthlac and Vercelli Homily XXIII”

Session 365: Performance of Women’s Voices in Medieval Lyric: Theory and Evidence
Room: Schneider 1340
Sarah Kate Moore, “Come ant daunce wyt me”: Middle English Women-Voiced Carols and Their Uses”

Saturday, 3:30 pm
HORTULUS SPONSORED SESSION
Session 438: Of Whom Shall I Be Afraid? Enemies in the Medieval Period
Emerson Storm Fillman Richards, organizer
Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, presider
Edward Mead Bowen, “(Former) Enemies at the Gates: Insinuations of Betrayal in ‘Pa gur yv y
porthaur'”
Josephine Livingstone, “’Into That Vile Countreye’: Figuring Ethnic Enmity with Gog and Magog in
Kyng Alisaunder”
Antonella Luizzo Scorpo, “‘Ni e yo amigo, ni enemigo’: Enmity, Trust, and Betrayal in Thirteenth-Century Iberia”
Daniel F. Melleno, “Franks and Scandinavians: Good Neighbors / Bad Neighbors”

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Divine Penetrations: the “Canterbury and St. Albans” Exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by hortuluseditors in Exhibitions & Events

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exhibits, General Interest, Getty

Review by Boyda Johnstone, Fordham University

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s current exhibition, “Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister” (until February 2) brings together two of the greatest examples of English art after the Norman Conquest: the St Albans Psalter (ca. 1130), and a section of the Canterbury Cathedral windows (ca. 1178-80). While the pairing of these two works from different times and spaces is unusual, and, in a way, the result of a happy accident,[1]the exhibition does a wonderful job highlighting their artistic correspondences. The Getty Center’s exhibition is a marvelous opportunity to access two stunning twelfth-century objects which are normally either closed to viewers (in the case of the Psalter), or simply out of sight (in the case of the windows).

from http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-voices-designing-canterbury-and-st-albans/
   Digital rendering of the exhibition

The Canterbury Cathedral windows in this exhibition were originally installed after the fire of 1174, but were moved in the eighteenth century to the Great South Window, where they normally hang sixty feet above the ground. Here at the Getty Center they hang easily within viewing distance, providing a rare chance for close scrutiny. They depict the Old Testament ancestors of Christ, linking the genealogy of the Cathedral with the genealogy of God, and the figures don fashionable twelfth-century apparel rather than biblical attire. Visitors have the opportunity to sit on one of the inviting benches and lose themselves in the moving impact of light and glass, or wander down the rows of pages of the Psalter and compare the two striking examples of Romanesque art.[2]

The Psalter is here displayed in “exploded book” format, as each individual bifolio is mounted on lecterns specifically designed for this exhibition.[3] Manuscript evidence such as calendar obits indicates that Geoffrey de Gorham, Abbot of St Albans (1119-1146) most likely presented the book to Christina of Markyate, an anchoress who established a community of women on the border of St. Albans. One of the many highlights of the exhibition is the inserted initial ‘C’ in Psalm 105 that seems to depict Christina of Markyate intervening with Christ, her hand penetrating the visible divide between mundane and divine; similarly, we as viewers penetrate spaces and objects we wouldn’t normally in this exhibit. Also related to Christina is the Alexis Quire, a discrete booklet in the otherwise Latin Psalter that contains the Anglo-Norman Vie de St Alexis. In this Vie, a son leaves his bridal chamber to spend seventeen years as a beggar abroad, and then spends another seventeen years living unknown underneath his parents’ staircase. In this exhibit we encounter the quire’s opening image of Alexis fleeing from his wife in their bridal chamber onto a boat, an act of abandonment which resonates with Christina’s own disavowal of her wedding vows.

The Christina Initial, in Psalm 105

In the course of their inspections, the Getty curators discovered faces of demons in the Passion sequence smudged by distressed viewers, and tiny needle pricks in the eyes of Christ’s tormenters. In medieval culture, seeing enacted the direct contact of touching or ingesting, and these details register the perceived danger that viewers and readers felt in the presence of evil or devilish figures. In the pages of the Psalms themselves we find a number of creative illustrative responses by the Alexis master, including a typological image of the nativity, and weeping figures surrounding a large initial ‘S’ which has become Psalm 137’s river of Babylon.  The exhibition is enhanced with interactive audiovisual materials and an assortment of other timely objects and books—such as the Eadwine Psalter, which contains thirty-three pictures in common with the St Albans Psalter; a codex depicting the Life, Passion & Miracles of Saint Edmund that is illustrated by the Alexis Master; and reliquaries associated with the cult of Thomas à Becket. A digital facsimile of the Psalter on a nearby computer screen translates the Vulgate into modern English with the touch of a finger, and the final room of the exhibit supplies visitors with background materials for the making of stained glass and illuminated manuscripts.

Overall, “Canterbury and St. Albans” dazzles its viewers with the beauty and power of these twelfth-century treasures, and the descriptions, audio guide, and other interactive materials give visitors valuable information about twelfth-century medieval spirituality and ecclesiastical power. This is a must-see for scholars of high-medieval England, and a should-see for everyone else.

For more on the windows, see The Ancestors of Christ Windows at Canterbury Cathedral by Jeffrey Weaver and Madeline H. Caviness. For more on the Psalter, see The St. Albans Psalter: Painting and Prayer in Medieval England by Kristen Collins, Peter Kidd, and Nancy Turner. You can also take a multimedia tour of the exhibition on your smartphone here. 


[1] The windows are on loan from Canterbury Cathedral due to construction, and the book, normally housed in Hildesheim Cathedral, has been sent to the Getty for rebinding and conservation.↩

[2] Curator Robert Checchi describes his vision for the arrangement of lecterns in front of glass: “the visitor can look down at a page, then up at the glass, and make the comparisons that—until this exhibition—have never been possible.” Read more here.↩

[3] Curator Kristen Collins explains the meaning of an “exploded book show” in her blog on the topic, found here.↩

“A Little Bit of Heaven” in New York

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by hortuluseditors in Exhibitions & Events

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Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon Adored by a Couple

The Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon Adored by a Couple, from the Heures à l’usaige de Romme

Review by Boyda Johnstone

The Morgan Library & Museum’s “Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art,” curated by Roger Wieck, runs from May 17 through September 15, 2013. Expertly selected and arranged, and organized chronologically according to theme, the exhibition showcases sixty-five manuscripts from the Morgan’s holdings, ranging in date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Perusing the gallery, one is struck by how incredible it is that two small objects, a wafer and a chalice of wine, could generate so much entangled, contested, and radical meaning for so many centuries. As Miri Rubin asserts, in a quotation mounted on the wall in the exhibit:

In the name of the eucharist some of the most humbling, and the most audacious, claims have been made: that God and humans could meet and unite, mix and merge, that a disc of baked wheaten dough could embody the saving body of Christ, that the lives of men and women, of cities and nations, could be encompassed, redeemed, transformed or forsaken through it. (1)

The first section of the gallery introduces us to some of these audacious claims as we encounter, for instance, an illustration in a twelfth-century book of the Last Supper as a medieval Mass, with Christ holding the wafer and chalice; sitting next to it is an English Book of Hours in which the priest is modeled on images of Christ, a striking reversal of the previous book’s imagery. Together, these two books demonstrate how medieval people sought to transport biblical stories into the present.

Other memorable illustrations in the gallery that demonstrate the multilayered significance of the Eucharist include a depiction of the Agony in the Garden with the Eucharistic chalice standing in for Christ; a crucifix miniature in which Christ’s blood drips down the cross to cleanse the skull of Adam (representing salvation from original sin); and a fascinating portrayal of Christ’s body being crushed in a winepress, his cross pressing his body while angels collect the blood/wine from below. We learn throughout the exhibit how priests in the thirteenth century began to raise the Host above their heads for the ocular edification of the public, and many of the books provide a revealing glimpse into medieval liturgical practices, such as the use of altar cards and monstrances during Mass. A fifteenth-century Italian pax is also on display, used in the late Middle Ages to convey the Priest’s kiss of peace to the congregation, who would kiss it in turn. The acclaimed fifteenth-century Hours of Catherine of Cleves shows us two typological scenes, illustrating the parallels that were typically drawn between the Old and New Testaments—one of the Israelites gathering manna as a parallel to Christ’s corporeal sacrifice, and another of Christ as the sacrificial Passover lamb.

Tucked behind a wall, and not fitting easily into any of the exhibit’s six sections, is the gallery’s scatological contingent, with miniatures that satirize the clergy. A French book of Jacques de Longuyon’s Les voeux du paon contains in its margins a fox celebrating mass with a tankard of ale while standing on the arse of an inverted man; and a French Book of Hours displays three grotesqueries: a monkey giving anal pleasure to a man with what may be an aspergillum (used for sprinkling of holy water), a phallic spear protruding from a soldier’s thighs, and a figure fellating a flying phallus.

These dissenting books offer a welcome contrast to the generally celebratory exhibition, as other uncomfortable visual registers seem consciously suppressed. The item description of a depicted life-sized wound of Christ, for example, explains that it would have offered talismanic potency to lay readers and viewers as part of a late-medieval practice of “ocular consumption,” in which laypeople could simply gaze at sacred images and become cured of disease or evil. But the wound also bears obvious similarities to female genitalia (as has been discussed by Karma Lochrie, in reference to this very same image (190)), a detail that was not mentioned, perhaps because the notion of imaginatively penetrating Christ’s wound as an object of sexual pleasure might be unpalatable to the modern public.

Another central theme of the exhibit is the Feast of Corpus Christi, begun in Liège in 1246 and blossoming and spreading throughout Europe in the form of processions and plays in the fourteenth century. An illustrated Italian Evangeliary limns how, as Wieck’s description states, “[a] Corpus Christi procession is a little bit of heaven on earth,” as angels parade the Host through city streets, which in this book have become a paradisiacal garden.

The exhibition concludes on a high note with a section on Eucharistic Miracles, tales captured in manuscript that attempted to prove the “True Presence” of the body of Christ in the wafer. In St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations, Christ and Mary illuminate St. Birgitta with visible laser beams of light as she records her visions, and the elevated Host to her left is transformed into the Christ-child under a burst of fire.

The final books are affiliated with the Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon, which was for over 350 years a holy talismanic object for the city. One book displays a portrait of a lay couple adoring the miraculous wafer, and another tells how in 1505, the Host cured King Louis XII of France from deathly illness. It was 1794 when French Revolutionaries publicly burned the Host, but an annual Mass of Reparation was established in 1825—a mass that is still said today.

Dijon’s story of the miraculously bleeding host is predicated on Christian persecution of Jews, as it was thought that Jewish disbelievers desecrated it to test its efficacy, after which it began to bleed. But the Morgan’s display does not recount this story beyond a brief mention, a significant omission in an otherwise educative gallery. This is an exhibition celebrating medieval devotion to the Eucharist in all its forms, with hardly a mention of its more disagreeable histories—perhaps due to the esoteric nature of the subject matter, and the general audience for whom the exhibition is geared.

Yet, Roger Wieck’s masterfully selected and carefully organized books offer a wealth of information about the evolving conventions, beliefs, and anxieties surrounding the doctrine of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages. “Illuminating Faith” remains a highly worthwhile visit for medievalists and non-medievalists alike.

Works Cited

Lochrie, Karma. “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.” Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 180-200.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

 

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    • Volume 1.1, 2005
    • Volume 2.1, 2006
    • Volume 3.1, 2007
    • Volume 4.1, 2008
    • Volume 5.1, 2009
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    • Volume 7.1, 2011
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  • General Interest
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  • Digital Publishing Column
  • The Reliquary Triptych, the Arms of Christ, and the Visual Language of the Relic Thesaurus ca. 1160–By Julia Oswald
  • Fortress of the Free Mind: The Contemplative Nature of Personal Liberty in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism—by William Tanner Smoot
  • BOOK REVIEW: The Eufemiavisor and Courtly Culture: Time, Texts and Cultural Transfer—Review by Heidi Synnøve Djuve
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Kungamakten och lagen. En jämförelse mellan Danmark, Norge och Sverige under högmedeltiden (Kingship and Law: A Comparison between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the High Middle Ages)—Review by Beñat Elortza Larrea
  • IMPERIUM ET CREDO: Frankish-Byzantine Rivalry over Leadership of the Roman-Christian Credo-State in the Ninth Century–By Elijah Wallace
  • Letter from the Editor
  • “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”: The Material and the Political in Ricardian Nature Allegories–By Allen Fulghum
  • Troilus’s Future: Perspectives on Futurity in Troilus and Criseyde–By Tyler Jones
  • Reform and the Welsh Cistercian Houses: Colonialism and Postcolonialism–By Frank Lacopo
  • “Fully His Entente”: The Allegory of Chaucer’s Pandarus—By Kayla Shea
  • Call For Papers: Fall 2018 Themed Issue
  • Letter from the Editor
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Walter Map and the Matter of Britain—Review by Thomas Sawyer

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