The University of New Mexico’s Institute for Medieval Studies hosts its 24th Spring Lecture Series, April 27-30. This year’s series includes six lectures and a concert around the theme Vision and Visionaries in the Middle Ages.” The final lecture incorporates a performance with actors and a choir. All sessions will take place in Woodward Hall Room 101 on the UNM main campus. The lecture series, supported by a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council, is free and open to the public.
The series begins with an opening lecture Monday, April 27, at 7:15 p.m. and continues with 5:15 and 7:15 p.m. sessions on the following three days. The four visiting speakers at the event are internationally prominent, award-winning faculty from Harvard University, the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University. The concert, scheduled for 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, features UNM’s Early Music Ensemble directed by Colleen Sheinberg, founder-member and co-director of Música Antigua de Albuquerque.
“The aim of the series is to investigate and bring before a wider public the extraordinary contributions made during the Middle Ages to visual design and to the scientific study of the sense of vision, as well as to explore the mystical and visionary experience of prominent medieval authors who wrote literary and spiritual masterpieces,” said Tim Graham, director, Institute for Medieval Studies.
Spanning the fields of history, art history, literature, science, and religion and incorporating stunning visual elements, the series will have wide appeal for a general audience. Presentations will represent the cutting edge of recent research but have been tailored to be readily understood and appreciated by those without specialist knowledge. Individual lectures will focus on such themes as the visual interrelationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts; the design of the Bibles Moralisées, the Bible picture books that are the most extensively illustrated works that have come down to us from the Middle Ages; the textual and visual representation of mystical experience; the coexistence of science and alchemy in the medieval study of optics; Dante’s vision of the afterlife in his Divine Comedy, which represents the supreme literary creation of medieval civilization; and the visionary writing of the first known female author in the English language.
“The series will inform and entertain, and will offer its audience the excitement of engaging with speakers who are at the forefront of research in their fields,” Graham said.
The lectures:
Monday, April 27, 7:15 p.m.
Jeffrey Hamburger, “Openings”
In the modern age of mechanical, and now virtual, reproduction, it’s easy to lose sight of the basic visual unit that structures our perception of the books produced during the Middle Ages. That unit was the opening—that is, the two pages that faced one another when a medieval book was opened. From the origins of the bound book in Late Antiquity, and in contrast to the scrolls used in the ancient world, the confrontation of the verso of one leaf with the recto of the following leaf provided the visual field within which scribes and artists operated, often with consummate skill. Openings made possible the visual elaboration of the word with figurated initials, frames, and full-page miniatures. In his lecture, Hamburger will explore the complex semantics and literally revelatory possibilities of this new medium of the opening as it developed over the medieval millennium, from the fifth to the fifteenth century.
Tuesday, April 28, 5:15 p.m.
Jeffrey Hamburger, “‘As It Were’: Mysticism and Visuality
By definition, the ineffable—that which surpasses the powers of human expression—lies beyond representation of any sort, be it visual or verbal. In its root sense, the word “mysticism” derives from the Greek myein, “to remain silent” or “to close the lips or eyes.” What place can there be for any discourse on the visible in the context of a system of thought that, by definition, is predicated on obscurity and blindness? The paradox extends from sight to speech: were mystics to fall silent, there would not be any mystical literature. Yet when they speak, they very often are called to describe what they see. Perhaps the ultimate paradox, when speaking of mysticism and visuality, is that a discourse that by definition shuns the senses came, over the course of the medieval millennium, not only to legitimize but even to redeem the senses. Given the incarnational emphasis of late medieval piety, one must use the word “redeem” advisedly, if cautiously, given that mysticism’s sensory and, at times, sensual side was never without controversy. Sensory was integrated into spiritual. In the spirit of “as it were,” illusionistic strategies, some driven by the desire for divine presence, only served to make images more persuasive. Changing attitudes towards works of art form part of this picture. As Hamburger shows, not even the Reformation was able to undo the effects of affirmation of the visual.
Tuesday, April 28, 7:15 p.m.
Katherine Tachau, “Illuminating the Science of the Stars in the Thirteenth-Century Bibles Moralisées”
The Bibles Moralisées were a set of picture Bibles first produced in the 13th century for members of the French royal family. They are the most extensively and sumptuously illustrated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages, with each manuscript including thousands of pictures. By contrast, they contain a relatively small amount of text—not the actual text of the Old and New Testaments, but rather a paraphrase thereof that seeks to demonstrate how the Old Testament foreshadowed the New, and how ideas in the Bible were reflected in contemporary medieval life. In her richly illustrated lecture, Tachau explores the intellectual milieu of the University of Paris within which the textual and decorative scheme of the Bibles Moralisées was developed. More specifically, she will demonstrate significant links between the Bibles Moralisées manuscripts and thirteenth-century developments in logic and astrology.
Wednesday, April 29, 5:15 p.m.
Katherine Tachau, “Light and Color, Optics and Alchemy in Thirteenth-Century Paris”
Doubt has always existed about whether anything approaching true science was practiced during the Middle Ages. Yet within the context of medieval universities, scientific disciplines were elaborated and significant discoveries made that helped pave the way for the Scientific Revolution of the early modern era. As Tachau shows, no field of knowledge demonstrates this better than the science of optics, above all as it developed at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century. The leading figure was Roger Bacon, known as the doctor mirabilis, who adopted a rigorously experimental method as he tried to establish the process by which human vision occurred and to demonstrate its relationship to cognition. Bacon’s “perspectivism” was later to influence Johannes Kepler, whose work on optics complemented his contributions to the study of the motions of the planets. Yet there was another side to medieval optics: it was strongly linked to alchemy, a “discipline” that in modern terms seems distinctly unscientific. Tachau explores the relationship between optics and alchemy in order to reveal the intersection between science and pseudo-science, reason and faith in the medieval mind.
Wednesday, April 29, 7:15 p.m.
Christopher Kleinhenz, “Dante’s Vision of the Afterlife”
Kleinhenz first discusses the various sorts of “visions” and “ways of seeing” present in the medieval world before looking specifically at Dante’s representation of the afterlife in the Divine Comedy. He examines the afterlife both as a real and traversable place/space and as a moral and spiritual construct. He also considers the meaning and functionality of the afterlife in Dante’s Comedy, examining in particular how the poem represents the operation of Divine Justine through the nature of the punishments in the Inferno, the purgation process in Purgatory, and the concept of beatitude in Paradise. The lecture includes discussion of the artistic sources of Dante’s rich poetic language and imagery, and of the rich illustrative tradition that his poem generated in manuscript illuminations and book illustrations. The lecture will be accompanied by many fine visual images.
Thursday, April 30, 5:15 p.m.
Concert of Music by the UNM Early Music Ensemble, directed by Colleen Sheinberg: “Musical Visions in the Medieval World”
Thursday, April 30, 7:15 p.m.
Barbara Newman, “Julian of Norwich and Her Book: A Multimedia Performance”
Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416) is the first known female author in the English language. Her Revelations of Divine Love is a spiritual classic, written while she was living as a hermit in a cell attached to the church of St. Julian at Norwich in eastern England. Newman will describe Julian’s extraordinary life, linking her visions to the newly emerging spirituality of the late Middle Ages, which perceived both feminine and masculine elements within the divine. With the help of actors and a choir, she brings Julian’s world to life through a series of recitations and renditions in plainchant, the moving genre of church music so characteristic of the Middle Ages.
“The performance takes place against a backdrop of digital images and will bring this year’s lecture series to a close in spectacular fashion,” Graham said.
For more information contact Tim Graham, director, 277-1191, or via e-mail at, tgraham@unm.edu.
Media Contact: UNM, Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at April 17, 2009 03:06 PM