Holy Beds and Holy Families: Devotional Objects in New York's Metropolitain Museum of Art

A public lecture given by Dr. Caroline Walker Bynum

Caroline Walker Bynum is Professor Emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and University Professor emerita at Columbia University in the City of New York.  She studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century.  In the 1980s, her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast  was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval Studies. In the 1990s, her booksFragmentation and Redemption  and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom provided a paradigm for the history of the body. The essays “In Praise of Fragments” (in Fragmentation and Redemption) and “Wonder” (inMetamorphosis and Identity) are widely cited in discussions of historical method.  Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and in Christian Materiality (Zone Books, 2011), is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century. An interpretive essay in art history and history of science as well as religious history, Christian Materiality locates the upsurge of new forms of art and devotion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against the background of changes in natural philosophy and theology. Increasingly cross-cultural in her interests, Bynum is currently pursuing a comparison between the treatment of devotional statues in late medieval Christianity and the ostensibly similar practices in the Hinduism of medieval India. She is also working on devotional objects in women’s cloisters in 15th-century Germany.