Gothic Ivory Virgins: A Poem

Note: I've been writing poetry over this past few months by cutting-and-pasting (literally with scissors and tape) words and phrases from scholarly art-historical texts. I've posted examples on some other blogs: Fumblr and the Material Collective group blog. Here I turn that activity onto one of my own texts, a recently rejected article on ivory Virgin and Child statuettes, to both rescue something from this rejection and advance my thinking on this project by coming at it in a different way.

Embellishing Ivories

Allow us to imagine:
some ivory buttons,
an ivory comb
several ivory and silver boxes.
And a set of metal chains -
set into a gold flower on the Virgin's chest.
Gilt in her hair, red on the inside of her veil,
a green belt with gilt embellishments.
Supplemented by precious stones,
emeralds as well as an emerald,
and thirty-two pearls (one missing).

Allow to us image,
against the background of the scarcity
that just appears from behind her,
in anticipation of his death,
with unnamed images,
with its accompanying angels,
solitary figures joined by a string.
Just a casual accumulation of goods
reaches out and breaks the boundary
to perform miracles for others.

The object's miraculous potential
rests on its silver chair
and emphasizes its preciousness:
one with a jewel in its chest and the other with a silver crown.
Garments moving over her body.
Gazes directed outwards.
Boxes, buttons, combs, fans, game pieces, handles, and mirrors:
St. Christopher kept in a box.
Highly embellished objects with no embellishments.
No documents for its prior existence
preserved her hand from decay.

Comments

The Virgin at Chartres, White Supremacy, and Medieval Studies

Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window). According to Fulton Brown, th

À mon seul désir

This post has been brewing for a while - since my Spring Break trip to Paris. It springs from one of my visits to the Cluny during that trip, when I ended up in the Unicorn tapestries room. I've been in there before of course, if only because it is the only air-conditioned space in the museum. My first month-long trip summer trip to Paris I took in July instead of June and it was hot (and a little smelly). I was spending my afternoons in museums looking at Virgin and Child statues and most of the Cluny's are gathered in a gallery right next to the tapestries room, so I would duck in there to sit in the a.c. for a bit whenever I got just too uncomfortable. On this most recent trip, in March, it was freezing cold and I got routed through the room because that space with the Virgins was briefly closed for some reason. And for some other reason I was struck by the panel above, sometimes labelled as the Lady and the Unicorn. Struck not so much by its imagery, as by its

Dobbs and Abortion in the European Middle Ages

A New Yorker article on abortion in the U.S. written prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision but anticipating its overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, quotes a gynecologist named Franz Theard as saying “I cannot believe that people who were born after ’73 are going back to the Middle Ages” (June 20, 2022, p. 21). Even before I read that, I had expected someone, somewhere, to make a medievalizing reference to describe a post-Roe America, given how often the European Middle Ages are used today to represent the “bad old days.” What surprised me was the actual medieval reference in Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs. In claiming that English common law treated abortion after “quickening” as a crime, he quotes “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise” as stating that if someone has “struck a pregnant woman, or given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide” (p. 17). This reference to the Middle Ages

Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

Search This Blog