Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

Last week I was at the Babel Working Group meeting in Santa Barbara where I participated in an experimental "Beachcombing" panel organized by Lara Farina.  This is Lara's description of the project: Participants in this panel have a scattered assortment of fragments of the medieval past to sort through. The tide has washed some of this flotsam and jetsam in to the site at Omeka , where shell collectors, treasure-hunters, and those just out for a stroll will find it littering the beach. They might pick some things up, sort them into displays, use them in making sandcastles or words scratched out with a stick, take them home, or throw them back. They might leave some of the things they brought with them behind--as a present to the sea or as unwanted junk.  Participants in the panel worked (mostly) with the "flotsam and jetsam" collection of objects that Lara had assembled in the Omeka site cited above to create online exhibits.  Because of some techni...

I've moved on to revising what will be the last chapter of the book, on fourteenth and fifteenth-century Virgin and Child sculptures.  I'm working on a couple of issues here: first, giving the reader a stronger sense of the sculptures themselves as objects and works of art; and second, strengthening the sense of argument throughout.  This is the first, intro section for the chapter and so crucial for both of those points: let me know what you think! Like the fourteenth-century sculpture featured in the Introduction, this fifteenth-century Virgin stands with her weight shifted to her left, to where she holds the child on her hip with her hand.   The comparison of these two sculptures, however, points to the latter’s exaggeration of the mother’s body’s twists and sways.   Here, the draperies on Mary’s lower body form thick folds that move on strong angles over to the child and the top of her body repeats that action as her head bends over and down towar...

I'm very happy to say that I'm on schedule for my writing this summer: I've got a draft of this new Intro to the book finished just in time to leave town for my cousin Seth's wedding.  The last part of it, which I am posting here, is the review of the literature (edited down a bit for this forum) and thee overview of the book as a whole.  Let me know what you think. Scholarship on motherhood in general has been shaped by a split between motherhood understood as an “experience” and as an “institution” since the publication of Adrienne Rich’s foundational work in 1976.   The experience that concerns Rich and those who have followed in her wake is that of the mother herself, as distinct from that of the child.   Indeed another set of terms for this distinction is between “maternal subjectivity” - that is, the mother considered as a thinking and feeling subject in her own right –and the “ideology of motherhood.” Institution and ideology alike ref...

While my last post hasn't gotten comments on the blog itself, I've received several responses to it privately.  A common word in these responses is "brave:" I'm assuming this is in response to the final paragraph where I identify the abortion I had in graduate school as one motivation for my turn towards writing about motherhood in my scholarship. I've gone back and forth over whether or not to include that information in the book.  I've decided (for now at least) to do it.  And I want to talk here a little bit about why. First and most broadly, I have long accepted the fact that there is always some connection between a person's scholarship and his or her life and experiences.  "Objective" or "disinterested" scholarship is a myth: why would someone spend years of their life working on something that s/he wasn't "interested" in for some reason?  That connection, that reason, may not be obvious or clear, even to the p...

The next part of the Introduction is the dreaded theory section.  Dreaded because it is absolutely crucial to everything that follows, because the concepts aren't easy to explain, because it contains some self-revelations, and because it is probably going to turn some people off to the book as a whole.  I've cut it down a bit for this forum and taken out the footnotes.  Let me know what you think. The relationship between the beholder and the work of art has been a major topic of interest in art history as a discipline over approximately the past 40 years. Nevertheless, I find that the most useful conceptual tools for understanding this relationship come from the work of literary theorists writing about the relationship between the reader and the text; specifically Hans Robert Jauss’s work on reception in combination with Wolfgang Iser’s on response.    Jauss focuses on the reader or beholder’s share in this relationship, introducing th...

The first thing I am doing in my work on the book this summer is writing a new introduction.  My thought is that doing this will help me to frame the book clearly, first of all for myself I continue working on it, and then for its eventual readers. Below are the first three paragraphs of the new Intro and so the projected first three paragraphs for the book as a whole.  My goals here are to get someone interested in actually reading the thing and then to lay out some big ideas for the book as a whole - the theoretical perspective plus some sense of the argument.  Let me know what you think. 7/1: I did a bit more fiddling with this - added a sentence and moved some things around. I've highlighted the new sentence. She stands with her weight shifted slightly to her left and with that hip pressed outward and upward, in a version of the classical contrapossto pose.   She puts that pose to a different end, however, propping a baby up on her hip an...

  I'm returning to the image that I used in my first post in this blog in order to mark a return to the blog itself.   I've not written anything here for a good long while now and am very aware of that.  I've been wondering whether I want to continue to writing here or not and why.  Thinking about where I am now compared to where I was when I started this and about what I might want this platform to do for me now. I've not been writing here, first, because I've been doing other things.  Primarily service work, chairing a couple of committees and so getting my department and college ready for a major curriculum change that will be going into effect in the Fall.  Looking back at my first post here, I wrote about not wanting to get dragged into service and hoping to use writing in this forum as a way of resisting that.  That didn't work out, obviously, but I've also changed my attitude towards service somewhat - seeing it not as a time-sink but in...