Cosmic Ecologies: Medieval Jewish Art

Catalog description

This course will explore late medieval Jewish art from western Europe and beyond. The first part of the seminar will focus on broad historical and historiographic issues in Jewish visual culture; topics will include, inter alia, issues of word and image, problematics of representation, the iconoclastic argument, and anti-Jewish polemic. In the second part of the course we will look at the great variety of later medieval Hebrew books with a special focus on illuminated Bibles and commentaries, liturgical books, and prayer books produced in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi contexts. In the last part of the class we will study several focused themes in medieval Jewish art, including issues of gender, zoocephalic representations, and the Kabbalah. By way of a coda, we will explore late medieval Yiddish books. Several guest speakers -- leading authorities on these woefully understudied topics -- will Zoom in during the course of the seminar. You will have a chance to examine three remarkable true facsimiles of Hebrew books in the collections of the Ingalls Library, including the Golden Haggadah, the Worms Mahzor, the Barcelona Haggadah, and the Kennicott Bible. Offered as ARTH 348 and ARTH 448 and JWST 348 . Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course. Counts as a Understanding Global Perspectives course.