2024 Carl Sheppard Memorial Lecture in Medieval Art History

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About the Lecture:

"The Secret of Creation: Bestial Humanity in the Worms Mahzor"

This paper will explore the fascinating imagery of the Worms Mahzor, a Hebrew festival book chockful of zoocephalic, or animal-headed, figures. Illuminated in the thirteenth century, the manuscript suffered tremendous vicissitudes of fate. Its second volume was lost already by the sixteenth century; the folios in the first volume have been re-bound out of order; and several images were mutilated, some as a result of the rebinding and some as a result of erasure and over-drawing. Still, the main thrust of the book’s visual language remains extremely clear: its artist used bird-heads as an exclusive default for representing humans. Where the manuscript departs from this mode of representation—and these departures occur strategically and unambiguously three times in the manuscript—the reader-viewer is treated to two distinct but reciprocal arguments: the visual argument about what should and should not be represented on the pages of a book, and how such (non)representation is to be navigated; and the ontological argument about the place of humanity in the cosmological spectrum of Creation. 

About the Speaker:

ELINA GERTSMAN is Distinguished University Professor of Medieval Art and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. In addition to numerous articles, she has authored The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010, winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize), Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (2015, winner of the Karen Gould Prize in Art History), The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (2018, with Barbara H. Rosenwein), and The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books (2021, winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Prize and the 2023 Otto Gründler Prize). A book co-written with Vincent Debiais, Écarts, excès d’image, is forthcoming from Cerf this year. She is the editor of several books, including, most recently, Abstraction and Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament (2021) and Collectors, Commissioners, Curators (2023). With Stephen Fliegel, she published a catalogue that accompanied the focus exhibition they co-curated, “Myth and Mystique: Cleveland's Gothic Table Fountain” (2016). In addition to guest-editing issues of Convivium and Ars Judaica, she is working on several book-length projects, including one on materiality of medieval medium, and another on theriomorphic imagery in Hebrew manuscripts. Prof. Gertsman’s work has been supported by the Guggenheim, Kress, Mellon, and Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundations as well as by the ACLS. In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

About the Carl Sheppard Memorial Lecture in Medieval Art History:

The Carl Sheppard Lecture is an annual medieval art history lecture in honor of the late Carl Sheppard, former University of Minnesota professor of medieval European art history. Begun in 2012 and held every fall, the Carl Sheppard Memorial Lecture in Medieval Art History is a scholarly public event.

If you’d like to make a gift, you can contribute to the Carl Sheppard Memorial Fund through the University of Minnesota Foundation. 

This event is co-sponsored by the James Ford Bell Library.