HAA Colloquium
Wednesday, February 18th, 12 noon-1 pm
Room 203, Frick Fine Arts
Saskia Beranek, HAA PhD Student
"The Demon in the Synagogue:
The Rhetorical Role of the Other in Medieval Text and Image"
In Perceval, Chrétien de Troyes presents striking textual descriptions of ugliness.
These characters are, however, seldom illustrated—and their
depictions never reflect the specifics of the text. Why did the manuscript
illuminators, so prone to outlandish illustrations elsewhere, choose not to
follow the rich textual material provided to them?
Beranek seeks to unravel this problem, turning initially to the way ugliness
has been treated in both sacred and secular textual sources since antiquity.
How was the idea of ugliness shaped in medieval Europe, and how
does that impact our reading of Perceval? How do we resolve the relationship
between the text and the image?
