Tuesday, October 30, 2018 @ 5:00PM
Soul Food and Salvation: Eating Animals in Medieval Ashkenaz
One of the unique features of the Jewish artwork of medieval Ashkenaz is its persistent zoomorphism—illuminated manuscripts produced by and for Jews in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Germany feature images of women and men with the heads of oxen, donkeys, birds, and so on. While art historians have offered various halakhic, polemical, and iconographical explanations for this aesthetic idiosyncrasy, this presentation will seek to situate Ashkenazic zoomorphism in a specifically theological context. Specifically, it will analyze the earliest surviving Ashkenazic zoomorphic image (a rendering of the rabbinic "heavenly banquet" motif depicted in the early-thirteenth century Ambrosian Bible), and argue that it lays bare theological anxieties over the ethics of carnivorousness, the eligibility of animals for eschatological salvation, and the limits of both "human" and "animal" identity.
* Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University and the Committee on Medieval Studies, Harvard University
David Shyovitz, Associate Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University
*This event is free and open to the public.
LOCATION:Mahindra Humanities Center Barker Center, Room 133, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20181030T210000Z DTEND:20181030T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR