This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris’s Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir j…[Read more]

Our focus is a remarkable object – or, rather, a collection of objects, in turn housed within another object, which bears on it representations of yet other things: a reliquary box, once held in the treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace, containing bits of stone, wood, and cloth, labeled with locations from the “Holy Land”. The b…[Read more]

Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, “Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket,” with Susan Kim, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, ed. K Ellison and S Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017)

The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up…[Read more]

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (o…[Read more]

The Vercelli map, bluntly put, is in very poor shape (Tav. VIII). The map was found by Carlo Errera in 1908, while he was «putting in order the archive of the Chapter of Vercelli: Nobody before had paid attention to it, because it was inventoried by a hand of the eighteenth century as an old sketch of a synoptic picture»1. It has survived the p…[Read more]

I want to touch the Middle Ages. I want to hold all of the works of art in all the museums. I want to turn the pages, not by touching a screen or mouse in the Brit- ish Library’s Turning The PagesTM app, but by touching vellum in the British Li- brary’s reading room. I want to open and close the wings on altarpieces, to feel ivories warm in my han…[Read more]

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain’s location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world’s holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography,…[Read more]

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art…[Read more]

La Vie Monseigneur Saint Fiacre, one of two medieval French plays featuring the misogynistic horticulturalist, has come down to us in a mildly puzzling form, as a saint play with an interpolated farce. While the text indicates that the farce was intended to be played as an integral part of the performance, it is in fact quite unrelated to the…[Read more]

Looks at the Hebrew reception of the Secret of Secrets

Einführung in die Gender Studies für Altgermanisten. Semesterprogramm und bibliographische Hinweise

The opening text for the exhibition Hafıza-i Beşer: Osmanlı Yazmalarından Hikâyeler | Memories of Humankind: Stories from the Ottoman Manuscripts, organized by the Istanbul Research Institute, open between October 18, 2019 – July 25, 2020.

Sergi Küratörü/Exhibition Curator
K. Mehmet Kentel

Danısmanlar/Advisors
M. Baha Tanman, Selim S.…[Read more]

Presentation on Bibliomancy in Medieval Western Europe. With Bibliography.

As per its title

This thesis follows my earlier work on Aurignacian rock art by drawing a clear line between cave painting in the south of France and the holiest Hebrew script Ktav Ivrit or STA”M. This is an in depth study detailing relationships between Language, Mysticism and Kabbalah, as well as Religious Dogma that answers the question, “Why do all religions…[Read more]

This is a series of brief paradigms that suggest ways of manipulating abstraction, such as Art Language Religion and Politics, for use with a Carlos Ginzburg Evidentiary Paradigm, or other multivariate analysis. The tables in this appendix accompany the Index of Deities and Demons and How the Aleph-Bet Got Its Shape.

Article for the exhibition catalogue “Hagenbund. A European network of modernism 1900 to 1938” (2014)

Article for the exhibition catalogue “Hagenbund. A European network of modernism 1900 to 1938” (2014)

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]