Opening Keynote Lecture: “The Breath of Every Living Thing”

“‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali in the Hammelburg Mahzor and the Limits of Alterity”

Elina Gertsman, Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor in Catholic Studies II, Professor of Art History and Director of Graduate Studies

Friday, March 25th, 2022 | 4:15–5:45 pm EST
Cleveland Museum of Art, Recital Hall

Abstract: The lecture focuses on the woefully understudied Hammelburg Mahzor (Darmstadt, HLH Cod. Or. 13), a Jewish festival book completed in Lower Franconia in the middle of the fourteenth century. The book’s most remarkable feature is the inclusion of carefully curated zoocephalic, or theriomorphic, figures: humans with beastly and bestial heads. By virtue of their alterity, the zoocephali call attention to themselves with emphatic force. The purpose of this talk is to explore the semiotics and phenomenology of this alterity, and to suggest that its presence lies at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and history. In the Hammelburg Mahzor this visual idiom also signals distinction, albeit in a way that, conspicuously, collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and makes an argument about likeness and difference. By foregrounding linguistic elisions between words, images, and the celebrants, such an idiom establishes visceral connections with the community of the book’s users. Ultimately, theriomorphs stand as a fitting metaphor for medieval Jewish art as it has been viewed in mainstream scholarship.

*Please note that masks are required for attending Vagantes conference events.

Register for the keynote lectures at (https://forms.gle/b59nSp5Wb1aWRU1p8).
Register to attend the entire conference at (https://forms.gle/LfrD71ZcjgpuJx7H7).