Global Middle Ages

ABSTRACTS

Chair: Maggie Crosland

Saint Louis Art Museum and Washington University in St. Louis

mcrosland@slam.org

Speakers:

Katie DiDomenico

Washington University in St. Louis

didomenico.k@wustl.edu

Paper Title: “A Good Constellation of Stars”: Zodiac Signs and Labors of the Month in the Worms Mahzor

The Hebrew expression mazel tov can be translated as “a constellation of good stars.” It derives from the ancient Hebrew term mazzal, originally used to denote the zodiac constellations and over time evolving to signify a person’s fate or fortune. Jewish thought also reveals a longstanding use of the zodiac in connection to liturgical, ritual, and prayer practices. This study analyzes visual articulations of the medieval Jewish zodiac by way of the Worms Mahzor, an Ashkenazi prayer book dated 1272-1280. In this manuscript, images of the zodiac signs and their corresponding labors of the month accompany the “Piyyut for dew,” a liturgical poem written by Palestinian poet Elʿazar berabbi Qillir (c.570-640). Recited on the first day of Passover, this poem invokes God’s favorable blessing of dew to support a robust harvest, and its text contains references to the zodiac constellations. By addressing the relationship between image and text, I demonstrate that this inclusion of zodiac signs and labors of the month communicated a visual connection between the heavens above and the earthly realm below, an idea reinforced by the dual meaning of the term mazzal (constellation/fortune) and the piyyut’s focus on the blessing of heavenly dew. The images thus offered the reader-viewer a “constellation of stars” to hold in one’s hand while reciting a prayer seeking good fortune. For a persecuted population living in diasporic conditions, this act may have served to restore a degree of Jewish agency by allowing them to figuratively take fate into their own hands.

Bryan Keene

Riverside City College

bryan.keene@rcc.edu

Paper Title: Exhibiting a Global Middle Ages on Indigenous Lands in North America:

Reflections and Approaches for Inclusive Presentations of the Premodern Past

For curators of medieval European art in North America, we have considerable work to do to break from centuries of exclusion in the presentation of art from the Middle Ages and to combat the weaponization of and misinformation about the premodern past today. Working on Indigenous lands and in institutions that have long benefitted from the labor of people of color, we have opportunities to reconsider the role played by collections of medieval objects in continuing the legacy of colonization and in perpetuating prejudices based on race, gender, and sexuality. In this talk, I advocate specifically that the Americas be included in projects about a global Middle Ages and that we adopt new approaches for collaboration with Native communities that decenter traditional narratives about the period 500-1500.

Sophie Ong

The Toledo Museum of Art

song@toledomuseum.org

Paper Title: “An excellent bit of teaching equipment”: Encountering the Global Middle Ages in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Cloister Gallery

For 89 years, the Cloister Gallery at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) has served as an evocative space for the display of architectural sculpture and artworks from the Middle Ages. Blake-More Godwin, the museum’s third director, assembled three stone arcades from French monasteries to create a cloister-like space that combined various styles of medieval architecture—Romanesque with Gothic—into an instructive, unified space for exhibiting the institution's nascent medieval collection. The gallery’s monastic architecture has historically directed the traditional presentation of western European art from around the tenth to fifteenth centuries. In 2020, the TMA embarked on a reinstallation of the Cloister Gallery to elevate the museum’s engagement with the Middle Ages and tell a broader narrative of art history, one of the museum’s strategic objectives. This paper will reflect on how the TMA approached expanding its narrative of the art of the Middle Ages to represent a more interconnected and global Middle Ages in four key ways: chronologically, culturally, geographically, and materially. Using the gallery’s history as support for refreshing one of the TMA’s most beloved spaces, the reinstalled Cloister Gallery draws connections across time and media to showcase the artistic prowess and cultural wealth of the Middle Ages globally, continuing to serve, as Godwin put it, as “an excellent bit of teaching equipment.”