MEMS Graduate Student Talk
“Ekphrasis in Ivory: ‘Reading’ Fourteenth Century Representations of La châtelaine de Vergi.”
by Philip Allen (Department of Spanish and Portuguese).
Friday, March 24, in Pugh 150, from 4-5 pm.
La châtelaine de Vergi is a short romance which tells the love affair between an anonymous knight and the niece of the Duke of Burgundy and was undoubtedly one of the most popular 13th-century French romances. Its popularity was such that the story has come down to us in more than twenty manuscript sources. Additionally, the tale was reworked in a 15th-century version, it was used by Marguerite de Navarre in her Heptameron, and it was used to decorate several ivory chests during the Medieval Era. In this presentation I will examine how the story was represented in various 14th-century ivory chests that are currently housed at the British Museum, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Musée du Louvre, among others, and I will analyze how the symbolism that appears in several of these ivory carvings carries with it a richer meaning than that would seem apparent at first glance.