Professor Hahn will give a lecture in the Death: Confronting the Great Divide series on March 16, and will also hold a lunch seminar on March 17.
Relics and Reliquaries: A Matter of Life and Death
Cynthia Hahn (CUNY, Hunter College)
Thursday, 16 March, 6:00 pm, Chandler Auditorium (Harn Museum)
A not unusual modern response to reliquaries is disgust – after all they often contain bones. To understand their presence, even their glorification, it must be admitted that the bones are not the ordinary subject of horror, rather as the bones of the blessed, “dem bones gonna rise again”! In a Christian understanding they will be instrumental in linking heaven and earth. Relics (with the help of their reliquaries) lead away from death and horror through intercession and access to salvation. Indeed, only in a later, almost modern development did the bones – and the “economy” of death – become a subject of fascination in themselves.
“Reliquaries as social and material objects”
A Faculty/Graduate Student Lunch Seminar with Prof. Cynthia Hahn (CUNY, Hunter College)
Friday, 17 March 2017, 11:30-1:00pm
Fine Arts C 201
Reliquaries are often very beautiful art objects of exquisite workmanship but if we treat them only as such we miss many of their most important qualities. To understand why patrons were willing to spend exorbitant sums of money on their creation and manufacture, we must inquire about their audiences, their functions, their histories and their settings in space and place. Even the materials from which they are made are of great significance.
Lunch will be served. To RSVP, please email with any dietary restrictions to: humanities-center@ufl.edu. Upon receipt of an RSVP, the following seminar readings will be circulated:
- Hahn, Cynthia. (2010) “What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?” Numen 57(3/4): 284-316.
- Normore, Christina. (2012) “Navigating the World of Meaning” Gesta 51(1): 19-34
Cynthia Hahn is a Professor of Art History and the Director of Graduate Studies in Art History at Hunter College (City University of New York). She earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and her MA from the University of Chicago. A specialist in early and late medieval art history, she has previously held teaching positions at Florida State University where she was Gulnar K. Bosch professor of Art History, the University of Chicago, the University of Delaware, and the University of Michigan. She participated in the planning of the major exhibition “Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in the Middle Ages”. Her recent publications include Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of the Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (2001) and Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (2012), as well as numerous journal articles and contributions to edited collections.