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IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 1221: Otherness of God in Late Medieval Religion

Wednesday 5 July 2017, 14.15-15.45

Sponsor:ScotMEMs: Scotland's Medieval / Early Modern Postgraduate Research Network
Organiser:Jonah Coman, St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of St Andrews / Glasgow School of Arts
Moderator/Chair:Alicia Spencer-Hall, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
Paper 1221-aQueer as Other: Queering the Wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Books of Hours
(Language: English)
Sophie Conaghan-Sexon, School of Critical Studies (English Language), University of Glasgow
Index terms: Anthropology, Art History - General, Daily Life, Gender Studies
Paper 1221-b'His nakede bodi red hi-maked mid blode': The Gore of the Crucifixion in Late Medieval Imagination
(Language: English)
Jonah Coman, St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of St Andrews / Glasgow School of Arts
Index terms: Art History - General, Daily Life, Ecclesiastical History, Lay Piety
Paper 1221-cHeavenly Monstrosities: The Three-Headed Trinity in the St John's Psalter, Cambridge, St John's College MS K 26
(Language: English)
Sophie Kelly, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies (MEMS), University of Kent
Index terms: Art History - General, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Mentalities, Religious Life
Abstract

The Christian God is a paradoxical bundle of human and divine, mortal and immortal, physical and invisible, all-loving and violently wrathful, everywhere and nowhere. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian believer (and sometimes non-believers) would engage with one or more of the persons of the Trinity in the church as rood and sacrament, in the home as book and vision, and in public as Corpus Christi and miracle. This panel will engage with the radical otherness and paradoxical sameness of God in the late medieval religion: with Christ as object of queer desire, as liquefied in the bloodshed of the crucifixion, or as part of the quasi-monstrous Trinity.