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IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 131: Culture and Identity in Southern Italy

Monday 3 July 2017, 11.15-12.45

Moderator/Chair:Graham A. Loud, School of History, University of Leeds
Paper 131-a'Divina officia Graeca lingua, quam Latini minime intelligunt, celebrantur': Mediating Greek and Latin Christianity in Southern Italy
(Language: English)
Maria Harvey, Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Art History - General, Art History - Painting, Byzantine Studies, Women's Studies
Paper 131-bDialogues of Belonging: Italo-Greek Hagiography and the Construction of Self and Other, 10th-12th Centuries
(Language: English)
Kalina Yamboliev, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Index terms: Hagiography, Rhetoric, Social History
Paper 131-cThe Demon and the Saint: (De-)Constructing Otherness in a Sicilian Life of St Thomas (Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS I.II.17)
(Language: English)
Katharina Christa Schüppel, Institut für Kunst und Materielle Kultur, Technische Universität Dortmund
Index terms: Art History - General, Hagiography, Manuscripts and Palaeography
Abstract

Paper -a:
This paper will focus on Santa Caterina (1385-91) at Galatina, near Lecce, and its patrons, Raimondello del Balzo Orsini (d. 1406) and his wife Maria d'Enghien (d. 1446). The foundation bull - quoted in the title - states that the Franciscan church was founded to provide Mass in Latin for those who did not understand Greek, the language spoken in Galatina. The mediation of Greek and Latin Christianity appears most prominently in the Sacrament cycle (1415-23, commissioned by Queen Maria d'Enghien), with its depiction of Baptism by immersion; in the apse of the Chapel of the Virgin, decorated with a Byzantinising Deesis and standing bishops; and in the use of Greek in the façade.

Paper -b:
Italo-Greek hagiography from medieval southern Italy and Sicily includes notable details on the interaction between resident Greek, Latin, Arab-Muslim, and Jewish populations of the pre-Norman and Norman periods. This paper considers the nature of social ties between these groups as depicted in saints' lives, with an emphasis on hagiography's role in creating distance from those considered threatening to the social order, as envisioned by the hagiographers themselves. Attention to the use of rhetoric and imagery in these texts elucidates the process behind constructing narratives of belonging, as well as narratives of separation between the self and the Other, in a period of social and political transition.

Paper -c:
The paper deals with constructions and deconstructions of diversity (religious, geographical, ethnical, gender) in the interplay of text and image. MS Turin I.II.17 was written and illuminated in Sicily (Messina?) during the reign of Frederick II of Aragon.