THE MEDIEVAL MILLENNIUM

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• THE MEDIEVAL MILLENNIUM
• OBJECTS OF DESIRE
• January 21 Introduction to the Course

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• Professor Stephen Murray, 854 8521
  sm42_at_columbia.edu
• Office Hours 8.00am-10.00 Tuesdays, 605
  Schermerhorn
• Associates
• Melissa Bugbee
• Kyle Killian
• Web Site
• www.mcah.columbia.edu
• login ahar
• password 826sch

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• The logistics of the course including
• 1. The architecture of the web site. Robert
  Carlucci will demonstrate
• 2. Readings. The Reserve list is defined on
  the Site the books are behind the circulation
  desk in Avery. In addition, a study shelf,
  358, for specific xeroxed readings. For those
  wanting a book, try Marilyn Stokstad's Medieval
  Art (order it from Amazon)
• 3. Examinations. Formal in-class examinations
  at mid-term and in the final exam week. In
  each exam you will be asked to recognize and
  discuss some of the objects you have studied
  and write a short essay. Essay question made
  available one week in advance.
• 4. Other assignments. a) Organize an
  exhibition of objects (by theme or by medium)
  and write an descriptive and interpretative
  essay. b) select a single object and
  undertake a research paper on that object
• 5. Discussion sections. Melissa Bugbee and
  Kyle Killian. You must sign up for a section.
• 6. Museum visits. To be scheduled visit to
  Saint John during class time.
• 7. Incompletes. No incompletes without medical
  reason and doctor's note.
• 8. Cheating. Cheaters will be excommunicated.
• 9. Protocol. The obvious things. Be polite.
  Do not arrive late leave early or talk in
  class. Be patient when we face technical
  difficulties. Your attendance counts for your
  final grade. Look at the readings.

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• Medieval Millennium Objects of Desire The
  Concept.
• First note that the term "Middle Ages"
  ("Medieval") is a pejorative epithet devised in
  the Renaissance by those who held the previous
  period in contempt. Thinkers of the fifteenth
  century saw our thousand-year period from the
  fourth century to 1400 as a negative gap
  separating the glorious time of Antiquity from
  the rebirth that was understood as the
  Renaissance. I want you to join me in looking
  for a more positive set of characteristics for
  this one-thousand year period. The past as
  other the past as ourselves. Barbara Tuchman,
  A Distant Mirror. Romanticism. Millennialism.
  Attitudes to time past and future.

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• Second we must refrain from accepting a
  pre-existing easy packet of understanding of the
  kind that we find in Art History surveys--such
  surveys suggest the existence of a canonic
  succession of distant "monuments" What have such
  monuments, illustrated in black and white
  photographs in a boring and expensive book,
  actually have to do with us?
• We clearly need to start with some feeling that
  the objects we are looking at are, in a sense,
  ours. We can possess them for a while, we can
  fix them and carry them in our minds and play
  with them--we might even get to like them.

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• To animate the past, I suggest that we begin with
  the recognition that there exists in our own
  community an incomparable treasure trove of
  objects that belong to our period of interest
  the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and
  the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. What relation
  do these objects have with the period they
  "represent" or "stand for"? A sign? A metonomy
  ( "crown" for "king")? A synecdoche (a part
  stands for the whole)?? The organic metaphor--a
  fossil. From these objects we can derive
  conclusions about how people lived and how they
  died what they ate and how they looked. We can
  learn about their architecture, their cities and
  the way they worked the land. We can learn about
  the fall of Empires the formation of states and
  the elusive concepts both of national identity
  and of "Europe." We can learn about peoples'
  beliefs and prejudices and their understanding of
  time.

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• The objects we are talking about were not, after
  all, dropped on our city by God--before coming to
  the Met many of them they were gathered by
  wealthy American collectors--mostly at a very
  specific time in our country's formation. These
  are the Objects of Desire--coveted by powerful
  individuals like the legendary J. Pierpont Morgan
  not just for their own sake as intrinsically
  valuable and aesthetically pleasing objects--but
  more than this, as a part of an attempt to seek
  roots to construct identity--personal, as well
  as the identity of a new nation. This concept
  will lead us on Thursday to examine the
  phenomenon that might be called "American
  Medievalism"--the powerful belief that the period
  known as the "Middle Ages" might have something
  to contribute in what was then seen as the
  dynamic projection of a young nation. T. J.
  Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace.

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• Such thoughts of a common identity or the great
  melting may now seem quaintly romantic or even
  offensive to our concepts of diversity. We are
  left, then, with the Objects of Desire that
  express for us both the period of their own
  manufacture and a vital episode in the formation
  of our own country. Unlike people of the
  generation of J. Pierpont Morgan we will approach
  the objects with a wide range of different
  approaches. The objects, I believe, are best
  understood as membra disiecta--bits and
  pieces--now separated from the situations that
  formed them and that gave them meaning. They may
  be understood as having once formed part of a
  living body--it is up to us to find or to create
  the connective tissue that links them and to
  breath life into the body. Will we then be
  shocked at our creation?

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• I want you to take possession of these desirable
  objects through their existence in an ambitious
  web site that will, I hope, form the basis of
  the teaching and learning process of this course.
  More than something "added on to" an existing
  course, this pedagogical equipment is intended to
  project a specific kind of approach. The
  approach is simultaneously a constructive and a
  skeptical one. You must not simply accept the
  idea the "the Middle Ages" actually existed--you
  must construct your own approach to the past.
  The three hundred objects in the web site form a
  critical mass the data base will allow you to
  conduct a kind of triage--a sifting through
  material according to period, materials or
  subject matter.. We have provided folders for
  you to gather your own favorite objects and play
  with them

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• In the outline of the weeks of the term, you will
  discern a two-part sequence. First, we will move
  briskly through the material arranged in
  chronological clumps (an approach that is through
  time or diachronic). I will try to look at the
  systematically objects for its own sake--this is
  the approach that concentrates upon the
  materiality of the object and the significance of
  its forms. But then we can use each object as a
  springboard to project us forward to some of the
  other works of art to some of the issues or
  themes that characterize the associated period.

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• Second, we will raise the question as to whether
  there are any underlying themes that lend some
  unity to this one-thousand year period. This is a
  synchronic approach
• The list of thematic titles that you see in the
  second part of the syllabus (technology
  aesthetic response monasticism pilgrimage the
  body of Christ the cult of the Virgin Mary etc.)
  is very far from exhausting the range of possible
  topics. You should begin to think about further
  underlying agendas which might provide you with
  the subject of a research paper.

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• I want to finish with the concept of "desire".
  Modern and post-modern theorizing (René Girard)
  has re-discovered what medieval people already
  knew. When it comes to desire, we must question
  the direct one-to-one relationship between
  subject and object. What at first may appear as
  the object of desire may actually be a medium to
  a third desired entity.
• Thus, the abbot of Saint-Denis, Suger, reflected
  on the power of light-reflective glistening
  objects to allow him to make a leap from things
  that are material to the transcendent "then, I
  see myself dwelling, as it were, in a realm that
  neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth
  or in the purity of heaven." The material object
  in front of his eyes was thus a vehicle leading
  him to where he wanted to go.

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• Medieval art, for the medieval user, did not
  exist in a separate aesthetic realm. Medieval
  artists did not employ illusionistic perspective
  that created a fictive window through which the
  viewer looks at a make-believe world. Medieval
  objects and images exist in our space. Medieval
  art is interactive. It often harnessed urges and
  needs that were direct and material and turned
  them into allegorical, tropological and
  soteriological ends.

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• OUTLINE AND READINGS
• 1 Jan 21 General Introduction
• The Cloisters. Studies in Honor of the 50th
  Anniversary, NY 1992
• Davis-Weyer, C., Early Medieval Art, 300-1150,
  Englewood Cliffs, 1986
• Metropolitan Museum. of Art . The Middle Ages.
  Treasures from the Cloisters, NY/LA 1969
• Metropolitan Museum of Art. Europe in the Middle
  Ages, ed. T. Husband and C. Little, NY 1987
• Southern, R., The Making of the Middle Ages,
  London, 1987
• Stokstad, M., Medieval Art, NY 1986
• 2. Jan 23 Medievalism
• Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace.
  Antimodernism the Transformation of American
  Culture, NY 1981
• Smith, E. B., Medieval Art in America Patterns of
  Collecting 1800-1940, University Park, 1996
• 3. Jan 28 Threshold to the Middle Ages West
• Elsner, J., Imperial Rome and ChristianTriumph
  Oxford, 1998
• Krautheimer, R., Rome, Profile of a City
  Princeton, 1980
• Weitzman, K., et al. Age of Spirituality, NY
  1977

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• 5. Feb 4 Byzantine Art
• Cormack, R., Writing in Gold Byzantine Society
  and Its Icons, London, 1995
• The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture in the
  Middle Byzantine Era, NY 1997
• Rodley, L., Byzantine Art and Architecture An
  Introduction, Cambridge, 1996
• 6. Feb 6 Art of the Period of Migrations
• Bede, The Venerable, The Ecclesiastical History
  of the English People, Oxford, 1994
• From Attila to Charlemagne. Arts of the Early
  Medieval Period in the Metropolitan Museum, NY
  2000
• Farr, C., The Book of Kells Its Function and
  Audience, Toronto, 1997
• Geary P., Before France and Germany The Creation
  and Transformation of the Merovingian World,
  Oxford, 1998
• Migration Art, AD 300-800, NY 1995
• 7. Feb 11 Carolingian and Ottonian Art
• Hubert, J., Porcher, J., and Volbach, WF., The
  Carolingian Renaissance, NY 1970
• Nees, L., Tainted Mantle, Hercules and the
  Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court,
  Philadelphia, 1991
• 8. Feb 13 The Year 1000
• Focillon, H., The Year 1000, NY 1969

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• 10. Feb 20 Visit to the Cathedral of Saint John
  the Divine
• 10-11. Feb 25-27 Gothic (two sessions)
• Toman R., The Art of Gothic, Cologne 1999
• Barnett, P., Images in Ivory
• 12-13 Mar 4-6 Review and Mid-term exam
• 14. Mar 11 Technology
• Dodwell, C. R., Theophilus Diversarum Artibus
  Schedula, Oxford, 1986
• White, L., Medieval Technology and Social
  Change, NY 1966
• 15. Mar 13 Aesthetic Response
• Belting, H., Likeness and Presence, Chicago, 1994
• Camille, M., The Gothic Idol, Chicago,
• Eco. U., Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, New
  Haven, 1986
• March 17-21 Spring Break

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• 17. Mar 27 Pilgrimage
• Gerson, P., The Pilgrims Guide to Santiago de
  Compostela A Critical Edition, London, 1998
• Sumption, J., Pilgrimage An Image of Medieval
  Religion, Totowa NY 1975
• 18. Apr 1 The Body of Christ
• Rubin, M., Corpus Christi, Cambridge
• 19. Apr 3 The Cult of Saints
• Brown, P., The Medieval Cult of Saints Its Rise
  and Function in Western Christianity, Chicago,
  1982
• 20. Apr 8 The Cult of the Virgin Mary
• Forsyth, Ilene, The Throne of Wisdom, Princeton,
  1972
• 21. April 10 Devotional Life
• Baxandall, M., The Limewood Sculptures of
  Renaissance Germany, New Haven, 1980
• Hamburger, J., The Visual and the Visionary Art
  and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval
  Germany, NY 1998

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• 22. April 15 The Profane World. Love
• Camille, M., Image on the Edge, Cambridge, 1992
• -----, The Medieval Art of Love Objects and
  Subjects of Desire, NY 1998
• 23. April 17 Warfare.
• Metropolitan Museum. of Art Handbook of Arms and
  Armor, NY 1930
• France, J., Western Warfare in the Age of
  Chivalry, Ithaca, 1999
• 24 April 22 Death and Dying
• Binski, P., Medieval Death. Ritual and
  Representation, Cornell, 1996
• 25. April 24 The End of the Middle Ages
• Baxandall, M., The Limewood Sculptures of
  Renaissance Germany, New Haven, 1980
• Huizinga, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages. A
  Study of the Forms of Life ... NY 1985
• 26-27. April 29 Open
• 28. May 1 Final Review