Medieval religious historian and scholar Caroline Walker Bynum, Ph.D., will give the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities (IPH) in Arts & Sciences lecture as part of the Assembly Series at 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 22, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.
Bynum’s talk, “Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles and Their Theorists,” will focus on the era between 1150 and 1550 when many Christians in western Europe made pilgrimages to venerate material objects that allegedly erupted into animation.
This theme will be continued in two other lectures Bynum will give on campus: “Living Synecdoche: Parts and Wholes in Medieval Devotion” at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge, and, “The Materiality of the Visual: How Did Medieval People See?” at 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, in Umrath Hall Lounge.
Bynum’s multidisciplinary scholarship draws on religion, art, philosophy, literature and anthropology. Her work is at the forefront of body history, especially in terms of describing attitudes and conceptions of the physical body in relation to the image of God in the Middle Ages.
Bynum has written many books, including “Holy Feast and Holy Fast,” a seminal publication that was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into medieval studies.
Another of her works, “The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom,” received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of Phi Beta Kappa in 1995, given for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.
In “Wonderful Blood,” published in 2007, she studied blood piety in 15th-century northern Germany. Her forthcoming book, “Christian Materiality,” reinterprets the nature of Christianity on the eve of 16th century reforms.
Bynum earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from Harvard University. She is a professor of medieval European history at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and university professor emerita at Columbia University.
She also is a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the Medieval Academy of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1986-1991. For more information, call IPH at (314) 935-4200. For information on the Assembly Series, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu.