Events at Reed

Elina Gertsman explores the so-called Shrine Madonnas (or vièrges ouvrantes), late medieval statues of the Virgin Mary that opened to reveal richly carved and painted interiors, and suggests that the appearance of these objects—predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation—points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex performative ways that audiences were expected to engage with devotional art, both in public and in private. Gertsman looks at discursive and physiological ruptures suggested by the vièrge ouvrante’s sacred flesh and the many performances, somatic and imaginative, fostered by the unfolding bodies of the statues. Professor Gertsman specializes in Gothic and late medieval art. Her research interests include issues of memory and perception; uncanny animation of inanimate objects; medieval image theory; performance and performativity; multisensory reception processes; late medieval macabre; materiality and somaticism; and medieval concepts of emotion and affectivity. She is the author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010), the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (2008) and Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (2011), and is coeditor of Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces (2012). Her book, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, will be published by Penn State Press in 2015. Sponsored by Art Department.