Objects of Desire
What originally began as a dissertation questioning the construction of medieval “courtly art” in modern art historical scholarship has now evolved into a project exploring medieval gift exchange and the role of material objects in thematizing and focusing erotic love in medieval art and literature. This much more fruitful direction (pun intended) was profoundly influenced by the in-person examination of my primary object of study, the thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Old French poem “The Romance of the Pear.” In this manuscript’s text and images, the poet and his lady exchange a series of increasingly abstract gifts, beginning with the titular pear and followed by a ring, a kiss, a headscarf, the lovers’ hearts, and finally, the manuscript itself. My own experience of the manuscript’s unusually small, intimate size and the physical traces of past viewers’ obsessive touching of specific illustrations are key pieces of evidence that shaped my thinking in important ways, as my conference paper will explain. My paper will also briefly address the profound impact that the recent explosion of high-resolution digital facsimiles and 3D renderings—increasingly made available by institutions around the world— has had on my research and especially my teaching of medieval art.
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