CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
Keynote speakers
The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art in the Works of Jan Vermeyen
and Nikolas Pfaff
This talk will examine the various agencies – medicinal, artistic, cultural and mercantile – at work in a group of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Kunstkammer objects that were crafted from various kinds of rare and exotic natural materials and which were regarded by contemporaries as highly potent substances, endowed with great medicinal and therapeutic powers, and capable above all, by their innate and active virtues, of neutralizing poisons. Concentrating upon works incorporating narwhal-unicorn and rhinoceros horn, attributed to the goldsmith Jan Vermeyen and Nikolas Pfaff, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, it will argue that these objects’ overall appearances were consciously crafted so as to enhance the active powers of their chief constituent: the horn itself; that, at the level of design and creation, the goldsmith combined and structured the constituent elements around certain occult and medicinal properties the horn was thought to possess, and that the stylistic, ornamental and iconographical characteristics of the mounts were determined by the nature and purported origins of the natural materials. It will use the evidence of contemporary natural philosophy and medicine to explain the therapeutic powers attributed to them and to show how, at a chemical level, their powers of sympathetic magic were believed to have operated. The last part of the talk will examine the transmission of these beliefs that had their origins in ancient China, following trade routes in rhinoceros horn and marine ivory both across Eurasia via the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean as well as from the circumpolar regions of the artic, which stood as a point of juncture for trade in marine ivory both east- and westwards.
Why Matter Matters
Miri Rubin will consider in this keynote lecture the historiographical trails which inspire the current interest in material culture. She will consider the interests in performance, liturgy and rituals, as arising after decades of preoccupation with textuality, and how these approaches may be combined. Using materials from the rich and challenging period 1400–1600 and from several parts of Europe she will consider concepts such as European, region and identity in connection with material objects and performances created by Europeans in that period.
The Boots of St. Hedwig: Thoughts on the Limits of the Agency of Things
Famously pictured in her illustrated fourteenth-century Legenda maior clutching a prayer book, a rosary, and an ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child, the aristocratic saint Hedwig of Silesia (d. 1243) has become the very poster-girl of medieval materiality studies. Often overlooked, in studies that invoke this picture, is the pair of boots that hangs limply over her arm-things that serve as emblem of her piety precisely by virtue of their emptiness. Instructed by both her husband and her spiritual advisor to wear them to protect her feet during her long winter walks, Hedwig cheekily carried them around instead, playing on the fact that the terms for ‘wear’ and ‘carry’ were identical in her native German (tragen). The boots became signs of devotion through what they did not contain. So did the footprints Hedwig left in the snow, speckled with the blood that dripped from her exposed, cracked soles. Both described and pictured in the Vita, the footprints, traces of a devout body that had left the scene, became the objects of marvel and pity for the duchess’s own devotees. These are two of numerous instances of what Michel de Certeau, in a different context, termed the ‘fascinating presence of absences’ in the seemingly materialistic hagiography of St. Hedwig. Hedwig herself was lauded for her devotion to the nuns of her convent when they were out of sight: she washed her grandchildren’s faces with the sisters’ dirty bathwater, for example, and kissed their choir stalls when they were out of church. In all these cases, the things per se- though central, even essential vessels and manifestations of piety- were less important than the human actions to which they bore witness and through which they were continually reactivated. Using the Legend maior of St. Hedwig as a case study, this paper calls attention to the limits of the agency of things and directs attention back to the power of people in imbuing objects with meaning.