Mail Code CSI
Jutta Sperling
Franklin Patterson Hall 208
413.559.5578
On sabbatical fall 2024.
Jutta Sperling received her M.A. from the Universität Göttingen and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Sperling's teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, with a special emphasis on Renaissance visual culture, body history, catholicism, and comparative legal studies of the Mediterranean.
Her most recent research centers on the Madonna Lactans in late medieval and Renaissance art (see her article in Renaissance Quarterly, 73.1 Fall 2018). Her books include two monographs entitled Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (transcript Verlag, 2016) and Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1999) as well as two edited volumes Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranvan, with Shona Kelly Wray (Routledge, 2009) and Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Ashgate, 2013). She published numerous articles on allegories of Charity, the Madonna Lactans, the history of marriage, and Portuguese women's property rights in the Renaissance.
The Virgin Mary is not Catholic. When, in 431, the Council of Ephesus declared the Virgin Mary to be Theotokos or God-Bearer, she had already been venerated in Egypt since the third century as a re-instantiation of Isis. The syncretism of her cult explains her ubiquitous popularity in medieval Byzantium and the Latin West, but also early Islamic Syria, Ethiopia, and colonial Latin America. Her frequent depiction on moveable wooden panels (icons) and mosaics accompanied her early rise to liturgical prominence. By 1200, she rivaled Jesus Christ in religious importance, not only through her role as intercessor, but also as dispenser of divine grace in the form of breastmilk. She was the most active miracle-working saint in all of Christianity; Muslims worshiped her on occasion, as well. Her frequent depiction on icons, altarpieces and devotional panels accompanies - and, in part, explains - the development of figurative art in the West. In colonial America, she became known as the Conquistadora; the introduction of her cult ended prior religious forms of expression, but also helped them to partially survive in a new context. Keywords:History, Global, Religion, Decolonial, Gender
In light of current political developments and the demand for decolonial approaches to European histories, this course asks: What is the relevance of the Italian Renaissance today? We will discuss the extent to which the Florentine Republic's struggle for survival in the midst of wars and despotic/oligarchic/authoritarian usurpations might, again, be of interest to us, and analyze the persecution of gay men and queer sexualities, the control of women's reproduction, and the emergence of racism - topics, which, likewise, remind eerily of today's political agendas. We will critically examine Renaissance cultural productions (humanist history writing, portraiture, perspective, mapping, erotic art) while also appreciating the politics of beauty in architecture, urban planning, and figurative art. Other topics include: the African presence; the gendered politics of charity; patriarchal families; domestic slavery; the conquest of America in the Renaissance imagination. Keywords:European History, Art, Politics, Italian Renaissance, Decolonial
Little is known about the medieval Empire of Ethiopia despite its fantastic achievements in the fields of architecture, book culture, and religion. Ethiopians converted to Christianity in the 4th century and developed a distinct tradition of religious literature, unique art forms, and imperial power politics. Centering Ethiopia, we will analyze parallel developments, synergies, and interchanges with European/Mediterranean societies. Case studies will include illuminated manuscripts, the practice of magic, monasticism, church architecture, the cult of the Virgin Mary, ancient Renaissances, encounters with Judaism and Islam, strategies of othering and racialization, visits and encounters, diplomatic gift exchanges. Moving into the early modern age, we will study military partnerships with the Portuguese, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and female royal patronage of the arts. The focus will be on primary sources whenever feasible. We will also study a magic scroll preserved at Amherst College and learn the G???z alphabet. KEYWORDS:Middle Ages, Africa, Religion, Art, Global History
What do pictures want? Do they want to be looked at, loved, analyzed, comprehended, worshipped, reproduced, and weaponized or simply acknowledged as life forms that live in the minds of their beholders? What if they harbor a divine or satanic presence? What is the meaning constituted by their media and materialities? What is their power over the beholder? Do images ever die? How do objects become fetishes? How do colonization and racism destroy and change the meanings of images and objects? Case studies will include miracle working Byzantine icons; contact relics of the Virgin Mary; Kongolese minkisi or power figures; the emergence of the "male" as well as "modern" gaze that freezes and objectifies as well as the medieval "female" religious gaze that animates and worships; the politics of Renaissance perspective; an-iconic Islamic art; ephemeral wax figures; racialized imagery and the question of interiority. KEYWORDS:Visual Culture, Art, Colonialism, Religion, Atlantic
