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 medieval/early modern history and visual culture, with a special emphasis on the Italian Renaissance, global cults of the Virgin Mary, medieval Ethiopia, decolonial archive studies, (queer) body history, and comparative legal studies of the Mediterranean.
Her most recent research centers on Ethiopian sacred art and literature, with articles on late medieval icons and miniatures of the Nursing Virgin. She is currently studying an original apocryphon written in Gəˁəz that tells the Story of Mary during her flight from persecution, which she is planning to edit and translate in collaboration with Guesh Solomon Tekla. This work grows out of her interest in global cults of Our Lady Mary and her research on images of lactation, including the European Madonna lactans. She is currently co-editing a volume entitled The Virgin’s Milk: On the Fluidity of Images and the Production of Divine Presence (with Vibeke Olson and Mati Meyer, forthcoming with Brepols). Prior books include 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 Mediterranean, with Shona Kelly Wray (Routledge, 2009) and Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Ashgate, 2013). She wrote many articles on diverse topics such as Venetian convent culture; Portuguese family law; marriage during the Council of Trent; allegories of Charity; same-sex lactations; contemporary instantiations of the Nursing Virgin; milk miracles; and Ethiopian sacred art, which appeared in highly selective peer-reviewed journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Renaissance Quarterly, The Art Bulletin, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, among others. She publishes in English and German; some of her work has been translated into French, Italian, and Greek.
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
