Saxifrage Seminars

How bodies feel in spaces—both in antiquity and today—has been constituted in and through emotional, or affective, engagement with the physical world. Sensation poses a particular challenge for the ways we understand the past since the way communities have conceptualized and experienced their sensory worlds has varied across cultures and time periods. Further, because they are embodied and therefore ephemeral phenomena, sensations cannot be accessed in historical records in the same way that other traces of the past might. This seminar introduces participants to the approaches and tools scholars rely on to begin to understand the embodied experience of the past. We will focus particularly on how we can use the ritual practices, physical objects, structures, spaces, and images of the past to access sensation. The seminar has two parts, each with two sessions. The second session of each unit will be an experiential learning activity. Just as we will practice close looking and close reading as part of our work together, we will also learn techniques of close sensing and embodied knowledge. In so doing, we will become attuned to sensory and embodied experiences, develop a vocabulary for their description, and gain the capacity for their investigation. Part One: Histories of Sensation: Affect, Emotion, and Space In our first session, we will discuss some of the primary obstacles to accessing the emotional and affective lives of ancient communities and explore different strategies for their recovery. In our second session, participants will delve into amuletic and apotropaic materials, attempting to recover the anxieties and desires of ancient communities through these materials. As part of this work, students will create their own incantation bowls, modeled on ancient examples that were intended to protect against demons. Students will reflect on how this embodied exercise impacted their understanding of incantation bowls in early antiquity and what questions it raises for the encounter with ritual objects in other periods. Part Two: Troubling the Senses: Materiality, Agency, and Assemblages In our third session, we will consider questions of object-oriented ontologies and material agencies. We will begin with a discussion of the shared readings. Dr. Angelo will draw on examples from her work on the affective experience of sexuality and Christian monasticism in late antiquity in order to raise questions about contemporary religious affect. Our fourth and final session will meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where students will delve into questions of visuality, context, object-oriented ontologies, and agency in relation to a selection of religious objects. At the end of this session, we will gather to reflect on what we have learned about the visceral ways in which communities, past and present, interact with the world, and how that matters for specific things in our lives today. If you're curious about art and religion, want to learn about how scholars study the use and meaning of objects, or are just curious how human encounters with art and architecture have varied across time and cultures, this short course is the perfect introduction.