Materielle Welten – Der virtuelle Salon am IMAREAL
Material Worlds – The Virtual Salon at IMAREAL

Mittwoch, 06. November 2024 | 17:00 Uhr (MEZ)
Wednesday, 06th of November 2024 | 17:00 (CET)

Seal Bags and Relic: The Case of Thomas Becket

Jitske Jasperse (Spanish National Research Council, Madrid)

After a brief introduction to seal bags, this talk explores to what extent seal bags provide a “reliquary experience”, to use the memorable title of Cynthia Hahn’s book in which she explains the relic’s shrine (its outer cover) was crucial to the way relics were experienced. The moment I presented seal bags – especially the sumptuous ones, such as that covering the seal of Thomas Becket – in conversations and presentations, scholarly response was often “have you considered a connection with relics?” This frequently asked question and the confirming answer that seemed embedded in it actually made me delve deeper into the matter. At first sight there are indeed parallels between seal bags and relic wrappings, as noticed also by scholars such as Corinne Mühlemann and Gertrude Robinson. If only because both cover bodies (or the remains of it). And if we understand seals, as Brigitte Bedos-Rezak has convincingly argued, not only as representations of their owners, but also as the actual embodiment of ownership (i.e., their presence), a comparison with holy bones or oil that embodied saints does not seem farfetched. Textile wrappings seem to knot seals and relics together, but here I demonstrate that this association is more complex.

Vortragssprache: Englisch
Language of the Lecture: English

Jitske Jasperse (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2013) is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. From 2018-2022 she was an assistant professor at the Institut für Kunst- Bildgeschichte, Bildkulturen des Mittelalters. Before that, 2016-2018, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, where she investigated twelfth-century objects connected to royal women, including the portable altar of Infanta Sancha of León and the maniple and stole of Queen Leonor of Castile. Driven by questions concerning why and how people engage with artefacts, both precious and mundane, Jitske has a particular interest in the relationship between material culture and gender. Her publications appeared in Journal of Medieval History (2017), Studies in Iconography (2018), Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres (2018), Medieval Encounters (2019), and Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (2020). Her monograph Medieval Women, Material Culture, and Power: Matilda Plantagenet and her Sisters appeared in 2020, as well as the co-edited Getting the Senses of Small Things / Sinn und Sinnlichkeit kleiner Dinge, a special issue of Das Mittelalter. In 2021 her book Het vrouwelijk oog wil ook wat: Vrouwen als opdrachtgevers, kunstenaars en verzamelaars was published. Currently she is a series editor for CARMEN Visual and Material Cultures (Arc Humanities Press), serves on the editorial board of Archivo Español de Arte, and has an edited volume The Social Lives of Medieval Rings underway (Arc Humanities Press).

The lecture will take place online via Teams. Please use the registration form below. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us via sekretariat.imareal@plus.ac.at.

Read more about the lecture series in this blog post (English version).