Religion Department Annual Lecture!
The Religion Department is excited to announce our 2025 Annual Lecture, presented by Sherry C.M. Lindquist!
The lecture will take place Wednesday, March 26; Barrister’s Hall (Law School) at 5PM. We hope to see you there!
Sherry will present: “The Book of Hours and the Body: Technologies of Devotion and Identity.” This lecture investigates the ways in which aesthetically sophisticated objects like illuminated Books of Hours may function as “devotional technologies” or “identity machines.” The variety of familiar, idealized, monstrous, transcendent, and abject bodies visualized in these late medieval and early modern prayerbooks help us understand the interrelated mechanisms of self-fashioning and othering. Such objects enable infinite, fluctuating meanings through dynamic tensions between text and image, material and immaterial, icon and narrative, margin and center, human and divine, individual and society. Bodies in Books of Hours compel their viewers—past and present—to ponder, and perhaps to reconsider, what it means to have a body, what it means to be human.
About Sherry: Sherry C.M. Lindquist is Professor of Art History at Western Illinois University. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Fulbright, Getty, Kress, and Mellon foundations, as well as the Newberry Library, Yale Center for British Art, and British Academy; she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis (2017-19). She has published extensively on late medieval Burgundy, the meanings of nudity in medieval art, medieval monsters, the history of the book, gender, neo-medievalism and the history of museums. Her most recent monograph is The Body and the Book of Hours: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny (2024). She is currently writing books on creatures in the works of Hieronymus Bosch and the ontology of late medieval images as reflected in the writings of the theologian, Jean Gerson.
