In the frame of the Colloquium: Eastern Christianity and Islam Tradition, Religion, Politics
the Department of History cordially invites you to:
Mapping Holy Russia:
Cartography and Icons in Early Modern Russia
a public lecture by
Valerie Kivelson
University of Michigan
Russian Orthodox icons typically position saintly figures on flat gold backgrounds, deliberately locating the sacred outside of and beyond the realm of the literal and worldly, outside of specific location. It is somewhat surprising to discover that some of the earliest maps produced in Russia were painted onto icons depicting local saints or miracles. In this talk, I consider how the corporeal and spiritual were fully and completely intertwined in Muscovite perceptions of the world around them, and how that conjunction is illustrated in their approach to depicting the world, both in icons and in maps. The striking conjuncture of iconographic and cartographic forms displays a little-noted impulse to situate the miraculous in spatial terms.
Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her publications includeDesperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell, 2013); Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. with Joan Neuberger, (Yale University Press, 2008); and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia, (Cornell, 2006), translated asКартография царства: Земля и ее значения в России в XVII-м в., Russian translation of Cartographies of Tsardom (Moscow: NLO, 2012)
Wednesday, 5 February, 11:00
Popper Room