CONGRESS CANCELED Reimagining the Bible in the Middle Ages
Description
Reimagining the Bible in the Middle Ages
The stories of the Bible enjoy a rich imaginative afterlife: every few years, another film retells a modern epic of a Hebrew patriarch or a psychological, spiritual or political drama about Christ and his disciples. Their perspectives are contemporary, but their generic conventions reach back at least to the Middle Ages, which produced innumerable imaginative expansions andrewritings of biblical narratives. Whether medieval or modern, biblical “fanfiction,” as it were, speaks to the aesthetics and politics, biases and values, anxieties and debates of their own cultural moment as they interpret the source text to suit agendas both religious and secular.
This session will explore such topics as:
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Deployment of biblical stories to support an argument, action or cause
-
Rewriting of characters or episodes to conform to medieval literary expectations of how stories should unfold or biases about how certain people should behave
-
Appropriation of biblical narrative to affirm religious, racial, cultural or political “ownership” of biblical texts or lands
-
Biblical literature encouraging affective or participatory reader responses (visualization, identification, decision-making)
-
Translation of biblical narratives across languages, cultures and religious traditions
Jeanette Patterson
CONGRESS CANCELED Reimagining the Bible in the Middle Ages
Schneider 1125
Reimagining the Bible in the Middle Ages
The stories of the Bible enjoy a rich imaginative afterlife: every few years, another film retells a modern epic of a Hebrew patriarch or a psychological, spiritual or political drama about Christ and his disciples. Their perspectives are contemporary, but their generic conventions reach back at least to the Middle Ages, which produced innumerable imaginative expansions andrewritings of biblical narratives. Whether medieval or modern, biblical “fanfiction,” as it were, speaks to the aesthetics and politics, biases and values, anxieties and debates of their own cultural moment as they interpret the source text to suit agendas both religious and secular.
This session will explore such topics as:
-
Deployment of biblical stories to support an argument, action or cause
-
Rewriting of characters or episodes to conform to medieval literary expectations of how stories should unfold or biases about how certain people should behave
-
Appropriation of biblical narrative to affirm religious, racial, cultural or political “ownership” of biblical texts or lands
-
Biblical literature encouraging affective or participatory reader responses (visualization, identification, decision-making)
-
Translation of biblical narratives across languages, cultures and religious traditions
Jeanette Patterson