CONGRESS CANCELED Reimagining the Bible in the Middle Ages

Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

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:

  • 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

 
May 9th, 1:30 PM

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