Sara Lipton (Stony Brook University), Thrones, Dominions:Identity, Authority, and Visible Things in the Medieval Mediterranean(Or Things Fall Apart: What a Difference a Century Can Make)
Abstract:
“For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:” (Col. 1:16)
At the quarter-mark of the twentieth-first century – the centennial year of the Medieval Academy – public debates are once again focused on the possibilities and pitfalls posed by pluralistic societies. The United States, the broader world, and scholarly communities alike are grappling with troubling and complex questions regarding the relationship of religion and political power; competing sources and loci of authority; the dynamics of cultural translation and appropriation; and the degree, implications, and limits of shared cultural horizons. In this paper, I explore how visual and material practices illuminate concerns about similar issues in the later medieval Mediterranean. Specifically, I trace the manipulation and meanings of a common decorative sign – the six-pointed star, also known as the Star of David, Shield of David, Seal of Solomon, and/or hexagram, prominent in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim visual and material cultures – in works produced for both Jewish and Christian patrons by a fourteenth-century Catalan painting workshop. I argue that though the clientele, physical location, and working conditions of this workshop seem to suggest that Jews and Christians had common cultural horizons and, at least at times, congenial relations; the deployment of the sign highlight mounting anxieties around power and authority in late medieval Iberian society, which led to the breakdown of a particular, fleeting moment of precarious coexistence. I conclude with reflections on the afterlife of the six-pointed star, which attest to the enduring emotional and imaginative impact of medieval visual legacies, and their potentially dangerous effects.
About the Speaker: Sara Lipton is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stony Brook University and President of the Medieval Academy of America. Her main fields of interest are Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations, Christian anti-Judaism, and visual and material culture in the central and later Middle Ages; she also writes for the broader public about religious and ethnic intolerance, the history of anti-Semitism, religious politics, and the role of social media. She received a B.A. in Medieval Studies from Barnard College and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University. Before joining the Stony Brook faculty she was an Assistant Professor at The College of William and Mary, a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Prof. Lipton is the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bibles moralisées (1999), which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize for Best First Book from the Medieval Academy of America and Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (2014), winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Award of the Association of Jewish Studies). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Tel Aviv University, a Professeure invitée at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and a Distinguished Visiting Professor the University of London; and has held fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (NYPL), Corpus Christi College (Oxford), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and All Souls College (Oxford). Her most recent book is, The Vulgate of Experience: Looking at and Learning from Art in the High Middle Ages, expected to appear in 2026 with Cornell University Press. She is currently working on a new project entitled How Pictures Hate: On the Origins, Mechanisms, and Effects of Inflammatory Imagery from the Middle Ages to Today.