Murray Seminar: Zsofia Buda on The Ashkenazi Rylands Haggadah
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
The Ashkenazi Rylands Haggadah (Manchester, JRL, MS. Rylands Hebrew 7) is a Jewish service book used during Seder Eve, the eve of Passover. It was produced in Southern Germany, perhaps in the area of Ulm, around 1430. A good number of illustrated Haggadah manuscripts have survived from medieval Europe, mostly from fourteenth-century Spain and fifteenth-century Germany. Several of the miniatures in the Ashkenazi Rylands Haggadah show peculiar iconographical features which do not fit into the evolving Haggadah-illustration tradition.
Zsofia Buda discusses three of these unusual images: a lady holding a book at the Seder table (fol. 5r) illustrating the beginning of the main part of the text, 'Ha lakhma anya' ('The bread of poverty'); a young figure holding a curtain at 'Ma Nishtanah' ('In what way is this night different?') (fol. 5v); and another composition with a curious motif of a curtain accompanying a quotation from Ezekiel, 'I made you grow like a plant of the field,' (fol. 14r). She analyses these images by placing them into the wider context of contemporary visual culture and pointing out certain surprising similarities to Christian iconography.
The Department of History of Art at Birkbeck presents a series of seminars on medieval and renaissance art, supported by the bequest established in memory of Professor Peter Murray, the Department's founder.
See the full Murray Seminar programme for Spring Term 2017 here.