LIVESTREAM of Murray Seminar: Marisa Michaud
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Online
Debating Sainthood: Didactic Images and the Construction of Colette of Corbie c.1470-75
After Colette of Corbie’s (1381-1447) death, members of her community sought ways to ensure the success of her reformed monastic order and the longevity of her burgeoning saint’s cult. This paper will take a new look at an early illuminated manuscript copy of Colette’s hagiography, 'la vie de Colette' (Ghent, Bisschoppelijk Archief van het Bisdom, Monasterium Bethlehem MS 8), examining the complexities of its rich miniature cycle. Though the creation of these miniatures has often been oversimplified as one in which text informs image, this manuscript contains the most extensive pictorial cycle of Colette’s hagiography and begins to develop an iconography where none had previously existed. This would have been a challenging task for the manuscript’s creators, who had to consider the manuscript’s patron, Valois Burgundian Duchess Margaret of York (1446-1503), as well as the state of Colette’s saint’s cult as it had evolved from the text’s creation around 1449. Therefore, this talk will focus on the function of these images as learning tools which aid the manuscript’s patron in understanding and accessing the complex issues surrounding the creation of a ‘new’ saint in the 1470s. In doing so, it will reveal a focus on early demonological and eschatological debates in Colette’s early saint’s cult, an interest which goes beyond the manuscript and can be further located in Margaret of York’s networks.
Speaker
Dr Marisa Michaud is a Wellcome Trust IFRC Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where she previously held a fixed-term lectureship. She holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of York and is currently a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Research Fellow there.
Contact name: Dr Marisa Michaud
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