Department of Art History

The Department of Art History applauds Hoda Nedaeifar, who recently completed her Ph.D. in Art History.
Dr. Lunt described her dissertation as follows:

My dissertation is titled, Devotion and Difficulty: The Performance of the Breviary of Saint-Sépulcre. The dissertation necessitated cataloguing all illustrations, textual content, and signs of use such as dirtied margins and rubbed images found on the 2,294 illustrated folios contained by 171 medieval books connected to the Breviary of Saint-Sépulcre. My study of the intersection of marginal illustrations and the residue of affective response on these folios demonstrates that the breviary is not just a support for corporate devotion but also a space for private contemplation, and that its marginalia functioned as mechanisms for affecting difficulty, a response that not only extends interpretive engagement but which recasts even the most obscene and profane marginalia in the monastic liturgical book as devotional images.

Photo: Cambrai Bibliothèque municipale MS 103 fol. A 89v