Columbia – Religion and Writing Seminar: Rachel Fulton Brown

Our first meeting will take place on Monday, September 18. Please note that this unusual Monday scheduling — we generally meet on Tuesdays — is due to commitments at the Faculty House that seem to exclude Seminars.

Our speaker is Rachel Fulton Brown, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. Her talk is entitled:

THE ANNUNCIATION: BEHIND THE SCENES

Professor Fulton Brown has provided the following abstract:

Open any Book of Hours, what do you see? The Virgin Mary in her chamber with a book open before her. She turns at the approach of the angel, who greets her, “Ave, Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum.” Throughout the later Middle Ages, medieval Christians sought to imagine themselves into this scene, wondering about what Mary must have thought and felt when the Word of God took flesh in her womb. In this presentation, we will explore some of the techniques they used to get inside Mary’s book.

In an email to me, Professor Fulton Brown described the thirteenth-century commentaries on the Annunciation as both a kind of “fan-fiction” and an exercise in theology. Her book Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

The evening will follow our usual format: the talk begins at 5 p.m. at Faculty House. RSVP to Fernanda Borges Nogueira, who has kindly stepped in as rapporteur, at [email protected].