Animate Ivory: Materiality, Beauty, and Pygmalion's Statue
2018-11-26 16:30 - 18:30 | Queens Building 1B
The story of Pygmalionâ€™s ivory woman, transformed into a living woman, posits a relationship between animacy and materiality that I will interrogate through a focus on several medieval French translations of Ovidâ€™s story. I will explore the terms in which medieval poets describe the inanimacy of the statue, and I will foreground the materiality and the material of Pygmalionâ€™s ivory woman in order to ask whether Pygmalionâ€™s beloved lady, as white as ivory, can tell us something about the values that organize the association of animacy and whiteness in medieval Europe.http://www.exeter.ac.uk/events/details/?event=8516
