This past semester, ISM faculty members Vasileios Marinis and Felicity Harley-McGowan taught a new course, Picturing the Bible in Early Christianity and Byzantium, in which students were introduced to the evolution of the illustrated Christian book through the Byzantine period by interacting with some of the the university library’s rich resources.
Drawing on a diverse range of materials from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Yale Divinity Library—and facilitated by divinity special collections librarian, Scott Libson ‘06—Marinis and Harley-McGowan encouraged students to handle original illuminated manuscripts, papyri, scrolls, and facsimiles of illustrated texts.
“Assembling different objects for each class was a process that enabled us to think in different ways about how we could connect important historical developments in the production of the codex in late antiquity,” said Harley-McGowan, “but it also facilitated a unique opportunity to confront, in a physical way, the practical issues of reading (how to hold a scroll for example), writing (how to write on parchment verses rough papyrus), and looking.”
“These questions could be approached in an entirely different way when students could have several physical objects in front of them to compare,” she added.
As Harley-McGowan explained, images don’t simply illustrate the earliest illustrated Christian bibles, they can also be part of a radical experimentation with the technology of the codex—a fact that the students appreciated all the more with the actual objects in their hands. They learned that images played a variety of roles for the Christians that commissioned, used, and saw these texts. They could be beautiful, but they could also aid the reader’s visual as well as theological comprehension of a text in significant (and often strategic) ways, and create new encounters with the divine.
Felicity Harley-McGowan is a lecturer in early Christian and medieval art at the ISM and Yale Divinity School.