Animate Ivory: Animality, Materiality, and Pygmalion’s Statue
Ovid’s Pygmalion story brings together craft, creation, and animation in the metamorphosis of an ivory statue into an ivory-white woman. Moving among several medieval translations of Ovid’s story, and focusing primarily on the adaptations in the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, I investigate the animation of the ivory statue in order to question the values of animacy in relation to human being and animal death, and in relation to Christian salvation.

Followed by drinks reception – all welcome!
Date: 23 January 2020, 17:00 (Thursday, 1st week, Hilary 2020)
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ
Speaker: Peggy McCracken
Organising department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Part of: TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Laura Spence