Masks and Monsters in the Margins: Cultural negotiation in medieval German Jewish art

我申请完成一本关于13世纪德国的希伯来语手稿的书。在这本书中，我提出了一种关于基督教艺术和犹太视觉文化之间互动的新理论。我的书为基督教艺术在中世纪晚期在中欧的转变以及在同一时期的犹太文化提供了新的线索。我放弃了寻求从艺术家的意图中寻找艺术作品的意义的旧模式(无论如何，意图是出了名的难以重建)，而更倾向于让观者积极参与意义创造的模式。我放弃了一种基于反犹太主义和压迫假设的基督教-犹太人互动模式，因为这样的模式剥夺了犹太主体的主体性，而是转向了一种让犹太少数民族在互动中更积极和更有创造力的模式。我放弃了文体学和肖像学的方法，这两种方法在中世纪艺术的研究中仍然很普遍；我没有选择风格，而是发现了一种混合的表现模式，它将基督教图像窃取并转化为某种无法用文体标准描述的小说；我没有寻求图像阅读(它将图像与文本捆绑在一起)，而是描述了一种视觉叙事，它将从基督教多数派文化中新出现的视觉叙事中采用的叙事设定，转化为犹太少数群体可以阅读和理解的新叙事。

I apply for leave to complete a book on illuminated Hebrew manuscripts in 13th century Germany. In this book, I put forward a new theory about the interaction between Christian art and Jewish visual culture. My book casts new light both on the transformations of Christian art in Central Europe during the High Middle Ages and on Jewish culture during the same time. I move away from older models that seek to find the meaning of art works in the intention of their artists (intentions being notoriously difficult to reconstruct anyway) and more towards a model that gives the viewer an active share in the making of meaning. I move away from a model of Christian-Jewish interaction based on assumptions about antisemitism and oppression, because such a model robs the Jewish subject of its subjecthood, and instead towards a model that gives the Jewish minority a more active and creative part in interactions. I move away from both stylistic and iconographic methods, still so prevalent in the research on medieval art; instead of style, I identify a hybrid mode of representation that appropriates and transforms Christian images into something novel that cannot be described with stylistic criteria; and instead of seeking an iconographic reading (which yokes image to text), I describe a visual narrative that transforms narrative set pieces adopted from visual narratives newly current in the Christian majority culture into new narratives that can be read and understood by the Jewish minority.