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

我申请休假是为了完成一本关于13世纪德国希伯来文插图手稿的书。在这本书中，我提出了基督教艺术与犹太视觉文化互动的新理论。我的书对中世纪鼎盛时期中欧基督教艺术的转变和同一时期的犹太文化都有了新的认识。我抛弃了那些试图从艺术家的意图中寻找艺术作品意义的旧模型（无论如何，意图都是出了名的难以重建的），而更倾向于一种让观众积极参与意义创造的模型。我放弃了基于反犹主义和压迫假设的基督教-犹太人互动模式，因为这种模式剥夺了犹太人主体的主体性，而是转向了一种让犹太少数民族在互动中更积极、更有创造性的模式。我不再使用风格和图像方法，它们在中世纪艺术研究中仍然很流行；除了风格，我发现了一种混合的表现模式，它将基督教图像转化为无法用风格标准描述的新颖事物；而不是寻求一种图像式的阅读（将图像与文本捆绑在一起），我描述了一种视觉叙事，将基督教主流文化中最新流行的视觉叙事中的叙事片段转化为犹太少数民族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.