LECTURE: Ilya Dines, (Ph.D. National Library of Israel, Jerusalem), Between Image and Text: Captions in the Medieval Bestiaries, Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Room 1 (Warburgstraße 26), Wednesday, 28 May 2014 at 6 pm.
Captions are very common in medieval manuscripts. They occupy the narrow place between text and image and, formally speaking, belong to both of them or to neither. Such a position presupposes the current situation with the research done on captions. So far, captions as a genre sui generis are rarely discussed in scholarly literature, be it literature dealing with the history of art or the history of text.
In this lecture, the scholar will discuss in detail the corpus of captions as they appear in the genre of Medieval Latin bestiaries, one of the most influential types of medieval pedagogical books. The talk will be illustrated with a broad range of examples, collected over the years from all currently extant bestiary manuscripts, and the function of the captions in the various documents will be explained.