Conversion Aesthetics

In its mission to convert ever greater swaths of medieval Europe, the church often had to reconcile its mandated disdain for the material world, as inscribed in Genesis, to absorb the territories of nature-centered cultures and spiritual traditions. Grounding its approach in anthropologies of religion and postcolonial studies, this bridge seminar tracks a series of artworks and monuments across the European subcontinent—from Insular manuscripts and Scandinavian stave churches to German fountain chapels and Cistercian monasteries built atop sacred groves in Eastern Europe—that demonstrate the tendency of medieval Christianity, despite its singular immaterial truth, to accommodate and negotiate with heterodox customs entrenched in the land. We will also explore the historiography of such encounters, and read how historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote about their own pre-Christian, so-called indigenous cultural heritage, and how that research was later co-opted by ethnonationalists, in particular but not limited to the Nazis of the Third Reich, who relied on those histories in their fascist aestheticization of race and landscape.