Please join AISEES on April 24 for a lecture by Marina Mandrikova. The lecture will begin at 9:30 a.m. PT / 12:30 p.m. EST / 7:30 p.m. in Eastern Europe.
"On the Wrong Side of Christ: Female Damned in Texts and Monumental Paintings" investigates images of female damned in Byzantine, Post-Byzantine, and Slavic monumental paintings between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and explores their complex and surprising relationships to written sources that describe the punishment of women at the end of time. After a brief general survey on the topic, this talk considers the most critical apocalyptic and educational Christian texts that describe sinful women and their torments in Hell and discusses how Early Christian and medieval Byzantine writers perceived and described sinful women. By exploring the surviving visual evidence, primarily from modern-day Greece and the Slavic-speaking countries of Bulgaria, Serbia, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, this study then examines the inconsistencies between textual descriptions of the damned and their dramatic representations on the walls of churches. This presentation also intends to raise awareness about the current issues of their preservation. Parts of this talk have been previously presented elsewhere.