Benjamin Saltzman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His first book, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), investigates the tensions between the medieval Christian belief in divine omniscience and the social experience of secrecy. He co-edited Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), with R. D. Perry.
His talk at Columbia will feature work from his book Turning Away: Variations on an Ancient Gesture, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
In this book, a critique of the privilege of turning from the afflictions of others, Saltzman takes up five premodern scenes in which a figure looks away or covers their face: Agamemnon in Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leontius in Plato’s Republic, Alypius in Augustine’s Confessions, the onlookers to the Crucifixion in medieval and early modern art, and illustrations of Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian state. Each of these scenes opens up into an array of related examples across media and historical periods to show how the affective multivalences of these gestures invite the reader or beholder of the work of art to reflect on their own positionality in witnessing the suffering of others. The project tries to uncover a central feature of our engagement with the world, the act of turning away.
This talk is sponsored by the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies, the Medieval Guild and the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
