Activity: Host visitor types › Hosting an academic visitor
“Breastfeeding Cain: Visualizing Eve’s Role in the Fall” Centuries before the motif of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Christ emerged in the twelfth century, an image of Eve nursing can be found in the sixth-century Ashburnham Pentateuch (Paris, BnF NAL 2334 f. 1v). The next such depiction does not reappear until the ninth century in a group of Carolingian Genesis frontispieces. This talk interrogates the negative portrayal of Eve as evidence of the Ashburnham Pentateuch’s influence on Carolingian manuscripts, and by extension addresses issues of the transmission of iconographies and gendered theology.