Books by Linda Seidel

This text presents an exhibition held at the the University of Chicago. The exhibition challenges the decontextualized approach to images and learning by setting ritual, functional and intentionally aesthetic objects side by side, together with inventories and technical viewing devices.

Whereas 12th-century pilgrims flocked to the church of St-Lazare in Autun to visit the relics of its patron saint, present-day pilgrims journey there to admire its superb sculpture, said to have been created by Gislebertus. These two cults, of sculptor and of saint, form the basis for this study.

Mediated Maternity: Contemporary American Portrayals of Bad Mothers in Literature and Popular Culture, by Linda Seidel, explores the cultural construction of the bad mother in books, movies, and TV shows, arguing that these portrayals typically have the effect of cementing dominant assumptions about motherhood in placeor, less often, of disrupting those assumptions, causing us to ask whether motherhood could be constructed differently. Portrayals of bad mothers not only help to establish what the good mother is by depicting her opposite, but also serve to illustrate what the culture fears about women in general and mothers in particular. From the ancient horror of female power symbolized by Medea (or, more recently, by Casey Anthony) to the current worry that drug-addicted pregnant women are harming their fetuses, we see a social desire to monitor the reproductive capabilities of women, resulting in more (formal and informal) surveillance than in material (or even moral) support.

First published in 1993, Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon examines one of the earliest and most celebrated paintings in the history of European art from a variety of perspectives. In her lucid analysis, Seidel considers this famous double portrait as social record, legal document, material object, and poetic fiction.

In their protracted search for divinity, Western European Christians follwed many paths to personal connection with the eternal, including the acquisition of art, objects and artifacts. The essays in this work consider the role these objects and images played in these spiritual journeys.