The 390th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 9, 2024 at 7 pm ET. In-person presentation at The New School, University Center, 63 5th Ave, New York, NY, Room UL104 (lower level) with streaming via zoom. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for zoom link. Free and open to the public.

Nina Rowe: Word and Image in Medieval Manuscripts: The Story of Emperor Nero

In the period between circa 1330 and 1430, manuscript workshops in the cities of southern Germany specialized in the production of a new genre of book – the illuminated World Chronicle. These volumes offered expansive tellings of biblical and ancient history, written in the vernacular language of the street, augmented by expansive pictorial cycles. The narratives often are surprising to modern audiences, presenting in word and image legends that have fallen out of standard accounts, but which register interests and preoccupations of the late medieval urban arena. This lecture explores a story about unusual demands the ancient Roman emperor Nero made on a cluster of doctors, as presented in a pair of illuminated World Chronicles created in the city of Regensburg, circa 1400. The original audiences for the tale lived at a time of increased professionalization and regulation of medicine, when the well-being of individuals was understood to be a means toward achieving municipal peace more broadly. The Nero episodes in the World Chronicles invited reader-viewers to reflect on harmony in the public sphere by engaging with entertaining scenes of Nero’s corporeal eccentricity. 

Nina Rowe is a Professor of Medieval Art History at Fordham University. Her books include The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2011) and The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City (Yale UP, 2020), as well as co-edited volumes, most recently: Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past(Fordham UP, 2019). She has held fellowships from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she served as President of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), 2020-2023.

Nero and the Doctors, in a World Chronicle manuscript, southern Germany, 1402. (Image: New York, New York Public Library, Spencer MS 38, fol. 341v.)