Frankfurt, January 19-21, 2020,Goethe-University Frankfurt
The Female Side of God
Representations of
a Suppressed Tradition
The symposium will be related to the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt/Main on “The Female Side of God: Visual Representations of a Suppressed Tradition”. It will be convened within the framework of the LOEWE research hub “Religious Positioning”, the Institute of Judaic Studies at Frankfurt University and the Martin Buber-Chair. The main objective of the symposium is to recognize, evaluate and compare various presentations and descriptions of the feminine aspects of the deity in written documents, artistic objects and other visual artefacts from different historical periods and cultural backgrounds.
The subject has recently been discussed in divergent academic and cultural contexts, especially with regard to biblical wisdom literature, Jewish mysticism and kabbalah and feminist theologies. The conference will focus on contextualized readings and interpretations of primary texts and artefacts in the Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions in changing cultural and historical circumstances. The role of a feminine divine in the formation and transformation of interrelated systems of knowledge will be discussed in a comparative approach. Of special interest will be the changing patterns of methodologies in the various fields of research when dealing with the female aspects of the divine within the broader framework of epistemic shifts between the historical epochs – Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modernity, Modernity and the Postmodern Era.
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