Zachary Lacy

Art History

Zach is a senior at the University of Colorado Denver and will be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History in May 2025. His research interests revolve around inquiries of gender, relationships to and materializations of the divine, and the ethics and legalities of cultural patrimony and repatriation. This summer, Zach will intern at the Denver Art Museum in the Provenance Research Department. In the fall, Zach will further his education in art history at the graduate level, pursuing a Master of Arts in Art History, continuing to focus on medieval material and visual culture.

Thesis Title:
Bloody Intercession: The Abject as a Bridge between Mortal, Infernal, and Divine

Abstract:
Christian devotional practices in the late medieval period of Europe are as diverse as they are nuanced, yet they often share a notable common goal of materializing the presence of the divine within a terrestrial framework, enabling practitioners to better interact and “touch” what is innately incorporeal. Scholars have frequently emphasized the physical senses, principal among them touch, facilitated by tactility and haptics, as an oft-used way for medieval Christian worshipers to manifest the intangible other-worldly, at the expense of accounting for an almost extra-sensory interaction with the spiritual that is fundamentally experiential in nature. This thesis will analyze how encounters with the divine and infernal for mortal, medieval Christian devotees were made possible not only through the employment of the senses, but also through confrontation with the abject, particularly the fluid of blood. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection will serve as the primary foundation for this examination of a proposed “abject” devotional worship as exemplified in the later Middle Ages. Kristeva’s contemporary philosophy will be supplemented by contemporaneous Christian mystical teachings and literary sources to elucidate how contact with the “other,” be it part of the celestial or infernal spheres, was manifested in the lives of Christian followers. This thesis argues that sensory contact with blood, one of the quintessential mediums of the abject and prevalent within Christian literary, doctrinal, and visual culture, was a powerful force in confronting the medieval Christian worshiper with their own mortality, and thus their prospective salvation. This thesis will reevaluate medieval devotional practices, proffering a more holistic sensory approach rooted in confrontation with the abject as a primary method of connecting with the afterlife.