Please join us for a public lecture on Thursday, 15 March, 2018 4:00 pm at the History Department conference room in 5 Keene-Flint Hall, as Professor Azzan Yadin-Israel of Rutgers University will present: “The Birth of an Icon: How the Forbidden Fruit became an Apple.”
Though we often assume Adam and Eve sinned by eating an apple, the Book of Genesis does not identify the Forbidden Fruit. Even at the end of the 12th century, when the great Bible scholar Andrew of St. Victor surveyed the various views on the Forbidden Fruit he knew of only two possible candidates: the fig and the grapevine. Three hundred years later, throughout northern Europe, the apple would become the Forbidden Fruit par excellence. What occurred during this period to transform the apple into the dominant iconographic representation of the Fall of Man? Weaving together insights from medieval Bible commentary, art history, and historical linguistics, this lecture offers a novel interpretation of an enduring icon.
This talk is open to the public and is co-sponsored by the departments of History and Classics