Presented By: Judaic Studies
The Monk's Haggadah: The Story Behind A Remarkable 15th Century Codex and Its Discovery
David Stern, University of Pennsylvania
There is a fifteenth century codex housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich that contains a beautifully illustrated, hand-written Passover Haggadah and a lengthy Latin prologue on the meaning of Passover written by a contemporaneous monk. The lecture will demonstrate the unusual features of the Haggadah, discuss the special status of the prologue as the earliest known Christian ethnography of Jewish culture, and tell of how a group of contemporary scholars have reconstructed its history.