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7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, August 3, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
In fifteenth-century Flemish painting, some of the most important moments in Christian history take place not in churches but in bedrooms. Annunciation scenes by artists such as Rogier van der Weyden relocate the moment of divine conception into richly furnished domestic interiors, often centered on the bedchamber—a space saturated with intimacy, sexuality, and bodily vulnerability.
This lecture examines the late medieval bedchamber as a charged visual site where theology, domestic life, and embodied experience collide. By reading Annunciation scenes alongside secular interior paintings, we will explore how artists navigated the uncomfortable implications of the Incarnation: what did it mean to imagine God becoming flesh in spaces associated with sex, reproduction, and privacy? And how did images attempt—sometimes unsuccessfully—to manage the tension between divine purity and human embodiment?
Rather than treating beds as neutral furnishings or purely symbolic props, this talk will argue that their presence reintroduces questions that doctrine alone could not fully resolve. The bed becomes a visual problem, forcing viewers to confront the physical realities of conception, flesh, and intimacy that underlie Christian belief.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, August 3, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
In fifteenth-century Flemish painting, some of the most important moments in Christian history take place not in churches but in bedrooms. Annunciation scenes by artists such as Rogier van der Weyden relocate the moment of divine conception into richly furnished domestic interiors, often centered on the bedchamber—a space saturated with intimacy, sexuality, and bodily vulnerability.
This lecture examines the late medieval bedchamber as a charged visual site where theology, domestic life, and embodied experience collide. By reading Annunciation scenes alongside secular interior paintings, we will explore how artists navigated the uncomfortable implications of the Incarnation: what did it mean to imagine God becoming flesh in spaces associated with sex, reproduction, and privacy? And how did images attempt—sometimes unsuccessfully—to manage the tension between divine purity and human embodiment?
Rather than treating beds as neutral furnishings or purely symbolic props, this talk will argue that their presence reintroduces questions that doctrine alone could not fully resolve. The bed becomes a visual problem, forcing viewers to confront the physical realities of conception, flesh, and intimacy that underlie Christian belief.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.