Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s scholarship bears primarily on medieval France (900-1600), with some attention to England, Germany, and Spain. Her early social-historical and archival work considered the modes of engagement between kingship and the northern French nobility over six centuries, particularly their documentary practices, their manipulation and domination of bureaucratic structures, their relations as clients and kindred, and their conflicting politics of prestige and cultural modeling. In the course of considering the dialectics of power among ruling elites, Bedos-Rezak observed the developing agency of media in these elites’ strategies of representation and communication from the twelfth century onward. She has demonstrated that authoritative presence and personal identity during that period came to be embodied in material artefacts (badges, insignia, seals, images, inscribed parchment), so that such artefacts were effective as agents of their users in situations requiring commitment and accountability. In her analysis of these mediatic developments, Bedos-Rezak’s work aims at constructing a semiotic anthropology of the western Middle Ages. She has explored the relationship between medieval sign theory and both the concept of and markers of personal identity. Her investigation of medieval definitions of person and identity has revealed that loci of singularity and distinction did not necessarily overlap with or result in the creation of individuality. Her present work recognize a significant culture of print in the Middle Ages, whereby the physical operations and conceptual implications of imprinting constitutively affected medieval art, law, documentary practices, governance, magic and natural philosophy, mysticism and anthropological theology.