Ann Marie Rasmussen (Duke University, Emerita) presents: "What's Cooking? How to Understand a Miniature Penis in a Pan"

With a response from Jenna Phillips. See the abstract below: 

"This talk focusses on a unique, miniature, pewter object from fourteenth-century Bruges: a tiny, long-handled pan (3.6 cm x 1.1 cm x 1.3 cm), within which is nestled a tiny penis that can be raised and lowered by means of a tiny chain. Attention to medieval Flemish and Dutch texts, proverbs, and other sexual badges found in Bruges demonstrate that penis in a pan participates in a way of thinking in which signs, symbols, and figures of speech cross the putative image/language barrier. Additionally, as a miniature object, penis in a pan distorts scale and so raises further questions about sign relations. Penis in a pan allows us to posit for the late medieval urban world of the Low Countries a delight in intermedial, interactive forms of symbolic communication that rewarded linguistic fluency in vernacular languages, competence in visual analysis, knowledge of cultural and medial contexts, and the ability to sustain interpretive ambiguity with laughter."