In 1950s Germany the sixth most popular pastime was looking out of windows, according to German sociological studies that Harvard University Society of Fellows junior fellow Daniel Jütte said inspired his interested in windows and window-gazing.
Jütte delivered a lecture titled “Window Gazes and World Views: A Chapter in the Cultural History of Vision” to an audience of about 15 in Carson Hall on Tuesday.
Jütte traced the cultural, theological and legal conceptualizations of windows and window-gazing from the ancient Middle East into early modern Europe. He argued that the rise of Protestantism in Europe catalyzed a shift in thought away from the Catholic belief that window-gazing was a profane act.
Present-day laws regarding windows remain consistent with those from pre-modern Europe, he said in the lecture. Ancient Roman laws guaranteed citizens the right to have a window with air, light and a view, but after the fall of Rome, other European societies did not include this right to a view in their laws, an exclusion that still remains in Western cultures.
History professor Darrin McMahon, who invited Jütte to speak, said he thought Jütte’s work intersected well with the material in his current first-year seminar on the Enlightenment as well as his own research on vision and light. McMahon said he wanted to invite Jütte to campus before Jütte returns to Germany this August after a three-year term with the Harvard Society of Fellows.
McMahon emphasized the academic significance of the interdisciplinary nature of Jütte’s work.
“Jütte is interested in material practice and material culture, and yet he still brings this incredibly synthetic erudition to those subjects,” McMahon said. “He goes from church architecture to the tech of window-making to the fairly detailed and arcane discussions of theology to an early modern biological understanding of how the human eye sees. He’s taking us into lots of different fields.”
McMahon said Jütte also covers a large time span in his work, spanning nearly 2,000 years of history in his lecture.
Jütte said in an interview that this lecture presented the beginning stages of research for a project that he hopes will turn into a book. He said he was happy to have a chance to “road test” this project in front of the College’s history faculty, on a subject he never expected to study.
“This is the exciting thing about history,” he said. “In a way you know that sometimes these small observations, these random findings that you make spark a much larger project.”
Jütte said he likes to approach history by looking at the less common trajectories, and that the main practical lesson historians and students should take away from his lecture is to see that a study of history can start with “very inconspicuous, very small things.”
Art history professor Ada Cohen said she was drawn to the lecture because of its unusual topic and its interdisciplinary potential. She said she enjoyed the lecture and generally enjoys lectures hosted by other departments because they suggest possibilities for connections across disciplines.
McMahon said he thinks it is important to bring outside scholars to campus to show students the people behind the types of books that they might read for their coursework.
“I think it’s important for undergraduates to see that the people who write the books are people who think and breathe just like them and were once undergraduates at places like Dartmouth,” he said.
McMahon also said he thinks that exposure to intellectual, accomplished lecturers can remind students of how much they have left to learn.
“When you witness that kind of mind, you’re impressed with the fact that you know very little,” he said. “It’s good to be reminded that there’s lots, lots, lots to learn and to get excited about that.”
