“My job is to notice very ordinary things and show that they are not ordinary at all,” Margaret Visser explains. Throughout her award-winning career, Visser has been praised for her ability to illuminate complex ideas hiding in plain sight that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
She prefers to write about objects that people encounter in their daily lives so that her books are accessible to as wide an audience as possible. She acknowledges that “in the modern world we don’t have a body of knowledge that we all share,” and everyday things are as close as we get to a common language.
After receiving her first doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto, Visser has returned to campus to accept an honorary doctorate for best-selling book, The Geometry of Love. Visser, who gave the 2002 Massey Lecture, is thrilled to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Sacred Letters, honoris causa from St. Michael’s College, which she received last week.
Her strength as a writer lies in her ability to choose a topic and explain its historical, anthropological and mythological origins in an attempt to help people understand the images and physical constructs they come across everyday, but might not stop to ponder. Given this ability, critics and book lovers have taken to describing her as an “anthropologist of everyday life.”
The Geometry of Love presents the reader with a tour of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, a small church in Rome. Readers are led unexpectedly into a world of history and myth where religion and culture collide. The book was written after four years of researching English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek texts.
The South African-born Visser, who has written about everything from table manners to blue jeans, chose to explore the church after discovering that “the [tour] guides never tell you what you really want to know.” On October 12 and 14, readers will have a chance to join Visser as she explores the symbols of Sant’Agnese, or St. Agnes in English, in an hour-long documentary airing at 10 p.m. on VisionTV.
The church houses the tomb of St. Agnes, who was murdered in 305 A. D. at age 12. Visser studies her story as a religious tale and a myth, one which she says has “classical overtones.”
The physical structure of the church represents both the body of the Christian people, and the diversity of its population. The story of Sant’Agnese is similar to that of any other religious site because “wherever you turn in a church, there’s always a symbol.” The Geometry of Love examines the church as a sanctuary to those who see it as such. To explore this one church is for her to take a closer look at Christianity and how it functions as a prominent institution in Western culture.
Visser, who is married to U of T’s English professor emeritus Colin Visser, has the uncommon gift of looking at artifacts and structures others might take for granted and telling a story about what they really stood for centuries ago, altering what they mean to us today.
