EventsArchives

The University of Pittsburgh’s Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies present:

NANCY WICKER

"Who Made It and Who Wore It? Agency and the Individual in Early Medieval Scandinavian Gold Bracteate Jewelry"

Friday, January 25th at 5:00

Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 202

This talk is sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture and co-sponsored by our program.

(University of California at Berkeley)

“The Useful and the Honorable: Literature, Diplomacy, and the Ethics of Mediation in the Late Renaissance”

Friday, February 8th at 4:30 p.m.

Carnegie Mellon University Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A

This paper will explore a point of contact between the Renaissance political practice of diplomacy, and the emerging discourse of secular literature. Modern diplomatic practice takes shape in and around the culture of Renaissance humanism, which offers deeply idealistic accounts of how diplomacy works. By the late sixteenth century, however, diplomatic theory struggles to bring humanist moral and ethical ideals into harmony with the contingencies of practical diplomacy. One of the ways in which writers reflect on the changes in diplomacy's relationship to moral philosophy is through a consideration of whether political action is to be 'useful' (that is, politically expedient), or 'honorable' (that is, morally correct). This is a topic that occurs repeatedly in discussions of the role of the mediator in diplomatic negotiations. My paper will trace this theme through the works of several late-Renaissance writers. Particular focus will be on Torquato Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, and Michel de Montaigne, who writes at length in his Essais about the ethics of diplomacy. I will show that both of these authors use diplomatic representation to explore the dynamics of literary representation. Thus the paper will open perspectives on how literary discourse represents the limits of political power.

This talk is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

(Art History, Carnegie Mellon University)

"The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art"

Friday, February 15th at 4:00

Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 202

In this paper, Balas examines the significance of the Mother Goddess and her cult in Renaissance culture. The Mother Goddess was one of the most popular cultic deities, and her colorful myths and exotic rites, described in detail by classical authors, became a rich source of imagery for Renaissance writers, antiquarians, and artists. After outlining key features of (and differences between) the classical and Renaissance versions of the Mother Goddess, Balas will offer detailed analysis of several canvasses from Andrea Mantegna’s series, The Triumph of Caesar (detail at right), in which Cybele appears as a national goddess and protector of the Roman state.

Edith Balas has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon since 1977. Her main areas of interest are modern art (1890-1960), painting and sculpture, and the art of the Italian Renaissance. Her most recent publications include the second edition of Brancusi & Romanian Folk Traditions (2006); Michelangelo's Double Self-Portraits (2004); The Early Work of Henry Koerner (2003); and The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art (2002). She has published over two dozen articles in the US, Holland, Hungary, Romania, Italy, and France. She has also curated shows in Pittsburgh, New York, Budapest, and Paris.

This talk is generously co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program and the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

(Department of History, SUNY Stony Brook)

Friday, February 29th at 4:00 in The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Room 501

This paper examines a range of sources dating to ca. 1140-80 (hagiographical and devotional texts, liturgical objects and images, and their accompanying inscriptions) to examine distinct changes in the representation of Jews in Christian art and thought. It argues that images often read as reflecting a heightened and increasingly “racialized” anti-Judaism are, in the first instance, a by-product of how Christians desired, feared, and used representations of God. Art and society are never discrete, however, and images created to serve internal Christian purposes eventually affected Christian perceptions of actual Jews, and influenced Christian-Jewish social and legal relations.

Sara Lipton’s work focuses on religious identity and experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and art and culture in the high Middle Ages (11th-14th centuries). She is currently working on two projects. The first, to be published by Metropolitan Books in 2007, examines how changing concepts of vision and witness in medieval Christian society intersected with the visual representation of the Jew. The second, entitled Art, Preaching, and Piety in the High Middle Ages (1150-1300), seeks to understand why and to what effect Christendom invested so much in worshiping the ineffable Word through the material thing. Her publications include “The Sweet Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” in the journal Speculum (2005), and Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley, 1999), which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize for Best First Book.

This talk is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of History.

(Department of French and Italian, Princeton University)

"Rabelais and the Renaissance Interpretation of Dreams"

Monday, March 17th at 4:00 in The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Room 501

In the enormous corpus of classical, medieval and early modern writings about the interpretation of dreams, the questions of truth and falsehood, predictability and indeterminacy, are recurring concerns: under what conditions are nocturnal visions prophetic or deceitful? are they inspired by God or by the Devil, by longings for certainty or by the power of our earthly desires? can they tell us something about our own future or are they simply the product of our fertile imagination? Many early modern books tried to address these questions in a various ways and different genres. As a literary critic, Francois Rigolot will turn to Francois Rabelais's fiction, and analyze the representation of an exemplary dream, which may shed at least some light in a comic way on a larger issue: the problematic interpretation of dreams during the Renaissance.

François Rigolot is an authority on stylistics and poetics and on the literature of the Renaissance. Of his many publications, some of the more recent include his critical edition of Montaigne's Journal de voyage, based on a newly discovered manuscript (Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), a new edition of Les Langages de Rabelais (1996), and Louise Labé Lyonnaise ou la Renaissance au féminin (Champion, 1997), which addresses the problems of a middle-class woman writer in the age of humanism. In 2002, he published two books, one on the concept of "error" before Descartes (L’Erreur de la Renaissance, published by Editions Champion), and Poésie et Renaissance (Éditions du Seuil). His critical edition of Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries sur Montaigne was published by Éditions Champion in 2004. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (1990), and in 2002 he was knighted into the Ordre National du Mérite by President Jacques Chirac.

An open reception will follow the talk, which is generously co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian

(Department of English, University of Chicago)

"Mind and World in The Winter's Tale"

Thursday, March 20th at Carnegie Mellon University

Time and Location TBA

(Department of English, University of Chicago)

"Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Work of The Comedy of Errors"

Friday, March 21st at 4:00 in The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Room 501

Professor Strier’s paper offers something like a Weberian reading of Shakespeare’s play, seeing it as not only praising bourgeois life-—marital and commercial—-but also offering it as a form of holiness, perhaps as the highest form thereof. Richard Strier is Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His scholarship brings together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas, but is interested not only in the ideas themselves but how they find their way into English and American literature in the period. He is the author of many essays, edited volumes, and books, including Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1995), and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983).

An open reception will follow the talk, which is generously co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (PCMRS).

(Professor Emerita of History, City University of New York)

"Was Jesus' Foster-Father a Martyr? Constructing the Death of Joseph the Carpenter"

Thursday, March 27th at 4:00 in The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Room 501

The death of Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary and foster-father of Jesus, goes without mention in canonical texts, leaving a gap that intrigued some medieval writers and artists. This paper examines their attempts to complete the shape of Joseph’s life, especially the construction of Joseph as a martyr.

Pamela Sheingorn is Professor Emerita of History at Baruch College and Professor Emerita of History and Theatre at The Graduate Center, both part of the City University of New York. She specializes in the European Middle Ages, especially in visual, cultural, and women's history. Her research areas include hagiography, drama, and visual culture. Her most recent books include: Myth, Montage, and the Visible in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea (2003, co-authored with Marilynn Desmond), and Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (1999, co-authored with Kathleen Ashley). Her current research projects focus on representations of the late medieval family, medieval masculinities, a cultural history of Joseph the Carpenter, and illuminations in medieval drama manuscripts.

An open reception will follow the talk, which is generously co-sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of History.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies present:

“Calculating Engines: Minds, Bodies, Sex and Machines on the Eve of the Enlightenment”

Thursday, September 27th at 4:30 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon University

The lecture explores the fascination with the idea of creating artificial life and 'thinking machines' in the pre-enlightenment period. It concentrates on the pertinent ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, and Leibniz, but ends by exploring the 'anti-machine' of the late seventeenth century, i.e., the malfunctioning sex machines of the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Professor Sawday's research is focused on the intersection between science, technology, and literature particularly in the Renaissance period. His major publications include: (with Thomas Healy) Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990); The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 1995); (With Neil Rhodes) The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (Routledge, 2000).

Sponsored by the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (for more information, see www.medren.org)

(Head of Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland)

Friday, September 28th 4:30 in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, Room 501

Professor Evans has published on Chaucer, medieval virginity, Margery Kempe, medieval origin myths, Middle English religious drama, Derrida, romance, translation theory, translation in the Middle Ages, the representation of Jews in medieval texts, and fifteenth-century courtly literature, among others.

Jointly sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and The Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh

Co-sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of English

"A Maiden, a Shepherdess, and a Queen: The Parisian Assumption Vespers Services and Two Thirteenth-Century Motets"

Thursday October 18th at 4:00 in room 132 of the Music Building at the University of Pittsburgh

David J. Rothenberg, Assistant Professor of Music at Case Western, is a music historian with research interests in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. His articles on topics ranging from Ars antiqua motets to compositions by Heinrich Isaac, Josquin des Prez, and Orlando di Lasso appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, and Musik in Bayern. Current projects include a study of Isaac's liturgical music for Emperor Maximilian I and a book about the confluence of Marian devotion and secular song in music of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries.

JONATHAN BURTON
(Woodburn Associate Professor of English, West Virginia University) “'This Blue-Eyed Hag:' Race and Shakespeare's Sycorax."

Professor Burton will speak to our undergraduate and graduate Shakespeare classes on the topic of his new book, Race in Early Modern England, which he co-authored with Ania Loomba of the University of Pennsylvania.
Students will be encouraged to ask questions after the lecture.

Ramie Targoff is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Brandeis University. Her first book, Common Prayer: Models of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2001) won the prize for Best Book of the Year from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her second book, John Donne, Body and Soul, will be published by Chicago University Press in 2008. She is currently at work on a book-length study of love in the Renaissance.

Co-sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of English

"From Document to Text and Back Again: Renaissance Women's Letters and the Interpretive Shuttle"

Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Cowell College Provost at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has authored, edited, and translated numerous books and essays, including Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Duke, 1998). She is currently at work on a translation of the letters of Isabella d'Este for the University of Chicago Press and a book manuscript titled "'In Continuous Expectation': Isabella d'Este's Epistolary Dominion."

Co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and the Women's Studies Program

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (PCMRS)

Associate Professor at Northwestern, West has published Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2002), has co-edited two books on Shakespeare, and is currently at work on a book called Understanding and Confusion on the Elizabethan Stages. See his website for more information: http://www.english.northwestern.edu/people/west.html.

Seamus Heaney's verse translation made Beowulf hip again. Benjamin Bagby takes the saga back to its roots with his dramatic performance of this Medieval horror story in Anglo-Saxon with English supertitles. For more information and to purchase tickets, see the Renaissance and Baroque Society’s website: http://www.rbsp.org/index.asp

Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where he is also Director of Graduate Studies and of Princeton’s Program in Medieval Studies. He is completing a book entitled Dying Medieval: The Termination of Middle English Literature and working on projects that include a book on medieval heraldic narrative and an edition of Piers Plowman. He has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the U.K. Fulbright Commission, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, and the ACLS, among others. His recent publications include Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minnesota, 2003) and The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (Minnesota, 2001). See his website for more information: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/new_web/bios/dvsmith.htm.

Robert Durling will lecture on DanteSponsored by the Department of French and Italian

Durling’s translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio have been published by Oxford University Press. His translation of the Paradiso is forthcoming.

MRST/ PCMRS event. co-sponsored by the European Studies Center and the Department of Religious Studies

Ehrman is James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, including a college-level textbook on the New Testament, two anthologies of early Christian writings, a study of the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, and a Greek-English Edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. His most recent books are Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code (2004), Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the New Testament and Why (2005), and Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (2006). See his website for more information: http://bartdehrman.com/.

MRST/ PCMRS event. co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Religious Studies

Beckwith is Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University. Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing and has published on Margery Kempe, the literature of anchoritism, and medieval theatre. Her publications include Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (Routledge, 1993), and Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago, 2001). She is currently working on a book on medieval and Renaissance drama centering on Shakespeare and the transformation of sacramental culture. See her website for more information: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/sarah.beckwith.

“St. Vincent Ferrer and the Chopped-Up Baby: Creating the Image of a New Saint in the Fifteenth Century”

“The Problem of Heretical Clergy in the Early Enlightenment: The Jewish Case and Some Christian Parallels”

Peter Machamer, University of Pittsburgh (History and Philosophy of Science)

Jesse Gellrich, Louisiana State University (English and Comparative Literature)

“Why There Was No Renaissance Bishop's Palace: Residential Architecture, Residency, and Reform in Northern Italy, 1400-1600”