Witchcraft and the Law in Medieval Scandinavia
January 16, 2002
The nordic provincial and city laws of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries provide us with remarkable opportunities to assess popular and elite constructions of witchcraft beliefs in northern Europe, especially as measured against subsequent national codification of these legal traditions and the testimony of the Icelandic sagas. In this lecture, CMRS Visiting Professor Stephen Mitchell (Harvard University) extracts legal , ecclesiastical, and literary materials the various images of witches and witchcraft in the northern world circa 1300.
Updating the Past: The Scores for Young Bess and Elizabeth · Wednesday, January 23, 2002 The many films about Elizabeth I of England reflect the various ways that culture has imagined her and wished her to be. Musicologist and film-score specialist Linda Schubert explores several contrasting film portrayals of Elizabeth and the role music has played in these interpretations.
Annual History of the Book Lecture: "The Imaginary Library of Archbishop Theodore" January 25, 2002 Each year the Center's History of the Book Lecture series bringto an eminent scholar of medieval and Renaissance books to UCLA. This year's speaker, Dr. Christopher de Hamel (Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), will discuss the "imaginary" library of Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury in 668-690. According to Bede, Theodore brought a collection of books to England on his arrival. None survived, although there are traces of what kind of manuscripts they may have been. But nine hundred years after Theodore, a later archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker (1504-75), set himself the task of finding the lost library. He assembled a group of exotic manuscripts which he was convinved were the actual books of Theodore. He published an account of them in 1572. Parker was wrong--spectacularly wrong, in fact, for most of the books were of no antiquity whatsoever--but his search for Theodore's library, and the way in which he allowed himself to be so deluded, reveal a great deal about Renaissance book collecting and the difficulties of dating manuscripts during the English Reformation.
***EVENT POSTPONED*** CMRS Faculty Roundtable:
Philip Brett (Musicology), "Byrd's Soul Authority" January 30, 2002 The Center regrets to announce that the January 30th 2002, CMRS Faculty Roundtable has been postponed until further notice. The February 13th, 2002, Roundtable will go on as scheduled.
The role of William Byrd (1540-1623) in Elizabethan musical culture is in some ways strikingly similar to that of his younger contemporary Edmund Spenser (1554-1599) in the literary sphere. Both had a sense of history, both cultivated (as Louis Montrose has argued in relation to Spenser) "a distinctive and culturally authoritative authorial persona" through appropriating print, both received royal appointments or favors. A great difference lies in their religious lives, for Byrd remained an ardent Roman Catholic, and courted danger in befriending Jesuit priests. Professor Brett argues that under pressure of religious conviction, Byrd's carefully constructed indigenous authorial voice was slowly undermined by an inward expressiveness upon which later generations have constructed his greatness but which his contemporary audience, outside the Roman enclave, virtually ignored. CMRS faculty, associates, Council members, staff, and graduate students are invited to attend. Bring your lunch! The Center will provide soft drinks and coffee.
California Medieval History Seminar, Winter 2002 February 9, 2002 The California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four, pre-distributed research papers (two by faculty members, two by graduate students or recent Ph.D. recipients). Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance and come prepared to discuss them. To promote an active discussion, attendance is limited. Presenters and paper titles are announced by e-mail approximately 6-8 weeks before the meeting.
The California Medieval History Seminar is supported by the generosity of a number of sponsors, including: the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Dean of Social Science, the California Institute of Technology, the History Department of the University of California, the History Department of UCLA, California State University Long Beach, the Huntington Library, and the Huntington-Caltech Committee for the Humanities.
CMRS Faculty Winter Quarter Event: Feasts and Fasts February 12, 2001, Mardi Gras (By invitation only!) The Center invites its faculty, associates, and Council members to a program of early music for Carnival (Mardi Gras) and Lent, with commentary by Professor Philip Brett (Musicology, UCLA) and Martha Cowan, UCLA Sounds Director. The event is sponsored by the CMRS Council.
CMRS Faculty Roundtable: Donka Minkova (English), "Alliteration Rules! From Old to Middle English"
Not long ago, CMRS sponsored a program entitled Doleful Dirge & Dress: Music for Mourning and Measured Merry-Making; reminding us that alliteration rules even today. Turning back to early English, Professor Minkova's talk will examine the evolution of the rules of alliterative verse composition from the 8th to the 14th century. She will argue that "alliteration" in early English verse was based on sound and not on letter; the term is, strictly speaking, a misnomer. An examination of the patterns of sound identity allows us to date sound changes with greater precision. The persistence of alliteration is an important component in the debate about orality and literacy in medieval English culture. CMRS faculty, associates, Council members, staff, and graduate students are invited to attend. Bring your lunch! The Center will provide soft drinks and coffee.
The Arabic Maqama and the Rise of the Modern Novel
February 20, 2002
This lecture, by CMRS Visiting Professor James T. Monroe (Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), will attempt to define the nature of the Arabic maqama genre in terms of its structure, while also investigating the cultural and historical factors that brought it into existence. It will relate the maqama to other genres of Arabic literature and to the Spanish picaresque tradition; it will discuss theories of possible influence and, finally, examine the similarities and differences between the maqama and the modern novel that begins with Cervantes.
History in Lightning: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Historical Film (with some references to Medieval History)
February 20, 2002 Twenty years after beginning to write about the historical film, Robert Rosenstone (History, Cal Tech) will meditate upon developments in and the state of this field. Included will be a survey of how writing about the historical film has evolved differently among historians and people in cinema studies-what is at stake in both fields and what gets left out of both. Arguing that the central question is what rules we use for telling the past, Prof. Rosenstone will suggest appropriate ones for the historical film-appropriate to the theory and practice of the medium. Film clips will demonstrate how film communicates the past in its own way, with particular kinds of visual tropes and metaphors; the truth status we accord to historical film depends upon our acceptance of such tropes and metaphors. Prof. Rosenstone is the author of Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History and editor of Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past.
CMRS Faculty Roundtable: Kevin Terraciano (History), "Native Responses to the 'One God from Castile' in Early Colonial Mexico"
February 27, 2002 From 1544 to 1546, the Inquisition investigated accusations that native nobles from two communities in Oaxaca had reverted to ancient religious practices, including human sacrifice. This discussion examines testimony from the two trials and sketches drawn by Mixtec artists as evidence of indigenous responses to Christianity in the early colonial period. The discussion will focus on the confused and ambivalent words and actions of a generation of nobles in Oaxaca who experienced an assault on their sacred beliefs and practices by followers of, as one Mixtec noble called Him, "the one God from Castile.
One Royal Body or Two? The Problem of Sacred Monarchy in Early Modern Western Europe
February 27, 2002 Did anybody really believe that Western European kings were sacred? Were they seen as possessing a mystical body as well as a natural one, and did this royal dualism provide a theological foundation for the growth of the state? In this lecture, Paul Monod (History, Middlebury College), reexamines these questions, first raised forty years ago by Ernst Kantorowicz, in the light of recent research on court rituals, political practices, and the human body. Professor Monod shows that what emerges is not a coherent theory of sacred monarchy, but a dynamic history of contested political concepts and changing royal publicity. Co-sponsored by CMRS, the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Dean of Social Sciences, and the Department of History.
Shakespeare Symposium: Hamlet
March 2, 2002 Each year the Center hosts a symposium devoted to an in-depth examination of one of Shakespeare's works. This year's symposium, coordinated by Professor Michael J. B. Allen (English) explores the intricacies and intrigues of Hamlet. For more information, contact Deborah Kennel at 310.206.3113 or kennel@humnet.ucla.edu.
The New Sorrows of the Young Aristaeus: Mythological Creativity in Neo-Latin Didactic Poetry
March 6, 2002 This lecture by CMRS Visiting Professor Heinz Hofmann (University of Tubingen) takes as its starting point the myth of Aristaeus at the end of Virgil's Georgics, which is the first and only myth of this kind at the conclusion of an ancient didactic poem. It was at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century that Giovanni Pontano, Marco Girolamo Vida, and Girolamo Fracastoro took up the Virgilian tradition and inserted onld and new myths into their didactic poems, and thereafter mythological narratives formed an integral part of Neo-Latin didactic poetry. Professor Hofmann examines the use of myth in a number of Neo-Latin didactic poems between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and assesses its thematic variation and diverse functions.
CMRS Faculty Roundtable: Michael Morony (History), "The Plague of Justinian"
March 13, 2002 The first pandemic of bubonic plague, 541 to 767 CE, is often called the "Plague of Justinian," but it recurred for over two hundred years and embraced all of Eurasia from Britain to China. Compared to the Black Death, there has been almost no scholarship on this pandemic. The first international conference devoted to this subject, held in Rome in December, 2001, brought scholars of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Syriac together with biomolecular archeologists to discuss whether or not the pandemic really was bubonic plague, whether there is archaeological evidence for it or not, and what the social, economic, psychological, or religious consequences may have been.
24th Annual UC Celtic Studies Conference
March 14-17, 2002 The first UC Celtic Studies Conference took place at UC Berkeley in 1978. Since then, the conference has been convened annually, its site alternating between the UCLA and UCB campuses. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the event returns to UCLA in 2002. The four-day program, culminating on Saint Patrick's Day (March 17, 2002), will be coordinated by Professor Joseph Nagy (English) and the UCLA Celtic Colloquium. Sessions will focus on all aspects of Celtic culture including language, literature, history, art and archaeology, from late antiquity until the present day. Related events include a concert of Celtic-themed music, the traditional conference banquet, and a local field trip. A call for papers will be issued in Fall 2001. For more information, contact Professor Nagy at jfnagy@humnet.ucla.edu.
