CMRS Roundtable: “From Dualisms to Convergences” Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Professor Ricardo Quinones' (Claremont McKenna) recently-published Dualisms: The Agons of the Modern World centered on differences, deeply-rooted, contentious and recurrent, and on enmities that were unending, not even abbreviated by death itself. In that book, aroused by the strange neglect of Erasmus and Voltaire, he promised a second study, now completed, that would focus on similarities, on the convergences across the centuries that bring two such preeminent intellectuals together in their fates and fashions. At this Roundtable, Prof. Quinones will read some snippets from Dualisms and answer questions before outlining the major convergences that make Erasmus and Voltaire, if not brothers under the skin, at least kindred spirits, who may be joined together in what has been heralded as the "second Reformation." View pictures >>
CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series
“Foundations of Medieval Monasticism”
Friday-Saturday, January 18-19, 2008
This CMRS Ahmanson Conference, organized by advanced graduate students in medieval studies, coincides with the completion of a two-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a digital database of the ninth-century “Plan of St. Gall,” an elaborate two-dimensional plan for a monastic complex. The conference will focus on the roots of medieval culture found in Carolingian monasticism, the reforms of the eighth and ninth centuries, and their impact in later periods. It offers an opportunity for scholars from a variety of disciplines to share current scholarship on medieval monasticism as well as to familiarize themselves with digital resources for the study of monasticism. This conference is made possible by a generous grant from the Ahmanson Foundation, and cosponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Dean of Humanities of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It was organized by UCLA graduate students Leanne Good, Ned Schoolman, and Sarah Whitten, all of the History department, with the assistance of Dr. Barbara Schedl (UCLA and the University of Vienna) and Professor Patrick Geary (UCLA). Program http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/monasticism_program.pdf.
Abstracts of conference talks www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/medieval_monasticism_conf.html. View pictures >>
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture
“The War between Eldad the Danite and Prester John through Time and Space” Thursday, January 24, 2008 Micha Perry (UCLA) speaks at this UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies co-sponsored Faculty/Student seminar.
CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series
“Reading Chrétien de Troyes (New Directions)”
Friday, January 25, 2008
This roundtable will bring together a small group of medievalists who are working collaboratively on a book on Chrétien de Troyes, the foremost author of the French Middle Ages. The corpus of texts attributed to him has been the object of the earliest and longest medieval criticism. Just as Chrétien worked within networks of exchange, this project starts from the premise of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, each scholar from her own theoretical and intellectual perspective, but in a collective effort to understand the larger cultural, historical, and literary moment of the second half of the twelfth century. Participants will include Professors Virginie Greene (Harvard University), Sarah Kay (Princeton University), Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz), Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), and Zrinka Stahuljak (University of California-Los Angeles). View pictures >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Translated Turks on the Early Modern
Stage”
Monday, January 28, 2008
When Othello referred to himself as a “malignant and a turban'd Turk,” what would his audience have understood? How did the term “Turk” travel from language to language, between one cultural context and others, from one European stage to another? What did it gain, and what did it lose in its travels? The “Turk”--an infamously composite figure, sodomitical, cruel, generous, lascivious, scheming, spectacular--also stepped on stage to represent theatrical representation itself. What does the stage “Turk” tell us about the way in which the early European theater imagined itself? Professor Jacques Lezra (Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese; NYU) considers these questions in this lecture. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “John Trevisa v. Lord Berkeley: Controlling the Language of Dispute”
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
With Professor Rita Copeland (English, Classical Studies, & Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania). Under the patronage of Lord Thomas Berkeley, a powerful aristocrat, John Trevisa (1342 -1402) translated important Latin texts into English at a time when English itself could be seditious, when people were arrested just for carrying the Wycliffite Bible in English. One of the works that Trevisa translated is a dispute, the Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk. And in the prologue to his version of a universal history, Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, Trevisa stages a debate between a lord (his master, Berkeley) and a clerk (Trevisa himself), raising questions of linguistic access against hermeneutic control, English insularity against Latin internationalism. The lord finally wins when proto-national political prestige prevails against the claims of an international ecclesiastical class. View video >>
CMRS Roundtable, "The Devil's Interval" Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Professor Jacques Lezra (Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese; NYU) discusses Adorno and music. View pictures >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, “Feasting with the Gods: Ovid, Bellini, Shakespeare” Wednesday, January 30, 2008
This talk by Professor Susanne Wofford (Dean, The Gallatin School, and Professor of English, New York University) will look at the treatment of the near rape of Lotis by Priapus in Giovanni Bellini's great painting The Feast of the Gods (parts of which were later repainted by Titian) and at the episodes in Ovid's Fasti on which it is based in order to consider the Roman roots of Shakespearean pastoral and festive drama, in this case especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream. View pictures >>
Annual E.A. Moody Medieval Philosophy Workshop
Friday-Sunday, February 1-3, 2008
“Arguments, Disputations, and Obligationes: Medieval Theories”
Coordinated by Professor Calvin Normore (Philosophy, UCLA).
Renaissance Conference of Southern California
Saturday, February 2, 2008
CMRS is one of the co-sponsors of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California’s annual interdisciplinary conference at the Huntington Library. This year’s keynote speaker will be Frances Dolan (UC Davis). Advance registration and fee required. For more information, or to register, see RCSC’s website at www.rcsca.org.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “After the Condemnations of 1277” Tuesday, February 5, 2008
With Professors Alex Novikoff (St. Joseph's University) and Hans Thijssen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen). The Condemnations of 1277 in the University of Paris, which involved Thomas Aquinas before he became a saint, were the most famous of many such efforts to confine and control debate in the university. At least fifteen condemnations are recorded for thirteenth and fourteenth century Paris alone. But official repression was the mother of disputational invention: disputants developed devices of speech and writing to signal acceptance of a condemned thesis in ways that were formally covert yet well understood within the disputational context. When John Buridan discussed the condemned view that the soul is a material thing, for example, he explicitly rejected it in a way that probably indicated assent. Because most condemnations were local affairs, their authority beyond the place of their promulgation was unclear, requiring officials who wanted to invoke them elsewhere to set the stage carefully. View videos >>
CMRS Annual Hammer Foundation Lecture: “Images and Rhythms in the Middle Ages”
Thursday, February 7, 2008
This year’s CMRS Hammer Foundation Lecture is presented by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Rhythms of work and leisure, of daily migrations between suburbs and downtown, of speech, walking, or music, and so on, count among the most important means of personal and collective individuation, as recognized by social scientists since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, no history of rhythms yet exists. In this lecture, Professor Schmitt will sketch such a history of rhythms in medieval Europe, focusing on images and the rhythms of their forms, colors, temporal, and musical dimensions. An attention to rhythms leads to another way of looking at the past and its visual legacy. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the Good Parliament of 1376”
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
With Professors W. Mark Ormond (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York) and Henry Ansgar Kelly (English, UCLA). The term ‘parliament’ has become synonymous with an institutional locus of disputation and ‘parliamentary’ with certain specialized rules of debate. An early and momentous Parliament met in England in 1376, when the Commons were very disputatious and notably contentious in their requests to the King. For his part, Edward III was very old, and the ministers replying to Parliament in his name could produce only bland responses that would not appease the Commons. Shortly after these events, Chaucer produced his Parliament of Fowls to depict an avian parliament in disputation. The commoner birds in the assembly show themselves impatient with the high-level wrangling of their betters until a sovereign Nature intervenes to moderate the dispute. View videos >>
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Breaking Expectations: Some Idiosyncratic Donor Compositions in Byzantine Art”
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Byzantine donor compositions rely on a relatively limited number of artistic formulae to convey the profession and rank of the donor, the nature of the encounter with the holy figure to whom the gift is directed, and the character of the gift itself. The formulae are widespread enough so that we are justified, when asking what may lie behind its anomalies. In this lecture, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Nancy Sevcenko will examine some unusual donor compositions from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and at approaches to the unconventional in Byzantine Art. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Masculine Dispute and Female Response ”
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
With Professor Karen Sullivan (Bard College). Learned disputation in the Middle Ages often involved attacks on women (as in The Owl and the Nightingale), provoking legal responses based on concepts of verbal damage and libel. The disputational genre of the responsio (response) provided another way to answer the same attacks. Responsiones written in women’s voices became prominent in French literature as early as the thirteenth century. Like other forms of literary disputation, responsiones often invoked legal terms and concepts, particularly defamation. A famous use of the genre is Christine de Pizan’s Querelle du Roman de la Rose (1402), with its systematic critique of the Roman’s misogynism. View videos >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Vikings: Raiders or Traders?”
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
A Scandinavian Viking has usually been seen as a warlike pirate or sea-rover. In recent times Vikings have been seen both as raiders and traders. The main question dealt with in this lecture by Helgi Thorlaksson (University of Iceland), is how the Vikings could combine plunder and trade. View pictures >>
“The Shakespeare Moot Court”
Thursday, February 21, 2008
A lecture by Professors(English, McGill), and(Law, McGill), co-sponsored by CMRS and the Department of English. Professors Paul Yachnin(English, McGill), and Desmond Manderson (Law, McGill), present a lecture about the origins and practices of the Shakespeare Moot Court project, which they founded five years ago at McGill University. The moot court takes a modern legal issue—marriage, for example, or women wearing veils—and uses the Shakespeare canon as the body of the law. Students are divided into applicants and respondents; they study Renaissance and modern legal theories, and Shakespeare. Co-sponsored by CMRS and the Department of English. View pictures >>
“Shakespeare as the Law: A Moot Court Workshop”
Friday, February 22, 2008
Professors Paul Yachnin (English, McGill), and Desmond Manderson (Law, McGill), present a lecture about the origins and practices of the Shakespeare Moot Court project, which they founded five years ago at McGill University. The moot court takes a modern legal issue—marriage, for example, or women wearing veils—and uses the Shakespeare canon as the body of the law. Students are divided into applicants and respondents; they study Renaissance and modern legal theories, and Shakespeare. Co-sponsored by CMRS and the Department of English. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Pico’s 900 Theses: Disputation Unbounded”
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
With Professor Giulio Busi (Jewish Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin). Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola, offered to pay the expenses of anyone who would travel to Rome in 1486 to dispute with him in public on 900 theses of his choosing. Because Pico’s enemies in the papal court objected, the debate was quashed, but Pico unwisely published his grandiose collection of theses, which show him pushing against the limits of both reason and faith by using a medieval form to break the boundaries of medieval discourse. The most startling innovation in the published theses is that 119 of them are about Cabala, the Jewish mysticism which was then all but unknown to Christians and very controversial among Jews. View videos >>
CMRS Roundtable: “Bernard of Clairvaux and the Problem of Postmortem Charisma”
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
ProfessorC. Stephen Jaeger's (CMRS Associate and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, Emeritus) research interests include German, Latin and French literature of the Middle Ages, the influence of Latin culture on vernacular literature, intellectual history, history of education, courtliness, chilvalry and courtly love, and the “Renaissance of the twelfth century”. Bernard of Clairvaux was a major force in the spread of the Cistercian order. A magnetic personal presence and spell-binding preaching style, recognized both by contemporaries and by Bernard himself, were invaluable instruments of conversion and communal harmony. Death threatened to erase these effects that had been so valuable to his order during his life. He prepared carefully for the postmortem preservation of these valuable instruments of proselytizing and conversion both in his self-presentation and in his sermons. While many saints and visionaries cooperated in their own commemoration, Bernard offers an unusual case of a self-conscious construction of his own charismatic afterlife. View pictures >>
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Freedom of Religion in Islam”
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The Quranic declaration that “There is no compulsion in religion” is attracting much attention these days, even from the Pope, but precisely what does it mean? In this lecture, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Patricia Crone (Mellon Professor of Islamic History, Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies) examines some of the different interpretations attached to it in the past, the ways in which Muslims of diverse kinds have reinterpreted it in the present, and the wider issues that these changes reflect. View pictures >>
Twelfth Annual Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern Slavic Studies
Friday, February 29, 2008 Download the full schedule as a 19k PDF. Organized by Professor Gail Lenhoff (UCLA). Sponsored by UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Center for European and Eurasian Studies. View pictures >>
California Medieval History Seminar
Saturday, March 1, 2008
The California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance and come prepared to discuss them. The California Medieval History Seminar is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the CMRS, the Huntington Library, and the Caltech Huntington Committee for the Humanities.
CMRS Lecture, “Renaissance Culture and its Global Ambitions”
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
A lecture by Professor George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) that will consider the ongoing debate concerning what some have called “The Great Divergence” and others “The European Miracle.” Instead of comparing unreliable estimates of coal or steel production in eighteenth century Britain and China, Huppert shifts the debate to a much earlier time and to comparisons that have nothing to do with production or consumption statistics. Co-sponsored by the UC Riverside Department of History. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Latin v. Greek at the Council of Florence”
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
With Professor John Monfasani (SUNY, Albany). In 1439 the Council of Florence brought about a historic union of the Greek and Latin Churches. But the union quickly fell apart after the Greek delegation returned home. What went wrong? Was the union doomed from the start? Did one or both sides misconceive the enterprise? After all, in theology one cannot achieve agreement by simply splitting the difference. View videos >>
"Love-Sickness, Melancholy, and Nostalgia in Early Modern Europe"
Friday-Saturday, March 14-15, 2008
One who loves in excess, or whose love is unrequited, falls ill. The symptoms are those described by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales (“The Knight’s Tale”, vv. 503-18). As in Arcite’s case, the unhappy lover runs the risk of descending into madness, which in turn may lead to death. The melancholic can expect the same prognosis. If left untreated, the lover languishes, loses appetite, is beset by fever and finally, having fallen pray to delirium, dies. One also must be wary of nostalgia. Albrecht von Haller, writing on the topic for the Dictionnaires des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, notes: “I have come across this disease many times; thus I can speak confidently on the subject. It consists of a melancholy caused by the intense desire to see our loved ones again, and by the tedium of living among foreigners whom we love not, and who lack the affection towards us that we felt within our families.” Lovesickness, melancholy and nostalgia share many traits in common, then indeed, through the course of history these ideas have often overlapped, and this ambiguity persists today, since in everyday speech these terms are almost interchangeable. This mixing and matching should come as no surprise. Literature plays a unique role in this process of distortion and reassignment of meaning. In the case of these three ideas, in particular, men of letters have shown an indefatigable propensity to explore their boundaries, to bring their reciprocal relationships to light and, most importantly, to ponder their relevance in the creation of a work of art. View pictures >>
Tenebrae: Theme & Variations
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Lenten Liturgy, Inheritance, Music & Dramaturgy
A UCLA Sounds concert featuring the noted Los Angeles ensemble Vox Profundis. This year in the calendar of the Western church tradition, Holy Week occurs during Exam Week at UCLA. Please join us as we examine the early roots of the Tenebrae service and other Lenten observances, from Ash Wednesday through the Triduum. Our guest artists Vox Profundis will lead us through the contemplation of dramatic expressions of ancient ritual reinvented and reinterpreted in music of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond. View pictures >>
Annual Will & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Professor Anthony Grafton (Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University) discusses “The Rise and Fall of an Early Modern Discipline: Biblical Chronology from Kepler to Ussher.” Chronology, the discipline that reconstructs past calendars and dates past events, is now of interest to few western scholars. In the early modern period, however, it fascinated great philologists like Joseph Scaliger and great scientists like Johannes Kepler. An interdisciplinary study that involved both astronomy and philology, chronology promised to connect the narratives in the Bible with the history of the Greeks and Romans. In the course of the seventeenth century, it became clear that this promise would not be kept, and this lecture will tell the story of that dramatic failure. View pictures >>
