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Calendar
“Processing Gender in Law and Other Literatures” This symposium, organized by Professors Karen Cunningham and Lowell Gallagher (both of the English Department, UCLA) will examine how gender is inflected through encounters with legal processes in early modernity. It will bring together a range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory, and early modern literatures. Encouraging dialogue across and among these fields, the conference will consider such topics as sovereignty, including women’s political writings; children in legal discourse; rape; sodomy; and slander. Among the figures to be discussed are Helen of Troy, Mary Queen of Scots, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean Bodin. Participants will include Professors Cyndia Clegg (Pepperdine), Mario DiGangi (CUNY), Elizabeth Fowler (University of Virginia), Graham Hammill (University of Notre Dame), Laurie Maguire (Magdalen College, Oxford), Julie Stone Peters (Columbia), Maureen Quilligan (Duke), and Mihoko Suzuki (University of Miami). The complete conference program (PDF 7.5MB) is available at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/processing_gender_program.pdf.
CMRS Lecture, “Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence” Monday, May 5, 2008 Professor Dale Kent (UC Riverside) considers a question that pre-occupied Renaissance Florentines, as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Could true friendship exist within the framework of instrumental friendship or patronage, upon which most men of this era depended for protection and support? Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern pre-occupations with disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, Kent explores aspects of love and friendship emphasized in fifteenth century discussions of their meaning, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Galileo: Scientific Disputation as Courtly Performance” With Professor Mario Biagioli (History, Harvard University). The scandalous end-game of Galileo’s condemnation by his church played itself out not in disputation but before a tribunal with exchanges of written documents. Earlier in his career, however, when the Starry Messenger of 1610 made Galileo a celebrity, fame won him a more visible place at the Medici court in Tuscany, and this new role soon found him disputing with a philosopher about Jupiter’s newly discovered moons. Treated by the Grand Duke like a patrician, Galileo had nonetheless entered a world where learned debates on science and medicine were often staged as entertainments for princes and courtiers. He soon saw the dangers lurking in facile rejoinders to witty questions about sensitive topics. Even after Galileo ceased to perform at court for his Medici patrons, the rules and conventions of courtly disputing still shaped the immortal literary expressions of his science.
Seventeenth History of the Book Lecture: “ ‘A notable and famous librarie in the Archbishop of Canterburies house’: John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft, and the Foundation of Lambeth Palace Library” The second History of the Book Lecture for this academic year is presented by Professor James Carley (York University). Much has been written about the collection bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1575), and the library set up in Oxford by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602, but the equally impressive library established at Lambeth Palace by Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1610) has not received the same attention. By the terms of his will, Bancroft bequeathed his collection—more than 470 manuscripts and almost 5,600 printed books—‘unto my successors and to the Arch-Bishops of Canterbury successively for ever’ and he made very strict conditions for its preservation. Under his successor George Abbot a catalogue was ‘accurately and exquisitely’ produced, King James himself being directly involved. In spite of various vicissitudes, including a direct hit to the Palace in the second World War, the collection remains virtually intact, many of the books in their original bindings. In this talk, Professor Carley will discuss the highly revealing preface to the 1612 catalogue, describe the original layout of the library, examine Bancroft’s sources—many of his books came from his predecessor John Whitgift—and look at representative examples. As the eighteenth-century antiquary John Bagford observed, it was, and is, a ‘well furnisht library’, full of unexpected treasures.
Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, “Female Paths to Holiness in Coptic Egypt” A lecture by Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Heike Behlmer (Macquairie University); co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History. A lecture by Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Heike Behlmer (Macquairie University); co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History. Christian literature, written in Coptic from Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt, has transmitted a number of lives of female saints, especially martyrs and ascetics from the 4th through the 6th centuries. In addition to giving an overview of this literature, the talk will focus on a second ‘female paths to holiness,’ namely the encounter of women with the protagonist in the (far more numerous) lives of the male saints. Dr. Behlmer studied Egyptology, Coptic Studies and the Ancient Near East at Göttingen University. Her dissertation, published in 1996, edited, translated and analysed a sermon by the abbot Shenoute, the foremost writer in Coptic, from a papyrus manuscript preserved in the Egyptian Museum, Turin, Italy. From 1995 to 2004 she was Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Coptic Studies at Göttingen University, in 2003/2004 Visiting Professor of Coptic Studies at Munich University. She joined Macquarie University in Sydney Australia in late 2004 to develop the new online M.A. program in Coptic Studies.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: Disputing What Hell Is” With Professors David Riggs (Stanford University), Michael J.B. Allen (UCLA), Debora Shuger (UCLA). One of the masterworks of the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus leaves its audience with an unforgettable picture of the heroic individual struggling against moral rules, religious constraints and academic conventions which were still stronger than any single person, however daring and ambitious. The low-born Faustus uses his learning, including mastery of the technique of disputation, to climb to fame and power. Dissatisfied with the ordinary rewards of success, Faustus turns to magic and overcomes time itself. The play becomes a psychomachia, a spiritual battle, between forces like the Good and Bad Angels of the play, which turns into a disputation about knowledge and the nature of hell itself. Readings available.
Annual Shakespeare Symposium "Shakespeare's Characters" organized by Professor Bruce Smith (USC). Download the complete program at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/shakespeare_2008.pdf.
CANCELLED!! CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Epilogue: Heidegger, Cassirer and the Fracturing of Modern Western Philosophy” With Professor Michael Friedman (Stanford University). After he had published Being and Time (1927) but before he joined the Nazi party and became Rector of Freiburg (1933), Martin Heidegger met Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929 to debate the future of philosophy after Kant. Cassirer, the first Jewish rector of any German university, was better known than Heidegger at the time, not so much for his recently completed Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as for two other accomplishments: Neo-Kantian responses to such new scientific problems as relativity; and major contributions to the history of philosophy. Observers judged Heidegger the winner of the Davos disputation, but Cassirer did not lose the attention of subsequent philosophical generations just by losing to Heidegger, the problematic patriarch of what Anglo-American philosophers call ‘continental’ philosophy – a name for what they often ignore. Although the prophets of Anglo-American analytic philosophy were Germans educated, like Cassirer, as Neo-Kantians, they largely repudiated Cassirer’s preoccupation with the past and thereby lost touch with his thinking, which was well embedded in history.
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture: “The Son of God in Jewish Mysticism” Faculty/student seminar by Professor Moshe Idel (Hebrew University), “The Son of God in Jewish Mysticism.” Presented by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies; co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture, "Death by Effigy: The Power of Images and the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century" Lecture by Professor Luis Corteguera (University of Kansas), sponsored by the UCLA Department of Art History and the UCLA Department of History.
California Medieval History Seminar 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.
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University of California, Los Angeles
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Box 951485, 302 Royce Hall Los Angeles CA 90095-1485 310-825-1880 | cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu | www.cmrs.ucla.edu
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