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| HOME > Calendar & Programs > Calendar February 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Calendar
Annual E.A. Moody Medieval Philosophy Workshop This year’s workshop, coordinated by Professor Calvin Normore (Philosophy, UCLA), will consider the topic “Arguments, Disputations and Obligationes: Medieval Theories.” The workshop is sponsored by the UCLA Department of Philosophy, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the UCLA College of Letters and Science. Friday, February 1, in Dodd Hall 399 Saturday, February 2, in Royce Hall 306 Visit the conference website at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/phil/Lectures/Moody.htm
Renaissance Conference of Southern California 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” 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. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html#condemnations_1277. You will need to contact CMRS for the user name and password to access the files. Call 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.
CMRS Annual Hammer Foundation Lecture: “Images and Rhythms in the Middle Ages” 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.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the Good Parliament of 1376” 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. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html#parliament_fowls. You will need to contact CMRS for the user name and password to access the files. Call 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Breaking Expectations: Some Idiosyncratic Donor Compositions in Byzantine Art” 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 approaches to the unconventional in Byzantine Art.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Daring to Write Against Philosophers: The Prostitute as Disputant” With Professor Karen Sullivan (Bard College). In the opening years of the fifteenth century, a group of Parisian literati engaged in what is thought to have been the first debate in French literature. Christine de Pizan, the first professional woman writer, inveighed against Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, the most popular literary work in French of the late Middle Ages. As partisans of the romance sprang to its defense, the debate came to involve figures from the royal court, the chancellery, and the university. If this debate remains of interest today, it is both because of what it shows us about practices of reading and discussing vernacular literature in the late Middle Ages and because of what it suggests about the interactions of men and women in disputations of this time. In trying to understand Christine's role in this debate, her interlocutors turned back to the image of the ancient Greek hetairia, or courtesan, as she was represented in ancient Roman writings. What happens when (to quote these interlocutors) a woman, like the French writer Christine or the Greek courtesan Leontium, “dares to write against a philosopher?” What was the perceived link between a woman's entry into the public intellectual sphere, as a disputant, and her entry into a public sexual sphere, as a prostitute? To what extent was the quarrel about The Romance of the Rose (which Christine takes to task for its representation of women) inevitably a quarrel about the quarrel itself (and a woman's role in it)? A consideration of what happens to disputation when a woman engages in it may ultimately shed light upon the functioning of disputation in general. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html#masc_dispute. You will need to contact CMRS for the user name and password to access the files. Call 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Vikings: Raiders or Traders?” 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.
The Shakespeare Moot Court 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.
Shakespeare as the Law: A Moot Court Workshop A workshop by Professors Paul Yachnin (English, McGill) and Desmond Manderson (Law, McGill).
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Pico’s 900 Theses: Disputation Unbounded” 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. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html#pico. You will need to contact CMRS for the user name and password to access the files. Call 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.
CMRS Roundtable: “Bernard of Clairvaux and the Problem of Postmortem Charisma” 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. Professor C. Stephen Jaeger's (Professor emeritus, Medieval Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign) 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, chivalry and courtly love, and the "Renaissance of the twelfth century".
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Freedom of Religion in Islam” 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 Study) 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.
Twelfth Annual Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern Slavic Studies 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.
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