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| HOME > Calendar & Programs > Calendar October 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Calendar
"The Saga of Egill, Viking Skald and Psychopath: Tradition and Text" A lecture by Professor Michael Chesnutt (The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen) cosponsored by CMRS and the Department of Scandinavian.
“Medieval Manuscripts—Their Makers and Users: A Conference in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse” The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with the assistance of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Young Research Library at UCLA, announces a three-day conference to honor the careers and scholarship of Richard and Mary Rouse. Sessions will be held at each of the participating institutions: on Friday, October 5 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, on Saturday, October 6 at UCLA, and on Sunday, October 7 at the Huntington Library. Lectures at the conference will reflect the remarkable range and impact of the Rouses’ work: paleography, codicology, manuscript production and decoration, the transmission of the classical tradition, and the formation of libraries. Among those libraries, medieval to modern, the conference celebrates the gift of the Rouses’ own manuscript collection to the Department of Special Collections at UCLA. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2007 2:30 PM - Making the Decorated Book 5:00 Reception SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2007 8:30am - Registration, coffee, pastries 9:00 - Books in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy 10:30 - Break 10:45 - The Richard and Mary Rouse Collection of Medieval Manuscripts 1:00 - Buffet lunch, on terrace outside Fowler Museum, UCLA 2:30 - Book Production and Use in Thirteenth-Century Paris 4:30 - Break 4:45 - Making and Using Books in France and Germany: Two Case Studies 6:30 - Reception, Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2007 10:00am - Secular Narrative: Text, Image, Afterlife 12:30 - Concluding Remarks A PDF version of the complete program (159kb) can be viewed online at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/rouse_conf_program.pdf.
CMRS Faculty Roundtable: “Chaucer and Numerical Design: A Case of Increasing Commitment” Professor Edward Condren (English, UCLA) discusses “Chaucer and Numerical Design: A Case of Increasing Commitment.” Although Chaucer has long been thought a "self-educated" man, thoroughly familiar with many of the learned texts of his day, there is no evidence of his formal education in the higher learning. Close scrutiny of his early dream visions suggests, however, that he had been experimenting with quadrivial mathematics. In Book of the Duchess the Golden Proportion privileges an informal compositional style over the formulaic one Chaucer inherited from his French precursors, and Parliament of Fowls lays before us the whole of proportional mathematics to affirm what Cicero presents in the Dream of Scipio which Fowls summarizes, the relation among all created things. The Troilus and Criseyde, a poem of the 1380s that Chaucer perhaps considered his greatest single work, gives pointed attention to a mathematical paradox as the most important interpretive guide to the poem's meaning. Thereafter, in his remaining career during the 1390s, while collecting earlier works and composing new ones for the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer seems to have reduced the mathematical content of his designs to mere spatial construction, arrangements that could be noticed by any attentive reader, for example, those at a Wednesday afternoon brown-bag lunch.
CMRS Open House The Center invites faculty and students with an interest in Medieval and Renaissance Studies to attend an open house marking the beginning of the new academic year. Meet the Center’s staff and learn about CMRS programs, awards, and fellowships. Drop by and see us!
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Spices and the Medieval Idea of the Exotic” Spices were wildly popular in medieval Europe, especially as trade increased and tastes for luxury products imported from Asia developed. Medieval cuisine was perfumed with the flavor of spices, but things such as pepper, ginger, musk, and ambergris were also used as medicines and perfumes. The vogue for spices was encouraged by the image of Asia as exotic, mysterious, wealthy, and even sacred. This lecture by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Paul Freedman (Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University) will discuss how the allure of the East enhanced the demand for spices and the European hunger to find out where they came from.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Disputation: Greek Roots” With Professors David Blank (Classics, UCLA), Catherine Atherton (Classics, UCLA), and Sean Kelsey (Classics, UCLA). The sophist wants to win by an art of speaking, the philosopher wants to find truth by an art of questioning. This is a philosopher’s version, at any rate, of the ancient struggle between philosophy and rhetoric, recorded by Plato in the Gorgias, the dialogue in which Socrates confronts the famous sophist of that name. Already in antiquity, both kinds of discourse, rhetorical and philosophical, were governed by rules that became formal and elaborate and then shaped the later development of disputation. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html. 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 Sawyer Seminar, “Qu’ranic Roots: Jadal and Disputation in Islam” With Professors Tony Street (Divinity, Cambridge), and Hossein Ziai (NELC, UCLA). Public disputation played a central role in natural theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh) in the Islamic world. The verb jadala (to dispute or argue) is common in the Qu’ran, and various derivatives of the verb have been used to cover a range of disputational forms, from the structure of Aristotle’s Topics to Al-Jazeera’s presentation of the news. A long tradition of works called Kitab al-Jadal emerged not only within the philosophical tradition (an early work by al-Farabi, for example) but also within the legal tradition (a text by al-Hanafi, for instance). Many of these Arabic works give rules for public disputation. A Latin treatise On the Way of Opposing and Responding that purports to be a translation of a Kitab al-Jadal is probably a thirteenth century forgery, but the forgery itself indicates the prestige of the Arabic disputational tradition in Latin Christendom. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings. 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 Faculty Roundtable Professor Mortimer Chambers (History, UCLA) discusses Lorenzo Valla's Latin translation of Thucydides. The first translation of the Greek text of Thucydides, into Latin, was the work of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla from 1448 to 1452. Various scholars published their own editions of Valla's Latin text, but in doing so they changed his words many times. This talk concerns the history of Valla's text, which will soon be published in a photographic facsimile by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with an introduction by Professor Chambers.
CMRS DVS Lecture: “Interrogating an Erotic Picture: Beneath the Surface of the Concert Champêtre” Professor Jaynie Anderson (Herald Chair of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne) will investigate the critical reception of the Concert Champêtre, a painting which has been attributed to Giorgione and Titian. Some new evidence from the recent scientific analysis of the under drawing by means of infrared analysis will be brought to bear on the problem.
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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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