William & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lectures
Professor William Matthews, a member of UCLA’s English Department faculty and the Center’s second Director (1970–72), was an authority on the life and writings of the seventeenth-century British wit and diarist Samuel Pepys. With the assistance of his wife Lois, Matthews and his co-editor Robert Latham produced the definitive edition (eleven volumes) of Pepys’s works, which was published incrementally between 1971 and 1983. The Matthewses’ will, which endows the Center’s annual lecture and also a festive dinner, specifies that the event should be scheduled to coincide with Pepys’s own annual celebration commemorating surgery he endured on March 26, 1658.
Upcoming Events
Past Events
March 2, 2026
Molly Warsh (University of Pittsburgh)
“Breedlings” and the “most sad Fenns”: Perceptions of Untameable Places and People in Samuel Pepys’s England
April 1, 2025
Carla Pestana (UCLA)
“Striving for Expertise”
February 29, 2024
S. E. Kile (University of Michigan)
“Was the World Early Modern? Telescopes, Surgery, and Print Media in China, ca. 1658”
February 20, 2020
Angela McShane (Wellcome Collection; University of Warwick)
“Dross? Dunghills? Or Musical Treasures? Rethinking Collectors and Collections of Seventeenth-Century Pop Songs”
April 19, 2018
Kate Loveman (University of Leicester)
“Secrecy, Scheming, and Samuel Pepys’ Diary”
April 17, 2017
Efraín Kristal (UCLA)
“Fictional Knights, Literary Translators, and Araucanian Heroes; or, the Emergence of the Spanish Historical Epic”
April 7, 2016
Henry Ansgar Kelly (UCLA)
“Satan’s Biography, from Beginnings to Pepys’s London”
May 11, 2015
Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA)
“Shaman of Reincarnation: Pythagoras in the Early Renaissance”
March 12, 2014
Ardis Butterfield (Yale University)
“Why Medieval Lyric?”
March 7, 2013
Richard W. Unger (University of British Columbia)
“Beer for Breakfast, or, Bad Times for Brewing in Pepys’ Day”
February 2, 2012
James Hankins (Harvard University)
“The Study of Renaissance Latin Literature: Its Past and Its Prospects”
May 10, 2011
Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University)
“The Hand of God and the Hand of the Scribe: Craft and Collaboration at the Abbey of Arnstein”
February 26, 2010
Stephen Orgel (Stanford University)
“Real Places in Imaginary Spaces”
April 30, 2009
Peter King (University of Toronto)
“Cold Comfort: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in the Middle Ages”
March 20, 2008
Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)
“The Formation of an Early Modern Discipline: Biblical Chronology from Kepler to Ussher”
May 14, 2007
Caroline Barron (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“Marginals in Medieval London”
May 17, 2006
Jill Kraye (Warburg Institute)
“From Petrarch to Rubens”
May 18, 2005
Eckhard Kessler (University of Munich)
“The Grammatical Roots of Modern Science”
April 7, 2004
Ramon Mujica (Universidad Mayor de San Marcos)
“Medieval and Renaissance Survivals in the Baroque Art of Viceregal Peru”
April 2, 2003
Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA)
“The Latin Lion and Three German Pussy Cats”
November 28, 2001
Max Novak (UCLA)
“Pepys’s Flirtation with Libertinism and that ‘Virgin Throng’”
November 29, 2000
Norman Thrower (UCLA)
“Pepys and the Royal Navy”
December 2, 1999
Margaret Rosenthal (USC)
“Veronica Franco in Hollywood: A Discussion of the Film Dangerous Beauty”
December 3, 1998
Teofilo Ruiz (UCLA)
“Royal Eateries, Festivals, Carnival, and Power in Late Medieval Spain”
December 2, 1997
Terence Cave (Oxford University and CMRS Visiting Professor)
“Notes Toward a Philological History of the Self”
March 5, 1997
Lina Bolzoni (University of Pisa and CMRS Visiting Professor)
“The Play of Memory Between Notes and Images”
June 5, 1996
Roberto Rusconi (Università degli Studi, L’Aquila)
“The Prophecies of Christopher Columbus”
December 6, 1995
Ursula Schaefer (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)
“Medieval Studies Yesterday and Today”
May 24, 1995
David Dumville (Cambridge University and CMRS Visiting Professor)
“An Invitation to a Medieval Culture and Its Self-Images”
May 18, 1994
Linda Siedel (University of Chicago)
“Remembering the Past: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and Romanesque Autun”
November 30, 1994
Mary Carruthers (New York University)
“Memory and Invention in the Middle Ages”
April 28, 1993
Don Harrán (Hebrew University)
“Madama Europa, Famed Jewish Singer in Late Renaissance Mantua”
December 2, 1992
P. E. H. Hair (University of Liverpool and CMRS Visiting Professor)
“‘Such as violently invade’: Afro-European Confrontation and Co-Existence”
March 21, 1991
Samuel Edgerton (CMRS Visiting Professor)
“A New ‘Perspective’ on the St. Francis Cycle at Assisi”
December 6, 1990
John Hale (CMRS Visiting Professor)
“Maps and War in the Renaissance”
November 22, 1988
Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani (University of Lausanne)
“Prolonging Life, Senescence, and the Papal Court of the Thirteenth Century”