Professor Joel Kaye will deliver the third lecture in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.
Abstract: Virtually every discourse in the medieval period was constructed around the ideal of balance. In my recent book, A History of Balance, 1250-1375, published this past spring by Cambridge Press, I show that preoccupations with balance lay at the core of medieval economic thought, medical theory, political thought, and natural philosophy, but one could apply the same analytic focus on balance to a host of other disciplines. And yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the concern with balance (or perhaps because of its utter ubiquity), it was almost never the subject of discussion in itself in the medieval period. For this reason modern historians, too, have failed both to recognize balance as a subject crucial to the history of ideas, or to imagine it as having a history – as changing in form over historical time. In my presentation, I will argue that an analysis of the forms of balance that were assumed and applied in the medieval period – and, in particular, an analysis of the change in the modeling of balance that occurred between 1280 and 1360 - are crucial both to the opening up of striking new vistas of imaginative and speculative possibility within scholasticism and to the scholarly comprehension of this many-faceted intellectual development.
Bio: Joel Kaye is professor in the department of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. His scholarly interests center on medieval intellectual history, with special interests in the history of science and the history of economic and political thought. His research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the NSF, and the NEH. Professor Kaye's book Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge UP, 1998), earned the 2002 John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America; his article "The Impact of Money on the Development of Fourteenth-Century Scientific Thought," won the 1990 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize of the Medieval Academy, reserved for first-time authors in medieval studies. In spring of 2014, Cambridge Press published his new book, A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought, the product of many years of research and writing.
