Each year, the Center hosts a series of lectures by visiting scholars, occasionally organized around a particular theme, with an annual "public" lecture in the spring that is aimed towards a general audience. Speakers represent a broad range of academic fields of study and historical periods.
Lectures recordings are posted within a week of the lecture itself. Please see the list of available recordings below, organized by year and event type. To see a list of our past, current, or future lectures, please see our CMRS Lecture Series Event page.
With the upcoming discontinuation of iTunes U, we are in the process of migrating our materials. Please bear with us as we work through this process!
2020-2021 Lecture Series | 2020-2021 Other Events | 2019-2020 CMRS Lecture Series | 2018 - 2019 CMRS Lecture Series | 2017-2018 CMRS Lecture Series | 2016-17 CMRS Lecture Series | 2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series | 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
2020 - 2021 Lecture Series
"The Wood Age: A Thought Experiment in Past, Present and Future Human Ecologies"
Max Adams (Independent Scholar)
March 19, 2021
Mediasite link: https://mediasite.osu.edu/Mediasite/Play/e4a75ff2dd1a483cb3af2fd554f10cfe1d
Wood has been the primary technological material for almost all of human history. But compared to ceramics, stone and metals it is barely visible to archaeologists. A limited range of surviving artefacts, backed by careful use of ethnographic study, allow us to posit key developments in human/wood ecologies. But to construct a coherent narrative of what one might call the Long Wood Age, to render visible that which is invisible, requires creativity in physical and intellectual experimentation. In this paper Max Adams, who is both an archaeologist and a woodsman, explores some lines of enquiry.
Bio: Adams is a critically-acclaimed author and biographer, an archaeologist, traveller and writing coach. His journeys through the landscapes of the past and the present, of human geography, music, art and culture are a continuing source of inspiration in his writing. Born in 1961 in London, he was educated at the University of York, where he read archaeology. After a professional career which included the notorious excavations at Christchurch Spitalfields, and several years as Director of Archaeological Services at Durham University, Max went to live in a 40-acre woodland in County Durham for three years. Max continues to manage woodland, and still lives on the north-west edge of County Durham, in a slightly more conventional dwelling. Max is also a musician, playing drums, harmonicas, Appalachian dulcimer and low-key whistle.
"Experimental Archaeology: Making, Understanding, Storytelling"
Brendan O'Neill and Aidan O'Sullivan (University College Dublin)
November 13, 2020
Mediasite link: https://mediasite.osu.edu/Mediasite/Play/b205435dabe14149aaa01af407e1d0191d
Experimental archaeology can be defined as the (re)construction of past buildings, technologies, environmental contexts, and things, based on archaeological evidence, and their use, testing and recording as analogies, to create a better understanding of people's lives in the past, and their relationships with buildings, things and material culture. Experimental archaeology has been a part of the archaeological discipline since its origins, the earliest antiquarians often carrying out practical experiments with ancient tools to discern their use. It boomed again in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the interest in archaeology in seeking scientific, replicable results to understand past technologies. In recent years, some have wondered if it is possible to have an experimental archaeology that is both ‘knowledge-focused’ and ‘experience-oriented’, and if we can give more weight to experience, or the sensory and emotional aspects of how people engage with material culture? Can we think about the “phenomenology of objects, the ‘feel of things’, the experience of buildings? This lecture will explore the research projects, undergraduate and graduate teaching, and public engagement activities of a university facility for experimental archaeology at University College Dublin. Through case studies of our own reconstruction of early medieval buildings, objects and technologies, we will investigate the many different ways that "making" helps with "understanding", and how "storytelling" about the past can engage with both archaeological and historical evidence, but also with our own experiences.
Bios: Brendan O'Neill is an Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Archaeology. He was appointed in the summer of 2018 to develop and enhance teaching and research in Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture. He is a module coordinator on undergraduate and graduate level Experimental Archaeology modules as well as a Masters level module exploring Material Culture. Added to these he contributes to a number of other modules with individual formal lectures, workshops and hands-on, practical content. His teaching approach is heavily influenced by Active/Experiential Learning techniques, providing students with well rooted, deep learning on a range of topics. He is also very much focused on providing different and dynamic learning environments, providing a wide range of access points to education for students. Since 2013 he has been the Deputy Director of UCD's Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture (CEAMC). In this role he is responsible for coordinating the strategy and day-to-day running of CEAMC, generating and disseminating research and managing its outreach activities. He is also responsible for site space management, Health and Safety and Material procurement.
Aidan O'Sullivan is a Professor in UCD School of Archaeology. He was appointed to UCD as a College Lecturer in September 2000, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005 and to an Associate Professorship in 2014. He has been Head of UCD School of Archaeology (2012/2013) and is currently and has been previously Deputy Head of School (2011-2014, 2016-2019). He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) in 2017, and is a Member of the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland (MIAI), and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA), London. Academic awards include an IRCHSS Senior Research Scholarship in 2002-2003, a UCD President's Research Fellowship in 2004-2005 and he was an invited Visiting Professor at Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) at the University of Rennes I, France in May 2010. His research is focused on three principal areas: early medieval Ireland in its northwest European context, wetland archaeology and environments across the world, and experimental archaeology and material culture.
"Reconstructing the Lost Mendicant Houses of Medieval Oxford"
Jim Knowles (North Carolina State)
October 23, 2020
The Oxford Friars Project (2010-2014) attempted to digitally reconstruct the architectural history of the lost Franciscan and Dominican foundations of medieval Oxford. Using data from archaeological surveys of the two sites carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, the project built low-budget conceptual models of the two friaries and created a short animated film which placed those models in the context of English anti-fraternal literature – including Chaucer, Langland, and Wycliffite materials. But because the creation of the project overlapped with the emergence of the field of Digital Humanities – with its data-driven and empirical methodologies that were often alien to literary studies – the reception of the Oxford Friars Project among scholars in medieval studies was found to be interestingly bifurcated. This paper will provide an overview of the project and its reception, exploring how the perceived split between “digital” and “traditional” methods has potential ramifications for the future of teaching and research at the intersections of literary study, architectural history, and archaeology.
"How to Build a Time Machine: 3d Modeling and Video Games as Portals into Medieval and Early Modern Minds"
Anthony Masinton (Independent Scholar)
October 23, 2020
Digital reconstruction of medieval and early modern spaces using 3d modeling and video game technologies offers unexpected and valuable glimpses into not only the material reality of the past, but also to its lived experience. The process of reconstruction itself is a powerful research method in its own right because it draws together archaeological, historical, textual, and immaterial evidence into a unified framework for envisioning and re-envisioning the past. We will begin in the late 11th century crypt of Worcester Cathedral, with St Wulfstan, pondering the play of light and dark in the crypt's forest of columns. We will then move through seven centuries of lay devotion as it reshapes a parish church. We will walk with Erasmus through Canterbury Cathedral on the eve of the Reformation before whitewashing the mural paintings in Holy Trinity Chapel, in Stratford-upon-Avon, alongside Shakespeare's father. Finally, we will act as the architects of a great cathedral using a playful, interactive approach designed to encourage present-day scholars of the medieval past to engage creatively with their research.
"Mark but This Fungi: Legibility, Interdisciplinarity, and Labor"
Joshua Calhoun (University of Wisconsin- Madison)
October 3, 2020
Mediasite link (coming soon)
How do we read the other forms of life that exist on and within a book—not just the metaphorical life forms such as that of the eponymous bloodsucking insect in John Donne’s “The Flea,” but also the material, microbial forms that persist on the page? This talk argues for the value of exploring book microbiomes and of making them more legible, but it also attends to the real, experiential, disciplinary challenges of that task. The work of interdisciplinary collaboration, like the work of close reading book fungi, is translational, so the latter part of this talk attends to the interpersonal and intellectual joys of collaborative scholarship as well as to the pitfalls and potential frustrations of such work.
Bio: Joshua Calhoun, Associate Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializes in Shakespeare, 16th- & 17th-century poetry, the history of media, and the environmental humanities. His work has been published in in PMLA, Shakespeare Studies, and Environmental Philosophy. His first book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (UPenn Press, 2020), explores the ecopoetic interplay between literary ideas and the physical forms they are made to take as paper texts. Calhoun is also the co-founder of Holding History, a mentorship-driven public engagement project that involves hands-on training in book making and archival research.
2020 - 2021 Other Events
"The Problematic Privilege of Interpreting the Bard"Iqbal Khan (Independent Scholar)
February 26,2021
Iqbal Khan’s lecture on “The Problematic Privilege of Interpreting the Bard" will discuss the constellation of ideas around Shakespeare and the construction of systems of power—and the construction of identity. “I don’t see any ‘agenda’ here on the part of the ‘Bard’,” Khan says, “but a series of provocations and interrogations.” In his lecture, Khan will draw on his decades of experience in directing Shakespeare—and theatrical afterlives of Shakespeare’s work—in venues as diverse as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, Box Clever, and the Birmingham Opera Company. He will discuss his decisions around interpretation, storytelling, working with actors, and working with and for audiences.
Bio: Iqbal Khan is a freelance Theatre Director, with productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company: Tartuffe, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and Much Ado About Nothing. Other work includes Educating Rita, Oleanna, Rafta Rafta, Perfect Days & Beautiful Thing (Bolton Octagon); The Wildman of the West Indies (Donizetti Opera for ETO); Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Globe); Snookered (Tamasha/Oldham Coliseum/Bush/UK tour): A Christmas Carol, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice (Box Clever); The Importance of Being Earnest: The Musical (Riverside Studios); The Killing of Sister George (West End); Broken Glass (Tricycle/West End); East is East (Birmingham Rep); A Slight Ache & Landscape (National Theatre); Treemonisha (Pegasus Opera); The Last Photograph (Edinburgh Festival); Otello (Birmingham Opera Company); Simply Cinderella (Curve); Too Close to Home (Lyric Hammersmith/Library Theatre); Madama Butterfly (Lyric Hammersmith/Minack). Iqbal has worked extensively in Drama Schools including the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD), the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and BSD. He has directed in Paris, Japan, the UK, and held residencies and delivered lectures at institutions including Michigan State University and Lafayette College. He was the Michael Douglas Visiting Artist last year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Iqbal was also recently made an Honorary Doctor of Arts at De Montfort University.
2019 - 2020 Lecture Series
"Sidestepping: Race, Blackface, and the History of Morris Dance Scholarship"
Seeta Chaganti (UC Davis)
September 13, 2019
Studying early dance means recognizing, first, how slim its evidence can be; and second, how to address that paucity: namely, we often experiment with various arenas of critical theory in order to find innovative ways to characterize practices that leave few conventional archival traces. Medieval morris dance crystallizes this dynamic: it is archivally scarce but rich with possibilities for interpreting its deep history through lenses of contemporary theory pertaining to both performance and race.
This talk will argue that by revealing racist perspectives within the late Middle Ages, morris dance also illuminates new ways to understand and combat modern racism. Throughout the history of its study, the evidence attached to morris has by and large not encouraged critics to analogize the blackface associated with this dance to the kind of dehumanizing impersonation we would condemn in, for instance, American minstrelsy. Morris blackface, in other words, rarely appears intentionally racist to scholars. Perhaps, however, the murkiness of this ancient dance tradition renders just visible what Claire Sponsler suggests are its racial elements while conveniently obscuring what I contend are its racist elements. I will show how a collaboration between dance theory and critical race theory can expose in morris the racism of the premodern period. Such an approach, informed by critical race and performance studies, simultaneously reveals our complicity as scholars of early dance in preserving a false racial innocence for both ourselves and the dance. For even when, I ultimately suggest, we acknowledge the racialized elements of morris dance, we continue to perpetuate antiblackness by failing to recognize the agency and perspectives of those whom the dance historically impersonated.
2019 - 2020 Other Events
2018 - 19 Lecture Series
"The Holy Spirit in the Form of a Woman: Apocalypse, Universal Salvation, and a Mysterious Fresco of the Thirteenth Century"
Nancy Caciola (UC San Diego)
November 9, 2019
In 1300 an inquisitorial inquiry was held in the city of Milan. The target was a group of individuals united in devotion to a woman who had died nearly two decades earlier. Her name was Guglielma, and many had become convinced that she was the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. They believed that Guglielma would resurrect on the feast of Pentecost in 1300; that she would initiate a new age of history and set a woman upon the papal throne; and that through her all human beings would be redeemed, including Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and heretics. My paper examines the group’s theology–particularly the notion of universal salvation–through the detailed analysis of a little-known sinopia (an under-sketch for a fresco) depicting a woman as part of a Trinity. I discovered this artwork in a suburban Milanese abbey and am the first to connect its content to the Guglielmite group.
2018 - 2019 Other Events
Books and Their Use[r]s - Oct. 19-20, 2018
"Textual Amulets in Early Spanish Literature"
Ryan Giles
In this talk, I will examine some of the ways in which amuletic texts, such as prayers, sacred names, and magical formulas, were used in Iberian/ Spanish literarature from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. I will show how the material presence and powers ascribed to such objects and the writing inscribed on them were meaningfully evoked and cited in imaginative works, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. My talk will discuss specific examples that shed light on the relationship between textual amulets and poems, dramatic works, and novels-- in manuscripts as well as early printed books.
"The Countess of Huntingdon's Books and Networks of Users in Early Modern England"
Elizabeth Kolkovich
Despite some excellent recent work on women’s engagement with books, the history of reading is still primarily about men. Our methods have privileged written catalogs, ownership marks, and marginalia—all of which are in scarce supply for women. My paper offers new research on a little-known woman reader: Elizabeth Stanley Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1588-1633). She was a bookish woman who loved intellectual discussion, actively shaped local literary culture, and belonged to a highly literate family whose members owned and marked books. She left behind no library list or ownership marks, but scattered traces of her engaged reading emerge from her five devotional manuscripts and many letters, as well as the printed dedications and manuscript poetry that John Fletcher, John Donne, Thomas Pestell, and other male authors wrote her. As these traces indicate both what and how the Countess of Huntingdon read, her case study adds to our growing understanding of the varied ways early modern women read religious texts. The Countess of Huntingdon did not passively absorb her devotional reading; she interpreted and revised the books she read. She engaged with her books not as an isolated reader, but as an influential participant in familial and local networks of textual production and reception. As my paper argues for the value of recovering female readers using a broad range of evidence, it underscores the importance of tracing networks and communities of readers.
"Hands-On Readers of Augustine's Soliloquia in Ninth-Century Francia"
Leslie Lockett
Esoteric. Peripheral. One of the least congenial of Augustine’s works. This is how present-day scholars typically describe the Soliloquia, one of the early philosophical dialogues by Augustine of Hippo. Yet the Soliloquia had an enthusiastic readership in Francia and England in the ninth and tenth centuries, as attested by surviving manuscripts and by the translation of the text into Old English. This paper focuses on one of these manuscripts: Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. perg. 195, which originated at Laon or Soissons in the mid-ninth century. Its copy of the Soliloquia is covered with glosses, explanatory notes, and construal marks, and while some of these indicate that the Soliloquia was consulted for its philosophical content, others attest to a more surprising use, as a substrate for elementary instruction in the disciplines of the trivium. Glosses and reader-added marks in the Karlsruhe manuscript also allow us to directly witness the difficult labor of copying from a glossed exemplar. Though expert, these scribes were fallible. The Karlsruhe text of the Soliloquia preserves a number of interpolated glosses, which imply an earlier and more widespread practice of glossing the Soliloquia that is now nearly invisible in the manuscript record. Moreover, the scribes of the Karlsruhe manuscript employed a system for graphically differentiating among explanatory glosses, alternative readings, and corrections of errors, but visible breakdowns in this system illustrate precisely how glosses easily became interpolated into the main text by mistake during successive rounds of copying. The Karlsruhe manuscript thus supplies a wealth of evidence for understanding the educational utility of the Soliloquia in particular, as well as more general patterns of hands-on engagements by Carolingian scholars with a Latin philosophical text.
"Bibliothecae Obscurae and the History of Reading"
Mark Rankin
The research tools available to scholars in the history of the book and the history of reading are in many cases based upon decades-old calendars and catalogs. Although the Pollard and Redgrave Short-title catalogue of printed books (STC) and its companion, the online English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC), are reasonably comprehensive, users are tempted to overlook the plus-sign at the end of many catalog entries, and forget that it designates the existence of additional surviving copies. Even though digital technologies allow the researcher to locate multiple copies of a single work with greater ease than ever, many libraries have been slow to place their catalogs online, and some for various reasons have not begun the task. Even if the existence of a book is known, scholars may not actually consult it. Because each copy of an early printed book is distinct in terms of its provenance and the material traces of reading which it might preserve, however, these copies must be examined before scholars are to achieve anything close to a general history of the relationship between the printed book and human thought. Such a history is clearly desired, but in the early modern period, provenance and marginalia research are still in their infancy. Despite the value of several prominent studies in the history of reading, marginalia remain the great untapped category of evidence in book history research. Even scholars who seek copy-specific details in surviving fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printed books typically examine a small number of copies located at well-trodden archives. The British Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and other major repositories certainly cannot be overlooked by the scholar seeking evidence of an early printed book’s reading and use. But they represent the tip of a vast iceberg of surviving copies. Scholars will never learn what these copies can tell unless they travel to the archives where they reside. This paper will bring together a series of case-studies based upon my own experience in obscure libraries. These fascinating finds include numerous copies of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments annotated by sixteenth-century readers, a copy of Foxe turned into a Reformation scrapbook by a seventeenth-century poet, a papal presentation copy of Nicholas Sander’s De origine ac progressu schismatic anglicani that was probably never sent, and other books which offer valuable insights into how contemporary readers consumed and used early modern print. The essay’s intention is broader: to reveal the benefits to be gleaned from the use of bibliothecae obscurae as a research method. Libraries under consideration may include the now-dissolved St. Benedict’s Abbey library, Fort Augustus, Inverness-shire; the sixteenth-century Ipswich Town library, which survives intact in the headmaster’s office at Ipswich School; the library and archive of Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, which dates from the sixteenth century; and more.
2017 - 18 Lecture Series
"The Dark Age of Herodotus: Shards of a Fugitive History in Medieval Europe"
Scott Bruce, University of Colorado, Boulder
Dec. 01, 2017
"The Law and the Soul"
Jesus Rodriguez-Velasco, Columbia University
Sept. 08, 2017
This talk will explore the specific ways in which the legal discipline appropriated the science of the soul in the Mediterranean, with especial attention to al-Andalus and the university of Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries. Whereas I am interested in the Middle Ages, I think that this process of appropriation is still ongoing, and I will give some attention to contemporary legal artifacts that deal with the connection of the legal discipline and the science of the soul, including the Spanish Law of Historical Memory, and the project of Forensic Architecture.
2016 - 17 Lecture Series
"Repurposing Classical Myth and Medieval Bestiaries in Harry Potter"
John Friedman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Barbara A. Hanawalt Public Lecture, Nov. 18, 2016
"The Concept of Baroque in Literature--and the World"
Roland Greene, Stanford University
Sept. 9, 2016
Shakespeare’s Day: Popular Culture and the Deep Past 2016
"Shakespeare and the Commedia dell' Arte"
Robert Henke, Washington University in St. Louis
CMRS Public Lecture, 2015-2016 Lecture Series
Abstract:
Especially if one views the “commedia dell’arte” in its relationship to Italian scripted comedy of the day, Shakespeare thoroughly absorbed the Italian system of masks. Despite the fact that Italian professional actors, who scandalously had women actually play female roles, abruptly stopped visiting England in 1578, a professional interest in the Arte emerges in London theater of the early and mid 1590s, as Shakespeare explicitly deploys versions of Pantalone, the Dottore, the Capitano, and the Zanni in plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s interest in foolish old men, loquacious pedants, braggart soldiers, and plot-controlling servants seems to have waned in his mature comedies, but resurfaces in his tragedies, in figures such as Polonius, and in the character system of Othello. One of the more persuasive “sources” for The Tempest is the Arte subgenre of “magical pastoral”: a set of Italian scenarios representing a magician on an island populated by spirits and shepherds who causes a group of travelers to shipwreck.
"Music, Death, and 'Uncomfortable Time': William Byrd’s O that most rare breast and Shakespeare’s "Excellent Conceited Tragedy" of Romeo and Juliet"
Jeremy Smith,Professor, Music, University of Colorado at Boulder
Shakespeare’s Day Keynote Address
Abstract:
Arguably few playgoers today are aware that Act 4 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ends with musicians engaging in badinage with a clown. Treated generally as superfluous or insignificant, the Peter and the Musicians scene is now cut more often than not. Yet Shakespeare must have had some larger dramatic purpose for it in mind, as the same musicians appear as spectators in the preceding "false lamentations" scene, where key characters mistakenly mourn Juliet's putative death. Too dramatically crucial to obliterate, this section too has nonetheless been redacted heavily and roundly criticized over the years, usually for the effusive, stilted, and formalized nature of its rhetoric. From an interdisciplinary perspective this paper reexamines these scenes as well as other moments in the play that feature musical allusions. It posits that Shakespeare used the musicians and other characters he thrust unawares into the act of "false lamentation" to portray the rhetorical trope of catachresis and that his model was O that most rare breast, a polyphonic song by the Elizabethan composer William Byrd. After purportedly composing O that for the funeral of the famous military hero and English sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney, Byrd used literary methods of sequential arrangement to develop an elaborate interdisciplinary tribute to his subject in his first published collection of English texted music. It was Byrd's venture into literary structures, via the rhetorical method of eristic imitation, I argue, that drew Shakespeare toward the song as he developed his hitherto unnoticed catachrestic conceit in Act 4 scene 5.
Romeo and Juliet has long been associated with music. Byrd was the premier musician of Shakespeare's day and recent studies of Elizabethan rhetoric have been markedly interdisciplinary. This paper, nonetheless, will be the first to contend that Byrd and Shakespeare had any direct influence on one another. Shakespeare, it has long been argued, was so focused on the "lowly" popular ballad and the "lofty" theories of musica mundana that he took little interest in Byrd's specialty in "pricksong" (art song). Byrd's reputation, in turn, has long suffered from the idea that he was "unliterary." Recent studies, however, point a way out of this quagmire. Students of the so-called New Rhetoric have exposed ways in which Byrd might have approached the literature of his time that have not been considered or have been disregarded as Music and Shakespeare revisionists Joseph M. Ortiz, Erin Minear, and Andrew Mattison have opened new paths for interaction across disciplines in their findings that Shakespeare might "silence ... music" or provide "contexts that pull songs away from their musical status." From an interdisciplinary perspective gleaned from these approaches it will be shown not only that the scenes in Romeo and Juliet involving music were carefully integrated into the dramatic action, but also that they were integral to one of the play's larger purposes, which was to encourage an end to the enmity surrounding religious divisions of the time.
"Buckets of Ducats"
The Confused Greenies of Player's Patchwork Theater Company
Shakespeare’s Day Performance
Abstract:
A one-act commedia dell'arte performance
2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series
"Compost / Compositions"
Frances Dolan, University of California, Davis
2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
As part of an explosion of agricultural experimentation and innovation in seventeenth-century England, many “improvers” turned to composting as both an “ancient practice” and “newly born.” The composting practices they advocated resembled the very particular practices that characterized early modern reading, remembering, and writing. In comparing composting, commonplacing, and composition, amendment and revision, I hope to draw attention both to the importance of soil amendment in early modern English agriculture and to the ways it generated writing and modeled what writing might be. Focusing on early modern agricultural treatises, this talk will consider the compost pile as an archive, a commonplace book, an occasion of writing, and a pungent figure for assembling and ripening the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment—that is, for the work of early modernists today.
“Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from Medieval France”
E. Jane Burns, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series
"Shakespeare and the Commedia dell' Arte"
Robert Henke, Washington University in St. Louis
CMRS Public Lecture, 2015-2016 Lecture Series
Abstract:
Especially if one views the “commedia dell’arte” in its relationship to Italian scripted comedy of the day, Shakespeare thoroughly absorbed the Italian system of masks. Despite the fact that Italian professional actors, who scandalously had women actually play female roles, abruptly stopped visiting England in 1578, a professional interest in the Arte emerges in London theater of the early and mid 1590s, as Shakespeare explicitly deploys versions of Pantalone, the Dottore, the Capitano, and the Zanni in plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s interest in foolish old men, loquacious pedants, braggart soldiers, and plot-controlling servants seems to have waned in his mature comedies, but resurfaces in his tragedies, in figures such as Polonius, and in the character system of Othello. One of the more persuasive “sources” for The Tempest is the Arte subgenre of “magical pastoral”: a set of Italian scenarios representing a magician on an island populated by spirits and shepherds who causes a group of travelers to shipwreck.
2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series
“'In Cuntrey Hit is a Comune Speche': Vernacular Legal Theory in Mum and the Sothsegger [Silence and the Truthteller]”
Fiona Somerset, University of Connecticut
CMRS 2014-2015 Lecture Series
Abstract:
It is not a new insight that what is probably the early fifteenth century’s most sustained and thoughtful response to Piers Plowman, the alliterative, allegorical dream vision Mum and the Sothsegger, is also a sophisticated critique of political corruption in contemporary England. What has not yet been addressed among studies of the poem’s political allegory and use of personification, though, is the extent to which its critique hinges upon a specific medieval legal idea whose implications continue to haunt us even up to the present day: that one person may be held responsible for (and even punished for) another’s sin because he or she has consented to it by remaining silent. Crucially, the poem insists (as in my title) that this theory is common knowledge, the property of all. My current book project focuses on the history of this idea, and its deployment in allegorical poetry and rhetorical prose between the late twelfth and mid fifteenth centuries. In my paper at OSU I’ll show what this broader perspective can contribute to our reading of Mum and the Sothsegger.
“The Sites and Sounds of Early Medieval Latin Song”
Sam Barrett, Pembroke College, Cambridge
CMRS 2014-2015 Lecture Series
Abstract:
The music of early medieval Latin song has hitherto been known to only a handful of specialists. Notations survive in manuscripts from ecclesiastical centres across the Frankish kingdoms from the ninth century through to approximately the end of the eleventh, but the fragmentary written record has relegated wider appreciation to the occasional cum neumis found in the footnotes of the volumes of Monumenta Germaniae Historica and Analecta hymnica medii aevi. The difficulties involved in reconstructing melodies from mnemonic notations have also tended to obscure a body of song made up of hundreds of accentual verses (rhythmi), metrical verses by medieval authors from Eugenius III of Toledo through to Alberic of Monte Cassino, settings of late antique poetry by writers such as Boethius, Prudentius and Capella, extracts from classical authors (most notably Vergil and Horace) and computus. One of the purposes of this paper will be to outline the full extent of this song tradition, examining hints about uses and users that survive in manuscripts associated for the most part with large abbeys and cathedrals. A second aim will be to examine prevailing models of song transmission, challenging universal theories proposed for rhythmi in particular by Karl Strecker and Dag Norberg, emphasising instead genealogies specific to individual songs and the role played by a number of different centres in shaping the tradition. A third aim will be to explore the limits of reconstruction, seeking in the absence of full information about melodic contents to establish how much can be recovered from the various types notational strategies adopted, and how much can be identified about modes of setting associated with particular verse forms. In seeking to summarize various aspects of what appears to have been a continuous song tradition strectching from novices through to notaries, abbots, bishops, and even Kings, it will finally be suggested that the early medieval Latin song tradition forms a significant precusor to the later flowering of vernacular song in medieval courts.
“The Polemics and Projects of Ramon Martí O.P.: Debating the Legacy of Medieval Iberia's Greatest Linguist”
Tom Burman, Tennessee and Ryan Szpiech, Michigan
2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
The Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí (d. after 1284) was the most learned polemical author of the later Middle Ages. He was part of the thirteenth-century Dominican interest in missionizing and language learning in Aragon under the auspices of Ramon of Penyafort, interest that led to the famous Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 between Friar Paul Christiani and the great Rabbi of Girona, Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides).Following in the wake of this debate, Martí developed many of its key arguments and strategies. In order to do so, Martí learned Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic and probably taught one or all of these languages to fellow Dominicans as well. His writing (two polemical works against Islam and two more against Judaism, including the massive Pugio fidei, or "Dagger of Faith" from 1278) makes ample use of original source material in these three Semitic languages, and cites and translates widely from Jewish and Muslim religious and philosophical sources. Despite the increasing attention that Martí's work has received in recent years, scholars have only scratched the surface of his abundant and complex corpus of writings, and much work (both editorial and interpretive) remains to be done in assessing Martí's important role in Christian relations with Jews and Muslims in Iberia as well as in Christian intellectual history more generally. These two talks will consider a few dimensions of Martí's work in detail, demonstrating Martí's profound importance for scholars of the Middle Ages in general, but especially for those interested in language learning in the later Middle Ages and Christian engagement with other faiths in this period.
“Why a History of Balance?”
Joel Kaye, Professor of History, Barnard College
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.
"Potions and Prayers: The Subject of Healing in Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts"
Renee Trilling, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
In texts like the Lacnunga and the Leechbooks, Anglo-Saxon healers struggle to merge two extremely powerful and largely incommensurate ideologies, with the result that detailed herbal remedies, charms written on communion wafers, and magical incantations of broken Latin and Irish find themselves on equal footing. Rather than focusing on whether or not these remedies are scientifically valid, then, I want to explore how the dissemination of medical knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England can offer evidence of a culture working out its own solutions to problems of embodiment amid the conflicting discourses of pre-Christian medicine and salvation theology.
“Utopia Un-Mored: Reading across Historical Divides”
Karma Lochrie, Professor of English, University of Indiana - Bloomington
2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
It is standard to read Thomas More’s “Utopia” in terms of its classical roots in Plato’s Republic, and at the same time, to treat it as an inaugural text, that is, as the text that marks the beginning of utopian thinking and a significant cultural break from the Middle Ages. This lecture challenges the historical methods responsible for this narrative of utopianism, providing an alternative account of utopianism that includes medieval texts and thought. Instead of reading backwards from More’s text, Lochrie suggests a method of “reading forward” to More from medieval texts that engage utopian perspectives, ideas, and places. “Unmooring” More, therefore, involves a rethinking of the way we conduct literary history as well as the way we understand utopianism. Using John Mandeville’s Travels and the Middle English Land of Cokaygne, Lochrie maps alternative utopianisms to More’s and suggests new historical interlocutors that complicate our current understanding of utopian thinking and writing.
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
“Eating the Bread of Angels: Transmutation in the Kabbalah”
Joel Hecker, Associate Professor of Jewish Mysticisim
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
Medieval Jewish mystics drew on the same Neoplatonic lines of thinking as their Christian neighbors did, developing theology and practices that facilitated knowledge of, and union with, divinity. Much of the kabbalah of the Zohar, Judaism’s central and canonical mystical text, interprets biblical stories and rituals that deal with food as opportunities to explore the mystical possibilities inherent in Jewish lore and practice. Inevitably, manna, unleavened bread, wine for the Friday night Kiddush, etc., are all transformed into symbols through which one encounters Shekhinah and YHVH, the feminine and masculine aspects of divinity. In his talk, Joel Hecker will explore the ways in which common foods and idealized edibles perform the task of incarnating divinity, transmuting God, food, and human beings in the process.
“Feasting and Fun in Piers Plowman”
Derek Pearsall,Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus Harvard University
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
There are the expected references to food in ‘Piers Plowman’, and in addition Langland offers unusual insights into the actual diet of peasants during the hard months (of summer). There are also two major scenes of feasting, important in the developing narrative and in the understanding of Langland’s specialized techniques of allegory. Finally, in the category of ‘Fun’, there is allusion in the poem to some unexpected forms of entertainment at public feasts, which leads to some interesting historical revelations.
“Diets of the Poor in Medieval England”
Christopher Dyer, Leverhulme Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History, the University of Leicester
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
If we can know about the food and drink consumed by the medieval poor, we can understand their role in society. In the middle ages beggars and vagrants were regarded as a race apart, a desperate underclass, leading a separate existence. If we examine the diets consumed by poor people, from the doles that they were given, the diets that prevailed in hospitals and almshouses, and the types of bread that they could obtain, we find that they suffered disadvantages, but they can be compared with mainstream society. Many of the poor were regular people who through misfortunes, circumstances or just old age were down on their luck.
“Cuisine by the Cut of One's Trousers”
Timothy Tomasik, Associate Professor of French, Valparaiso University
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
Contrary to what some culinary historians have been asserting up until the last decade or so, the French Renaissance did actually have a thriving trade in homegrown cookbooks. Beginning in the 1530’s, a new generation of cookbooks appears in France that synthesizes the innovations of earlier sixteenth-century texts. Between 1536 and 1627 appear twenty-seven editions of a cookbook associated with the printer Pierre Sergent, bearing witness to the literate public’s appetite for works of cookery. By analyzing title pages, woodcuts, and prefatory remarks, we can see that cookbooks were being marketed to a wide spectrum of social stations and potential readerships, each representing contradictory desires. This analysis demonstrates that questions of conviviality are not limited to an elite sector of society. The early modern French banquet is a space whose contours can be adapted to fit a number of occasions, accommodating diners from all strata of society.
“Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine”
Luisa del Giudice, Independent Scholar
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract: none
“The Hungry Courtier: Gourmets and Ascetics in Early Modern Drama”
Joan Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
This paper will trace attitudes to excessive consumption and fasting in the early modern period. By considering the church line on gluttony and fasting and how such excesses were regarded in sixteenth-century dietary literature we can get a sense of the strictures in place regarding this particular 'sin of the mouth'. Shakespeare was rather less judgemental than the Church and from his plays the paper will move to a close consideration of 'the hungry courtier' in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Woman Hater, showing that critics have hitherto overlooked an illuminating debt to Shakespeare in their depiction of the gluttonous figure.
“Things That Seemed Incredible: The Starving Time at Jamestown”
Kathleen Donegan, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
In the desperate winter of 1610, mass starvation reduced the settler population of colonial Jamestown from 500 to 60. This paper uses the specter of starvation at Jamestown to explore a larger and ongoing relationship between suffering and violence, hazard and horror at the site of colonial settlement. Connecting the misery of “Starving Time” to the viciousness of the first Anglo-Powhatan war, the paper will trace how, as structures of meaning crumbled in Jamestown, the colonial arena became a theater of atrocity wherein settlers did (in the words of one) “things which seame incredible.” And because the place called “Jamestown” was always also the place called “Paspahegh,” the extremities committed there left behind a harrowing history for natives and settlers alike.
“Ceremonies and the Arts in Late 15th Century Florence”
Timothy McGee, Professor Emeritus of Music, University of Toronto
Feast and Famine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 2013-2014 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
The arrival of Girolomo Savonarola in 1490 had serious implications for the traditional public ceremonies in Florence as well as the practices of music and art. The elaborate public ceremonial events were either eliminated or converted to sacred ceremonies; the sophisticated music was curtailed and professional choirs disbanded; and artists were encouraged to confine their work to sacred subjects. It is generally thought that the artistic community completely surrendered to the new restrictions, but the discovery of a disguised protest in a painting by Filippino Lippi leads to the suggestion that this may not have been so.
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
“Blindness, Desire, and Touch in Two French Paintings”
James Clifton, Director and Sarah Campbell, Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
In a discussion at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1667 on Nicolas Poussin's painting of Christ Healing the Blind (1650), the participants assumed that fidelity to the biblical text was part of the painter's brief, yet they could not account for several aspects of the painting or even agree on whether Poussin depicted the miracle at Capernaum (Matthew 9) or the one at Jericho (Matthew 20), a point still unresolved. Modern scholarship tends to view Poussin's painting as thematizing seeing and (proper) looking, but this paper returns to the relationship of the painting to its textual source(s), viewing it as a "visual exegesis" of Scripture, and examines the range of possible readings of both Poussin's painting and a related, but remarkably different, painting by Philippe de Champaigne (ca. 1660). Particular attention is given to the desire and faith of the blind men and to Christ's potent gesture.
“Toward a History of Distraction”
Shigehisa Kuriyama (Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History, Department Chair, Harvard University
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
Why was being distracted once synonymous with being mad? And why did distraction later come to figure as a much less radical disability? Starting with close analysis of some iconic Renaissance images, my talk will spotlight the entwined histories of curiosity, death, and the power to attend.
“Maimed Bodies and Broken Systems in the Old Norse Imaginary”
John Lindow, Professor of Scandanavian, University of California, Berkeley
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Annual Francis Lee Utley Lecture
Abstract:
This lecture treats the use of bodies and body parts as they relate to kinship and social systems in Old Norse heroic legend and myth. In various ways, body parts can be appropriated for cosmic purposes or forfeited for enhanced abilities. But if an intact body represents an intact kin group (as language such as 'within the knees' for 'kin' suggests), appropriation or forfeiture of body parts suggests loss of kin, and also flaws in social systems in which kinship plays a role. Indeed, body parts and kinship—especially kinstrife—relate in powerful metaphorical ways.
“Serfdom Without Strings: Amartya Sen in the Middle Ages”
Paul Hyams, Professor of History, Cornell University
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
What is poverty? What does it mean to label people as "poor"? Social scientists tend to reach for the measurable in their definitions. Equating poverty more or less with starvation, the inability to sustain life, they have often calculated the income required for this, and called it the "poverty line". The poor are those who live below this. Critics have long pointed out the many defects of such a view, but the language is nevertheless still in frequent use. And historians have tended to follow the crowd.
One influential recent attempt to do better is the Capabilities Theory of Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen. This located the essence of poverty in the inability of some men and women to perform certain mundane acts that ought to be within the power of all. Not starvation alone but exclusion from freedom marked off the poor, a formulation that has attracted conservative applause for the liberal economist.
Freedom has, of course, a quite concrete and down-to-earth connotation to historians. Specialists in slave and serfdom societies quickly recognize sees that Sen’s "capabilities"—that full participation in community life from which the poor are excluded—map closely onto the disabilities of servitude. Sen's understanding of "poverty" is virtually serfdom without the strings. Perhaps then the historian can add some perspective to the common criticism that Sen gives too little weight to power relations and the role of law in maintaining and validating poverty.
In this paper I first sketch briefly and without frills or exegetical polemic what I take to be the gist of Sen’s theory. I then argue a case for the serfdom analogy. I note that the early medieval opposition was Potens/Pauper (not yet Dives/Pauper), since the "poor" were those subject to oppression by the powerful. I briefly examine the takeover of servitude by national laws and Marc Bloch's three (questionable) "signs of serfdom". I then ponder a few consequences of this insight for the study of medieval servitude, and offer a few modest suggestions as to lines of argument on the nature of medieval poverty. I end with some thoughts on the special case of famine and what this might suggest about the persistence of poverty in a Western world still dominated by Judeo-Christian attitudes toward charity and the equal worth of rich and poor.
“Mental Illness, Self-Violence, and Civil War”
Julie Singer, Assistant Professor of French, Washington University in Saint Louis
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
Around the turn of the fifteenth century it might well have seemed to many French people that the world was going quite mad. King Charles VI's scarcely mentionable mental illness was soon mirrored at every level of social experience, from the irrational civil war through which the body politic tore itself apart, to reports of elevated suicide rates among the common people. Allusions to suicidal impulses and acts recur in an astonishing number of works composed in the first three decades of the fifteenth century: in sermons (Jean Gerson's Vivat rex), political pamphlets (the anonymous Songe véritable), mirrors for princes (Jacques Legrand's Livre des bonnes meurs), diaries and chronicles (by Michel Pintoin, Juvénal des Ursins, and theBourgeois de Paris), poetry and prosimetra (Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance).
In these texts, self-violence is an act marked by political implications that far exceed individual mental health concerns. Indeed, rather than constituting a symptom or manifestation of a mental disability, suicidal acts are presented in early fifteenth-century French literature and chronicle as the cause of a disability of a different sort: a direct attack on a surprisingly corporeal body politic. Exploring the intersection of the physiological and the metaphorical realms, we will see how the rhetoric of suicide brings together discourses of bodily disability and political disunity.
“Able Bodies: Considerations of (Dis)ability in Anglo-Saxon England”
Christina Lee, Lecturer in Viking Studies, Faculty of Arts, Nottingham University
Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance: 2012-2013 CMRS Lecture Series
Abstract:
The body is a useful instrument for medieval writers to charter desirable an undesirable traits. Physical features may be used as 'signs' so: how much can we rely on medieval writers when it comes to studying disability? Can they really tell us anything about attitudes? Also: how much do concepts connected with impairment create disabilities? Are differences made between congenital impairments and acquired illness? Some fine studies of medieval disability have been published of late, but there are still a number of questions that need consideration. In this paper I will examine how impairment compares with other 'inabilities', such as gender, age and status. I will look at literary texts but also at normative sources, such as laws and observations from material culture.
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Cartography, Iconography, and Ethnography in Early Modern Portuguese Asia”
Jorge Flores, European University Institute, Florence
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Holy Sepulcher, Lunar Lost-and-Found”
Robert Hanning, Columbia University
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“World Upon Worlds: The Waldseemuller Map of 1507”
Toby Lester, Independent Scholar
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Britain, France and the Mediterranean: 1702-1713”
Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Sea Charts, Sea Power and the Visual Language of Sixteenth Century Political Persuasion”
Richard Unger, University of British Columbia
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Mapping Magic: The Sites of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia”
Valerie Kivelson, University of Michigan
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage”
Emily Lethbridge, University of Cambridge
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series
“Policia and the Plaza: Utopia and Dystopia in the Colonial City”
Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University
Mapping Minds, Bodies, and Worlds: 2011-2012 CMRS Lecture Series