Spring 2009
EVENTS
2009 Muller Colloquium
Towards a Theory of Creative Collaboration
17-18 April 2009
http://www.virginia.edu/french/MullerColloquium2009.htm
Friday, 17th March 2009
"Towards a Theory of Creative Collaboration"
2009 Müller Colloquium
Department of French, UVA
April 17-18
Harrison Institute Auditorium
As a catch-all term, collaboration covers the relationship between a
poet and bookmaker; composer, scribe, and performers; and fellow writers
who produce together new works. What are the rules of creative
cooperation? Is it bound by time constraints? Can collaboration be
antagonistic as well as cooperative? What criteria do we use to
designate successful versus failed collaboration? How would a theory of
collaboration influence present definitions of authorship and elucidate
discussions on literary circulation and production?
The purpose of the 2009 Müller Colloquium is to generate discussion
about artistic collaboration through examples drawn from medieval and
sixteenth-century material/literary/musical culture.
Monday, 23rd March 2009
Please join us at 5:15 on Monday evening, March 23, 2009 in New Cabell
345 to hear:
"The Power of Apocalyptic Rhetoric in the Eleventh-Century West"
Matthew Gabriele
Virginia Tech
Matthew Gabriele is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Coordinator of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary
Studies at Virginia Tech. A graduate of the University of California,
Berkeley, Dr. Gabriele’s research engages with issues of eschatology,
theology, historical memory and historiography in the early and central
Middle Ages. His work is characterized not only by a sustained interest
in medieval thought but also by a concern with its influence upon lived
political culture, an approach evident in his forthcoming monograph,
‘The Legend of Charlemagne and the Origins of the First Crusade’. He has
published a number of articles on medieval apocalypticism, the genesis
of the anti-Jewish violence of the First Crusade, and the political and
eschatological aspects of the legend of Charlemagne in Capetian France.
These include ‘The Provenance of the Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus:
Remembering the Carolingians at the Court of King Philip I (1060-1108)
before the First Crusade’, Viator 39 (2008), 93-117 and ‘Otto III,
Charlemagne, and Pentecost 1000 A.D.: A Reconsideration Using Diplomatic
Evidence’, in M. Frassetto, ed., ‘The Year 1000: Religious and Social
Response to the Turning of the First Millennium’ (New York, 2002),
111-32. Together with Dr. Jace Stuckey (Louisiana Tech University),
Professor Gabriele has edited an interdisciplinary volume of essays on
the medieval legend of Charlemagne, ‘The Legend of Charlemagne in the
Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade’ (Palgrave Macmillan: New Middle
Ages Series, 2008), a volume to which he also contributed.
Thursday, 12th March 2009
Please join us on Thursday, March 12 at 6:00 (location: TBA) to hear:
Jessica Brantley
Yale University
"The Material Culture of the Medieval Dream."
Jessica Brantley is an associate professor in the English department at Yale. Her book Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England explores a single codex, a Carthusian miscellany (BL MS Add. 37049), where she seeks to negotiate the space between private devotion and public performance. This highly illustrated manuscript requires Brantley to use both literary and art historical approaches in order to unpack the reader's experience in confronting the work.
Friday-Saturday, 17th-18th April 2009
Collaboration Conference (hosted by the French Department).
Fall 2008
Harrison Common Hour
Please join us for the inaugural Harrison Common Hour on Tuesday, October 21st, from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. in the Byrd/Morris Seminar Room in the Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections Library.
Amy Ogden, Associate Professor, Department of French at the University of Virginia, will give a brief talk entitled, "New Technologies, Traditional Media and Medieval Saints," and then open the floor to questions.
The Harrison Common Hour provides an opportunity for U.Va. humanities faculty, students, and the public to learn about current research projects underway at the university and to engage in active discussion about these projects.
Harrison Common Hours are free and open to the general public.
Please bring a brown-bag lunch. Beverages will be provided. Please e-mail Kelly Miller, kellymiller@virginia.edu, by October 14th, if you plan to attend.
Date/Time: Tuesday, October 21st, from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Location: Byrd/Morris Seminar Room in the Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections Library.
Contact: Kelly Miller, Ph.D. - Head of Programs and Public Outreach, Harrison Institute, University of Virginia Library
Medieval Studies Lecture Series 2008-09
Monday, 3rd November 2008
‘Bede, Augustine and the Writing of History in the Early Middle Ages’.
Alan T. Thacker (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
Time: 6:30 pm
Location: The Solarium, Colonnade Club, Pavilion VII, West Lawn.
With reception to follow.
Thursday, 6th November 2008
"An Ambiguous Threesome: Marguerite de Navarre, Boccaccio, Apuleius"
(Lecture in English)
PROFESSOR GARY FERGUSON
French Studies, University of Delaware
Time: 2-3 PM
Location: Newcomb Hall 389. Reception to follow.
For more information, please contact Ari Blatt, Dept. of French, at ajb6f@virginia.edu
Spring 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 5:30pm — Campbell 158
The Body in the Map, the World Embodied: Reflections on the Medieval Figuration of Space
Marcia Kupfer author of The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town (PennState University Press, 2003).
Wednesday, February 13, 6:30pm — Cabell Hall 138
Sociolinguistics in Twelfth-Century Spain: three kinds of text
Friday, February 22, 2:30 PM — 1 Dawson's Row
Acknowledgment and Confession in Cymbeline
Sarah Beckwith, Marcello Lotti Professor of English, Duke University
Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing. She is particularly interested in
middle English religious writing in its fully cultural dimensions and in the intersections
of writing and religious practice. She has published on Margery Kempe, the literature of
anchoritism, medieval theatre and sacramental culture, in numerous essay collections and
journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly and Exemplaria. Her book, Christ's Body:
Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing was published by Routledge in
1993. Her book, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus
Christi was published by the University of Chicago Press in the summer of 2001. She is
currently working on a book on medieval and Renaissance drama centering on Shakespeare
and the transformation of sacramental culture. The book is tentatively entitled The Mind's
Retreat from the Face.
Click here for a Dawson's Row map
Sponsored by the English Department Medieval Colloquium.
Wednesday, April 2, 12:00pm — Maury 110
Lunchtime Works-in-Progress Colloquium
Roger Wright a distinguished visiting medievalist on Grounds this year who teaches at the University of Liverpool. Professor Wright specializes in the relationship between Latin and vernacular literatures and languages, particularly Spanish, in the European Middle Ages. He has written on early Ibero-Romance, the "sociophilology" of Late Latin, bilingualism and diglossia in medieval Spain, and many other topics. For us he will deliver a paper titled "The relationship between ballad and epic in Medieval Spain."
The Program in Medieval Studies will be furnishing a Take Away lunch (sandwiches, chips, drinks) for the first twenty attendees who RSVP. If you can make the colloquium and would like lunch, please contact Gabriel Haley at gabrielhaley@gmail.com, letting him know your sandwich/drink preferences, such as they are (and particularly about any dietary restrictions).
Wednesday, April 9, 3:00 PM — English Department Faculty Lounge, Bryan Hall
Sex and the City: Sacred and Social Epistemologies in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocent
Theresa Coletti is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her books include Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Cornell, 1988); Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Pennsylvania, 2004); and an edition of The Digby Mary Magdalene forthcoming from TEAMS (Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University).
Abstract: The biblical story of the Slaughter of Innocents recounted in Matthew’s gospel provided late medieval English urban communities the opportunity to gaze upon a symbolic image of social and political relationships in which they might discern their own likeness. Vernacular dramas on the Slaughter appropriate themes and tropes associated with medieval interpretations and celebrations of the Innocents’ feast to critique social and material categories of late medieval urban life. This paper examines the Slaughter of the Innocents in the Chester mystery cycle, the most provocative of the English plays on this subject. In the Chester Slaughter, dramatic reflexivity involves an elaborate comic subplot in which mothers of the Innocents struggle verbally and physically with soldiers of Herod seeking to murder their children. In one such contest, a mulier attempts to thwart the soldier who threatens to attack her child if it has a “pintell” (penis); the woman insists that the child has “two holes under the tayle.” Her challenge puts into play a series of substitutions that focus on questions of social and sexual identity, exposing their intersections with power and knowledge. Analyzing the web of social and symbolic relationships signified by the mulier’s act, this paper contends that the challenge of counting holes under the tail encodes an anxious critique of the major categories of difference on which civic authority and social structure were based.
Reception to follow
Friday, April 18, 2:00 PM — The Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
Medieval Studies Program's 3rd Annual Robert L. Kellogg Lecture
Myth in the Middle Ages: Fulgentius and his Later Readers
Gregory Hays, Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, has published numerous articles and reviews on Greek poetry and later Latin literature, as well as a translation of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. His research interests center on late antique and medieval Latin, and he is currently finishing a project involving the fifth-century African mythographer Fulgentius, the subject of his Kellogg Lecture.
Annual Medieval Studies End-of-the-Year Reception to Follow
Friday, April 25, 5:00-6:30pm — Cabell Hall 138
The Marriage of Philology and Huitzilopochtli: On Medieval Christian Iconography and Mexican Pictorial Catechisms
Barbara De Marco, Editor, Romance Philology
When the Franciscans first arrived in Mexico in the early 16th century, the first and
fundamental obstacle to their program of catechesis was language itself. Pictorial
catechisms were one means of overcoming that obstacle. Pictorial representations of
the fundamental texts and tenets of the faith (the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the
Credo, some formula of confession, the Ten Commandments, the seven Sacraments, and so
on), were sketched into small, portable notebooks. Extant examples of these catechisms
are relatively few in number, modest in dimension, and rudimentary in technique.
Nonetheless, they are precious witnesses to the incorporation of Christian European
iconography into indigenous narrative practices.
The presentation will be heavily illustrated by a selection of images drawn, in turn, from several different pictorial catechisms, from medieval European prototypes, and from central Mexican pictorial codices. Some parallel evidence from the art and architecture of the early Franciscan conventos will also serve as a point of reference. Textual evidence of catechetical practices will be drawn from the testimonies of early Franciscan missionaries and chroniclers, among them, Pedro de Gante, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, and Bernardino de Sahagún. The discussion of these materials will focus on the extent to which any evidence of iconographic syncretism in the pictorial catechisms may color our interpretations of the encounter between late medieval Europe and early colonial Mexico.
Fall 2007
Saturday, September 15, 11:00 am — New Dominion Bookshop
Reading: The World Map, 1300-1492
New Dominion Bookshop (on the Downtown Mall at 404 East Main St.) will host Evelyn Edson, Professor Emerita of History, Piedmont Virginia Community College, for a discussion, reading, and book-signing. She will present selections from her new book, The World Map, 1300-1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Johns Hopkins University Press, published in cooperation with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia, August 2007).
Monday, October 8, 12:00 PM — Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge
Thinking Earth: Mortuary Lyric
D. Vance Smith, Department of English, Princeton University
Sponsored by the Department of English and the Program in Medieval Studies
Reception to follow
Monday, October 15, 6:00 PM — Alderman Staff Lounge, 1st floor, west side, Alderman Library
Counting Sheep: What DNA Can Reveal About Medieval Manuscripts and Texts
Timothy Stinson, Johns Hopkins University
Friday, October 19, 3:00 PM — Kaleidoscope Room, Newcomb Hall
Colloquium on Medieval Lyricism
This afternoon colloquium, co-sponsored by the McIntire Department of Music and the Program in Medieval Studies, will explore medieval lyricism from a number of angles and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. For advance readings, please contact Bruce Holsinger at
"Feelings in Time:
The History of the Middle English Passion Lyric Reconsidered."
Sarah McNamer
Department of English
Georgetown University
"The Sense of Sound: Listening to the Lyrics of Adam de la Halle"
Emma Dillon
Department of Music
University of Pennsylvania
Reception to follow
Thursday, November 1 — Campbell Hall 158
Confessions of a Trogoldyte: Cappadocia Demythologized
Robert Ousterhout, University of Pennsylvania
Sponsored by Medieval Studies and the McIntire Department of Art.
Friday, November 16, 5.00 p.m. — Shea House (400 Monroe Lane, next to 'Casa Bolivar')
Getting Stoned and Making Babies: Ethics and Hermeneutics in Decameron VIII.3 and IX.3
Simone Marchesi, Princeton University
Friday, November 30, 4:00 PM — Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge
The Body of the Past: History and Imagination
Nicholas Watson, Professor of English, Harvard University
A lecture co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, the Department of English,
and the Department of Religious Studies.
Reception to follow.
Spring 2007
Friday January 19, 3:00PM — 345 Cabell Hall
Isabeau Of Bavaria: Rehabilitating The Queen
Tracy Adams, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Presented by Department of French Language and Literature. Reception to follow in Cabell 329.
Friday January 26, 3:00PM — 345 Cabell Hall
A Master, a Vilain, a Lady, and a Scribe: Competing for Authority in a Late Medieval Translation of the ars amatoria
Deborah McGrady, Tulane University
Presented by Department of French Language and Literature. Reception to follow in Cabell 329.
Thursday February 1, 5:30 PM — 160 Campbell Hall
Reading and Seeing: The Beginning of Book Illumination and the Modern Discourse on Ethnicity
Lawrence Nees, University of Delaware
A specialist in the art of the early Middle Ages, Professor Nees is the author of several books, including The
Gundohinus Gospels (1987), A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court
(1991), and Early Medieval Art (2002).
Presented by the McIntire Department of Art, co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program.
Friday February 2, 3:00PM — 345 Cabell Hall
Social Class, Vice, and Gluttony in Fifteenth-Century France
Susan Dudash, Utah State University
Presented by Department of French Language and Literature. Reception to follow in Cabell 329.
Thursday February 22, 3:30 PM — 1 Dawson's Row
Langland the Philosopher
Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania
Emily
Steiner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is
the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature
(Cambridge UP, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays called The Letter of the Law:
Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell UP, 2002).
She has also published essays in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New
Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Representations.
She is presently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled The
Politics of Literary Form.
Click here for a Dawson's Row map.
Wednesday, March 14, 3:30 PM — Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
The Dark Age Body and its Parts
Lynda Coon, University of Arkansas
Professor Coon's work centers on hagiography, gender and sexuality
in the late antique and early medieval West. She is the author of
Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (U.
Penn, 1997) and co-editor of That Gentle Strength: Historical
Perspectives on Women and Christianity (University Press of
Virginia, 1990).
Co-Sponsored with the Corcoran Department of History
Friday, March 23, 2:00PM — New Cabell Hall 340
Cultural Representation and the Practice of Warfare in the High Middle Ages
Richard P. Abels, U.S. Naval Academy
Professor Abels is the author of numerous publications on early medieval politics and warfare,
including Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (University of California
Press, 1988) and Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Ninth-Century England (Longman, 1998).
Co-Sponsored with the Corcoran Department of History
Monday, April 2, 6:00PM — Minor Hall 125
The Idea of Literature in the Middle Ages
Julian Weiss, King's College London
Julian M. Weiss is Reader in Medieval Language and Literature in the Department of Hispanic
Studies, King's College, University of London. He is the author of The Poet's Art: Literary
Theory in Castille, 1400-1460. Oxford, 1990; and The 'Mester de Clerecía': Intellectuals and
Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile. London, 2006, and has published numerous articles on
medieval literature in Speculum, MLR, Medium Aevum, and other major journals.
From 1985-1992
he taught at the University of Virginia.
Presented by the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program
Friday, April 6, 3:00PM — Clark Hall 101
Reading Ovid in Medieval France
Frank Coulson, Ohio State University
Professor Coulson is co-director of the Center for Epigraphical and
Palaeographical Studies at Ohio State. He is the author of numerous
articles on medieval texts and manuscripts, with a special focus on
the reception of Ovid. His books include Incipitarium Ovidianum
(Brepols, 2000) and a preliminary edition of parts of the 'Vulgate'
commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses (Toronto, 1991).
Co-Sponsored with the Department of Classics
Monday, April 30, 4:00 PM — Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
The Second Annual Robert L. Kellogg Lecture in Medieval Studies
1450-1492: Negotiating Difference and Conversion in Pre-Expulsion Castile
E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia
The Medieval Studies Program's 2006/07 lecture in memory of Robert
L. Kellogg will be delivered by E. Michael Gerli, Commonwealth
Professor of Spanish. In addition to numerous articles on medieval
and Renaissance literature, Professor Gerli is the author of twelve
books including Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain (Arizona
State, 1998) and Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing and
Re-Writing in Cervantes (University Press of Kentucky, 1995), and
General Editor of Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (Routledge,
2003).
Reception to follow in the Colonnade Club, 5:00-7:00 PM