UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Fall Calendar

UCLA CMRS Online Calendar: http://cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/index.html

CMRS Open House
Wednesday, October 8, 2014

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!

  • Place: Royce 306
  • Time: 4:00 – 7:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Co-sponsored Conference
Touch: 19th Annual French & Francophone Studies Graduate Student Conference
Thursday, October 9 and 10, 2014

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture
“Jacob’s Limp”
Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The persistent linkage of crippled and royal bodies in the Middle Ages is nowhere more explicit than in the figure of Jacob, the lame patriarch. After his struggle with the angel (Genesis 32) Jacob remains lame, though imagery and commentary vary enormously in the degrees to which they emphasize or ignore his bodily condition. By the late twelfth century, across the thirteenth and into the fourteenth, Jacob is a single figure upon whom boundaries of time and place, the promise of territorial power, national integrity, divine vision and blessing, and a crippled body all converge. In this lecture, Christopher Baswell (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Anne Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College) explores the ways these culturally resonant bodies construct intense moments of royalty, power, personal or national integrity, and the work of the sacred.

  • Place: Royce 314
  • Time: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture
“Real Acting Cripples Around 1300”
Wednesday, October 15, 2014

  • Place: Humanities 193
  • Time: 4:00 – 5:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Roundtable
“Ecclesiastical Approval and Use of Judicial Torture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance”
Wednesday, October 22, 2014

It is widely thought by Church historians, even experts in medieval canon law, that the early Church disapproved of torture and disallowed it in court proceedings, whether secular or ecclesiastical. They base this view on a statement made by Gratian in his Decretum (ca. 1140), but Gratian here refers only to extrajudicial extortion, as is made clear by the Ordinary Gloss. He most certainly allows and prescribes the use of torture by judges in specific circumstances. His doctrine was inherited by heresy inquisitors and was maintained through the sixteenth century, with a dramatic further twist in good time for Galileo’s trial in 1632. This talk by Henry Ansgar Kelly (Distinguished Research Professor, English, UCLA) will include a demonstration of the UCLA Corpus Juris Canonici website.

  • Place: Royce 306
  • Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Poetry Across Languages: Pairs and Paratexts in Milton and Marvell”
Thursday, October 23, 2014

John Milton’s double book of 1645, containing a vernacular volume of English poems (plus a handful in Italian) followed by a volume of Latin poemata (plus a couple in Greek), announces and codifies one of the preeminent early modern poetic careers across languages. On a smaller scale, the oeuvre of Milton’s contemporary Andrew Marvell includes a number of Latin and English poems composed in cross-referential pairs. A reading of Marvell’s Hortus alongside his famous Garden, or of Ros alongside Drop of Dew, rather than getting bogged down in questions of priority between the two versions, can find an active sense of mutuality between them, and a point of access to some broader questions about poetic bilingualism, as will be discussed by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Stephen Hinds (Professor of Classics, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities University of Washington, Seattle). Stephen Hinds is interested in moments of connection between Latin and vernacular texts which approach the condition of translation without quite being the same thing as translation.  His larger project explores not just individual poems but the classical tradition itself as process rather than as product, involving micro-negotiations of authors and readers across language and culture.

  • Place: Royce 314
  • Time: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Trouble in Mind: Personal Conscience in the Sixteenth Century”
Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Throughout its long history, conscience has perched precariously at the boundaries of the self. Does it originate outside the mind as a God-given entity or reside within as a unique faculty and defining personal trait? In the sixteenth century it decisively swerved within, as an aspect of distinctive selfhood. Yet, at the very moment of its decisive relocation and apparent triumph, the personal conscience found itself under siege: overburdened and underequipped for its new and formidable responsibilities. This lecture by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Paul Strohm (Emeritus, Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University) will touch on More, Calvin, and Foxe as well as plays and religious pamphlets, in considering the vicissitudes of sixteenth-century conscience.

  • Place: Royce 314
  • Time: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Seeing the Larger Picture?: Writing of the First Vernacular World History in 1209 ”
Tuesday, November 4, 2014

The title of this lecture by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar William Burgwinkle (Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature, King’s College, Cambridge) takes the expression “larger picture” in two senses. What are we to make of a world history that was written for the Flemish nobility, in order to glorify their role in the construction of a Christian empire, but found its first success in the city of Acre (today Akko, in Israel), capital of the Latin Crusader Kingdom in the mid-thirteenth century? The larger picture, in this sense, involves the writing of history in general—the attempt to place oneself within a larger timeframe and find a place for oneself in the past; but it also implies the importance of place in a literal sense. Acre was the most international city of its day, a small but thriving cultural, religious, and commercial center, always on the brink of imminent disaster. Such a precarious situation bred a taste for history and histories, narratives that would provide the bearings for dealing with the unruly and the unexpected. .

  • Place: Royce 314
  • Time: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Roundtable
“Last Word, First Look: Ralegh’s Dutch Translation of The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana” and “Illustrating Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana”
Wednesday, November 5, 2014

These two presentations—the first by Professor Emeritus Paul Sellin (English, UCLA) and the second by Professor Christine Sellin (Art History, California Lutheran University) deal with 1) the hitherto neglected importance of the 1598 Dutch translation of Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and 2) the genesis of the famous De Bry and other illustrations soon to follow.

  • Place: Royce 306
  • Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

California Medieval History Seminar, Fall 2014
Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Fall Session of California Medieval History Seminar will meet at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Esther Liberman Cuenca (PhD candidate, Fordham University), Professor Sharon Farmer (UC Santa Barbara), Professor Alison Perchuk (California State University, Channel Islands), and Eugene Smelyansky (PhD candidate, History, UC Irvine) will present their work at the Seminar’s Fall session. Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance and come prepared to discuss them. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail and on the CMRS website. To be added to the announcement list contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu. More information is at cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/med_hist_seminar.html.

  • Place: Huntington Library, Seaver Classrooms 1 & 2, San Marino CA
  • Time: 9:30 am – 4 pm
  • Advance registration required — write to cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu
  • Fee: Varies
  • Seating: Seating is limited and by pre-registration only.

CMRS Roundtable
“Marlowe’s Ghost in Shakespeare’s As You Like It”
Wednesday, November 19, 2014

We all know Christopher Marlowe was killed on 30 May 1593. Would you believe that in early 1600, William Shakespeare wrote As You Like It to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the death of his friend and mentor, and modeled the character of Jaques on the deceased? Come, listen and see. Dr. Steve Sohmer (Fleming Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and CMRS Associate) will discuss the particulars.

  • Place: Royce 306
  • Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Lecture
“Reflections on Poussin’s Landscape with Diogenes”
Tuesday, December 2, 2014

This lecture by Herbert Morris (Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA) takes Hazlitt as a guide in regarding Poussin as a poet who works with pictorial images and respects Poussin’s desire to be “read.” Professor Morris argues that, as with poets generally, Poussin sought, in addition to promoting pleasure with his images and their relationship to each other, to stimulate critical reflection, the imagination, and a range of emotions and moods. Professor Morris’ exposition is an attempt to remedy a failure of art historians to provide to Poussin what he desired.

*A description and reproduction of the painting will be available from the CMRS office (Royce 302) and on this website. Those planning to attend the lecture should read this material in advance. *

  • Place: Royce 314
  • Time: 4:00 – 6:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

CMRS Roundtable
“The Valencia-Rome Crusading Axis: El Cid and Pope Urban II”
Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Known to history and legend by the honorific title El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (ca. 1043-99) continues to be an enigmatic figure. History seems to cast him in the role of a freebooter and a soldier of fortune, while legend has made him the quintessential Christian hero and warrior of the Spanish Reconquista. Getting beyond these two rigid stereotypes has proved difficult. Crusade historian Paul Chevedden (CMRS Associate) will describe one of the most important founding documents of the Crusades, the endowment charter that the Cid granted in 1098 to the newly-restored cathedral of Valencia and its newly-installed bishop, Jerome of Périgord, and emancipate the Cid from the narrow Iberian context in which he is usually placed and relocate him in the wider eleventh-century world of the Crusades.

  • Place: Royce 306
  • Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
  • Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating.
  • Self-service parking is in UCLA Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5. More information and maps at the UCLA Parking website.

Leave a comment