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The Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program
at the University of Pittsburgh
Newsletter
No. 55: November, 2003
Electronic address: http://www.pitt.edu/~medren/
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Prepared and distributed by the Executive Committee of the Medieval and
Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh
Alison Stones, Editor
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CONTENTS
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Lectures in Fall and Spring
Other Events
News from the Departments
Newberry Library
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We warmly welcome Kellie Robertson as the new Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program and offer our support in an exciting program this year. And we say a special thank-you to Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski for her splendid leadership and offer her all best wishes for a productive year's leave.
Lectures in Fall and Spring
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We began the year on September 19 with a lecture "Re-Orienting the Renaissance Archive," by Jonathan Burton of West Virginia University. The lecture addressed two methodological questions: First, how do literary scholars reconstruct and theorize cross-cultural exchange when our archives are one-sided? Second, how can we avoid in our own histories reproducing the problems of emplotment that we find in early modern accounts of exchange? Our second lecture, on October 2, was given by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen of George Washington University, on the subject of "The Blood of Race." This lecture examined how the body figures centrally in medieval imaginings of race, especially in the wake of trauma and ethnic violence, taking the example of the supposed martyrdom of William of Norwich, first recorded victim of a supposed Jewish ritual murder -- and a postcolonial body that was made to figure a community.
Future events are:
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Thursday, 6 November at 6 p.m. Lecture Room #5, Scaife Hall
Walton Schalick, III, M.D., Ph.D. Washington University School of Medicine
Ninth Annual Sylvan E. Stool History of Medicine Lecture: “‘On the Shoulders of Giants’: The Medieval Origins of ‘Professional’ Medicine.”
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Friday, 21 November at 4:30, CL 144
University of Pittsburgh Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program Open House
Duquesne University Medieval and Renaissance Players Present Wit and Science
John Redford's hilarious morality play, Wit and Science (c. 1540s), concerns itself not with the question of how humans are to save their immortal souls, but with a concern of great interest to all students: how humans are to save their grades. Wit, a student, wants to marry Lady Science, but first he must overcome Tediousness. Hooray for Honest Recreation -- a different sort of girl altogether from that slatternly Idleness!
Please join us afterwards for a reception with the opportunity to meet our faculty and learn more about the MRST undergraduate and graduate certificate program.
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Thursday, 22 January at 4:30
Bruce Venarde, University of Pittsburgh
“‘Your Daughter's Going to Hell’ and Other Adventures in Medieval Latin Culture.”
A talk coinciding with the appearance of Professor Venarde’s new book, Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life.
Bruce Venarde is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also taught at Harvard and Tufts Universities. His books include Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215 (Cornell University Press, 1997) and Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Catholic
University of America Press, 2004). His current project, on culture and religion in late Romanesque France, is called "The Loire Valley Humanists."
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Saturday and Sunday, 13-14 March (funding permitting)
Gautier de Coincy Conference, co-sponsored with the University of Missouri, Kansas City
An international research conference on the Benedictine poet and writer Gautier de Coincy (c. 1177-1236). This meeting will draw together scholars of history, music, art history, and literature to examine the legacy of this important medieval figure.
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Friday, 19 March at 4 p.m., Frick Fine Arts Auditorium
Roger Chartier
Roger Chartier is the Directeur d’études, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and currently the Annenberg Visiting Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. A widely admired cultural historian, he has made invaluable contributions to the overlapping fields of the history of the book and the history of reading and print culture, as well as many areas of early modern literature and historiography.
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Friday, 26 March
Natasha Korda, Wesleyan University
“A Cry of Players.”
This paper looks at the representation of itinerant women street vendors and their "cries" in plays, prints, ballads, and court music, and their place in the informal economy of early modern London. The paper is framed by a discussion of Hamlet's advice to the players, and the rhetorical function of "cries" in that play (hence its title).
Natasha Korda is Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University and author of Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and co-editor of Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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Saturday, April 24, 2004, 9.30-noon, FFA Auditorium
A Symposium in Honor of David Wilkins, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
The theme of this interdisciplinary symposium is Travel into Art.
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Other Events
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London is the place for exciting exhibitions in our period this Fall and Winter: at the Royal Academy, London (http://www.royalacademy.org.uk), in the Sackler Galleries
29 November 2003—22 February 2004: Illuminating the Renaissance. The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe. This exhibition has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, the British Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: Gothic: Art for England, 1400-1547, 9 October 2003-18 January 2004. NB: booking is advisable, consult the web site (http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1220_gothic/).
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Newberry Library
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The Newberry has excellent resources in the early history of the book including manuscripts and incunabula as well as a first-rate collection of secondary materials in areas of interest to medieval and renaissance scholars. Pitt participates regularly in Newberry programs and again this year is co-sponsoring the History of the Book series. Funds are available through Pitt's membership in the Newberry Library Consortium for faculty and students to attend events at the Newberry and/or do research there. Contact Janelle Greenberg, History Department (janelleg@pitt.edu) for information and see the Newberry website http://www.newberry.org. We encourage faculty and graduate students to make the most of our Consortium membership. Please remind graduates about the Annette Kade Fellowship in French or German Studies in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, and the Newberry Library-Ecole des Chartes Exchange Fellowship, both deadlines in January, 2004.
Further details on the Newberry’s website listed above. The Newberry has excellent resources in the early history of the book including manuscripts and incunabula as well as a first-rate collection of secondary materials in areas of interest to medieval and renaissance scholars.
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News from the Departments
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French and Italian
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski is on leave with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dennis Looney published several reviews and an article, “Ariosto and the Classics.” In Ariosto Today. Eds. D. Beecher, M. Ciavolella, and R.Fedi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 18-31. He was invited to lecture on Boiardo’s translations of Greek classics, “Fragil arte: tradurre e governare nei volgarizzamenti boiardeschi ad Ercole I d’Este,” at the opening of the University of Ferrara’s Centro Studi Matteo Maria Boiardo. Scandiano, Italy. September 18, 2003; and gave a paper on: “Ariosto’s Erotic Art: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime,” at the Society for XVIth Century Studies. Pittsburgh, October 30, 2003.
Daniel Russell lectured this fall on "Emblems and the Ages of Life" at Hunter College (NYC). He recently put the finishing touches on volume 13 of Emblematica. This volume contains his article on emblems and postmodernism: "Icarus in the City: Emblems and Postmoderism," Emblematica 13 (2003): 333-358.
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History
Bruce Venarde published a book: Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
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History of Art and Architecture
Ann Sutherland Harris published an article, "Three Proposals for Gian Lorenzo Bernini" in Master Drawings, Vol. 41, no. 2, 2003, pp. 119-127. She gave a paper, "Gaspard Dughet's Drawings: Fame and Function", at a conference on Claude Lorraine and the Art of Landscape held at the British School at Rome, June 28-9, 2003.
Alison Stones published the iconogrpahical appendix to Angelica Rieger's facsimile edition of L'Ystoire du bon roi Alexandre. Der Berliner Alexanderroman, Handschrift 78 C 1 des Kupferstichkabinetts Preussischer Kulturbesitc Berlin (Stuttgart: Müller und Schinler and Lachen am Zurichsee and Reinbek Berlin: Corona, 2002), 247-59; a web contribution: 'The Illustrations to Brunetto Latini's Trésor in France, c. 1275-1320,' La città e il libro II, Il manoscritto, la miniatura, ed. J. Bolton-Holloway (http://www.florin.ms/beth5.html); and an article: 'The Illustrations of the Pseudo-Turpin in the Johannes translation, Florence, Laurenziana, Ashburnham 125, and the Chronique de l'anonyme de Béthune, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, n.a.fr. 6295,' O Pseudo-Turpin, ed. K. Herbers (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia), 299-312. In May, 2003, she delivered at lecture to the Heraldry Society at the Society of Antiquaries, London, on 'Heraldry in the so-called Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons, New York, Morgan Library, MS M. 729.' She gave a lecture on the Lancelot-Grail Project to the New England Medieval Manuscripts Group at Harvard, September 28, 2003, and three papers on the project: at the GIS Conference, California University of Pennsylvania (with her Pitt collaborator, Ken Sochats of SIS), September 5, 2003; at the Manuscripta Conference, St Louis, October 10, 2003; and at the Text and Image in Medieval England Conference in Honor of Calvin Kendall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, October 24, 2003.
John Williams, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, gave a series of Seminars May 22-28, 2003, at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Curso de Doctorado del Programa Estudios de Iconografía: "La Ilustración del Comentario al Apocalipsis de Beato de Liébana." He published two articles: "Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style," Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 442-68, and "Meyer Schapiro y el Beato de Silos," in Silos. Un Milenio (Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre la Abadía de Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos, 2001), coord. Alberto C. C. Ibáñez Pérez, Silos, 2003, Vol. IV, 531-541.
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Religious Studies
Bernard Goldstein, University Professor Emeritus (Religious Studies and History & Philosophy of Science), has published a book and an article since last spring: The Alfonsine Tables of Toledo. (Archimedes: New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, vol. 8.) Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003 [with José Chabás]; "John Vimond and the Alfonsine Trepidation Model," Journal for the History of Astronomy 34 (2003), 163-70 [with José Chabás]. He also helped to organize an international conference, SCIENCE IN MEDIEVAL JEWISH THOUGHT (London, June 2003), where he read a paper, entitled "Astronomy Among Jews in the Middle Ages." During this conference there was a session in his honor at which he was presented with a CD version of a Festschrift to appear later this year.
Adam Shear was the recipient of a Research Expense Grant from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for his project on the reception of Judah Halevi's Kuzari by early modern Sephardic Jews and Christian Hebraists. He spent parts of summer 2003 in Philadelphia, Boston, and Amsterdam researching this topic.
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Slavic Languages and Literatures
David Birnbaum has published The Povest' vremennykh let (The Tale of Bygone Years) An Interlinear Collation and Paradosi, with David Birnbaum and Horace G. Lunt. Editor and Collator Donald Ostrowski. Edited by David Birnbaum, Horace G. Lunt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications, 2003) and http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/OSTPOV.html
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