The Medieval
and Renaissance Studies Program
at the
University of Pittsburgh
Newsletter
No. 55: November, 2003
Electronic address:
http://www.pitt.edu/~medren/
Prepared and distributed by the Executive Committee of the Medieval and
Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh
Alison Stones, Editor
CONTENTS
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.
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:
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.”
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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
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.
History
Bruce Venarde published a book: Robert of
Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2004).
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.
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.
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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