“What does the Battle of Hastings have to do with Pornography? Borders of the Bayeux Tapestry and the Meaning of Marginal Images”
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The central pictorial narrative of the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry has always attracted scholarly debate, but its lower and upper borders have received much less attention. Despite some quite obscene, if not pornographic motifs and other meaning-loaded elements in the borders, the older literature considered them as purely decorative ornament, having no relation to the main scenes. Recent scholarship, however, has tried to interpret these borders as a direct commentary on the main narrative of the Tapestry, without offering a consistent concept of the relation between the main panel and the borders. On the contrary, this paper by Professor Peter Klein (University of Tübingen) will argue that the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry belong to the tradition of the so-called “marginal images”, which generally do not function as a visual gloss but are relatively autonomous. Nevertheless, they do have an overall negative meaning apparenlty related to basic medieval concepts of order and space. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Luther and the Leipzig Disputation: Dissent Disseminated”
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
With Professor Erika Rummel (Emmanuel College, University of Toronto). In 1519, Martin Luther, assisted by Andreas von Karlstadt, debated Johann Eck on free will, penance and the authority of the pope. In a speech inaugurating the debate, later published as The Method of Disputing, Petrus Mosellanus presented a humanist critique of scholastic disputation. We also know that procedural wrangles on the use of written aids disturbed the debates, but these altercations also shed light on scholastic disputational practice. The most important outcome of the Leipzig Disputation, however, was Luther’s decision to use the new print media to broadcast his ideas, thus shifting authority away from university theologians, the traditional arbiters of doctrinal disputation, to a large and unruly reading public. View videos >>
CMRS Roundtable
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Dr. Chris Jones (University of Canterbury, Christchurch) discusses his new book Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and Its Rulers in Late-Medieval France, Cursor Mundi, vol. 1 (Brepols 2007). Eclipse of Empire explores the reality behind the assumption that the idea of a universal ruler became increasingly irrelevant in late-medieval Europe. Focusing on France in the century before the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, Jones investigates attitudes towards the contemporary institution of the western Empire, its rulers, and its place in the world. There has been a tendency among modern historians to assume that there was little place for a universal Empire and its would-be rulers in late-medieval thought. Pointing to the rapid decline in the fortunes of the medieval Empire after the death of the Emperor Frederick II, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Politics by western Europeans, and the growing confidence—and burgeoning bureaucracy—of the kings of France and England, historians have often argued that the claims to universal domination of men like the Emperor Henry VII, or indeed of popes like Boniface VIII, were becoming increasingly anachronistic, not to say a little ridiculous. Perceptions of the Empire undoubtedly changed in this period. Yet, whether it was in the cloisters of Saint-Denis, the pamphlets of Pierre Dubois, or even the thought of Charles d’Anjou, the first Angevin king of Sicily, Jones argues that the Empire and its ruler still had an important, indeed unique, role to play in a properly-ordered Christian society. View pictures >>
“Byzantine Icons Under Attack: How Religious Images Survived Iconoclasm” Thursday, April 10, 2008
With Professor Judith Herrin (King's College, London); co-sponsored with UCLA History Department and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. View pictures >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, “The Matter of Fulk: Romance and History in Fourteenth-Century Shropshire” Thursday, April 10, 2008
A lecture by Professor Ralph Hanna (University of Oxford). Fouke le Fitz Waryn, an Anglo-Norman prose text of c.1325-1330, is the only surviving full rendition of a narrative retold at least three times, in English and French, during the period c.1260-c.1400. Most of the text is devoted to Fulk III's quite historical revolt against King John in 1201-1203. But the text has always appeared problematic, since the tale of Fulk's disobedience has acquired a patina of ‘romance’ materials very far from plausible, let alone, historical. In this lecture, Professor Hanna examines aspects of this presentation, far from limited to this text but ubiquitous in insular historical writing and romance. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Healing from History: Psychoanalytic and Sociological Considerations on Disputation and Reconciliation in the Modern Context”
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
With ProfessorJeffrey Prager (UCLA). This discussion shifts focus on disputation from various early modern expressions to a contemporary one. This presentation focuses on institutions of Truth and Reconciliation, describing these commissions or tribunals, convened in various national contexts, as uniquely modern practices of dispute settlement intending to transform existing enmities between perpetrators and victims into forms of civic friendship. Even in these modern settings, these institutions are also distinctly novel, subordinating conventional legal procedures aimed to determine guilt and to exact punishment to the offering of forgiveness in exchange for apology and truth-telling. Applying psychoanalytic insights concerning the process by which individuals overcome traumatic pasts, relevant social, political and interpersonal features are identified that promote this form of dispute-settlement and also describe the inherent challenges to its realization. View videos >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Mapping the Realm: Cartographic Imaginaries and Spatial Technologies”
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Dr. Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast) is a historical geographer, specializing in European urbanism
of the later Middle Ages. In this lecture, he will discuss the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map out and analyse medieval urban landscapes. Most recently, he has used it to examine a mid-fourteenth century map of Great Britain known as the Gough Map. The Gough Map is a fascinating document, opening up questions of its production, purpose, and provenance, all of which are undocumented. GIS allows us to do some statistical analyses on the geographical features shown on the map (such as towns and cities) to explore its un-evenness in cartographic ‘accuracy’, and thus use the content of the map as a ‘way in’ to working out why it was made, how, and for whom. This, then, raises broader questions of surveying and cartography practices in fourteenth-century England, as well as statecraft and geographical knowledge. View pictures >>
31st Annual Symposium on Portuguese Traditions
Saturday-Sunday, April 19-20, 2008 Organized by Claude Hulet (Emeritus Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA). CMRS is one of the co-sponsors.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Raphael’s Disputa: Adoration and Disputation”
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
With Professors Marcia Hall (Temple University), Franco Mormando (Boston College), Joanna Woods-Marsden (UCLA)
In 1509-10, Raphael painted the four walls of Pope Julius II's personal library (now the Stanza della Segnatura) in the Vatican with subjects reflecting the organization of medieval libraries into four faculties of Jurisprudence, Poetry, Philosophy (represented by the image now known as the School of Athens), and Theology (represented by the Disputa), the last two on opposing walls. Presided over by the Trinity, Saints, Prophets, and Fathers of the Church, the various figures of the Disputa discuss the central sacramental mystery of Christianity, the doctrine of the Eucharist, which had been contentious philosophically for three centuries. On the opposite wall, the School of Athens shows an ideal assembly of the great philosophers of pagan antiquity, led by an otherworldly Plato and an earthbound Aristotle. Christianity and pre-Christianity open complementary paths to truth, one by way of faith and revelation, the other by reason and observation - the choice between the two ways stimulating moral, theological and philosophical argument. View video >>
Fifth Rebecca Catz Memorial Lecture, “Portuguese Seafarers and the Quest for Rewards and Social Status, 1640-1777 ”
Friday, April 25, 2008
This year's lecture is presented by Professor Francis Dutra (History, UC Santa Barbara). From 1640-1777, hundreds of men with seafaring experience attempted to receive patents of nobility, knighthoods in the prestigious Portuguese military orders of Santiago and Avis, and financial rewards for themselves, their sons and grandsons and as dowries for their daughters. Knighthoods in the military orders made them members of the lower nobility. Most were not successful, though about a hundred did become knights of these two orders. Prof. Dutra will describe the social and maritime backgrounds of these seafarers and the obstacles they had to overcome to obtain the rewards and social status they desired. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “The Valladolid Junta of 1550-51: Native American Rights Disputed in Spain”
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 With Professors José M. Hernández (UNED), Carole Goldberg (Law, UCLA), Anthony Pagden (Political Science, UCLA).
Juán Ginés de Sepúlveda, a minister of the Spanish crown, and Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary bishop, met in Valladolid in 1550-51 in a disputation about the rights of people conquered by Spain across the Atlantic. Las Casas successfully contested Sepúlveda’s claims that violence against Native Americans was justified because of their immoral behavior, idolatrous worship and sub-human nature. The dispute echoed earlier juntas or consultations, going back to 1504, in which lawyers, theologians and other experts advised the Spanish monarchy on its policy in the New World. Prominent in these discussions was Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘slavery by nature,’ which, as long as Aristotle’s authority remained beyond dispute, had enormous implications for law, morality and politics both in theory and in practice. View video >>
“Processing Gender in Law and Other Literatures”
Friday-Saturday, May 2-3, 2008
This symposium, organized by Professors Karen Cunningham and Lowell Gallagher (both of the English Department, UCLA) will examine how gender is inflected through encounters with legal processes in early modernity. It will bring together a range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory, and early modern literatures. Encouraging dialogue across and among these fields, the conference will consider such topics as sovereignty, including women’s political writings; children in legal discourse; rape; sodomy; and slander. Among the figures to be discussed are Helen of Troy, Mary Queen of Scots, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean Bodin. View pictures >>
CMRS Lecture, “Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence” Monday, May 5, 2008
Professor Dale Kent (UC Riverside) considers a question that pre-occupied Renaissance Florentines, as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Could true friendship exist within the framework of instrumental friendship or patronage, upon which most men of this era depended for protection and support?
Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern pre-occupations with disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, Kent explores aspects of love and friendship emphasized in fifteenth century discussions of their meaning, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “Galileo: Scientific Disputation as Courtly Performance”
Thursday, May 8, 2008
With Professor Mario Biagioli (History, Harvard University). The scandalous end-game of Galileo’s condemnation by his church played itself out not in disputation but before a tribunal with exchanges of written documents. Earlier in his career, however, when the Starry Messenger of 1610 made Galileo a celebrity, fame won him a more visible place at the Medici court in Tuscany, and this new role soon found him disputing with a philosopher about Jupiter’s newly discovered moons. Treated by the Grand Duke like a patrician, Galileo had nonetheless entered a world where learned debates on science and medicine were often staged as entertainments for princes and courtiers. He soon saw the dangers lurking in facile rejoinders to witty questions about sensitive topics. Even after Galileo ceased to perform at court for his Medici patrons, the rules and conventions of courtly disputing still shaped the immortal literary expressions of his science. View videos >>
Seventeenth History of the Book Lecture: “ ‘A notable and famous librarie in the Archbishop of Canterburies house’: John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft, and the Foundation of Lambeth Palace Library”
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The second History of the Book Lecture for this academic year is presented by Professor James Carley (York University). Much has been written about the collection bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1575), and the library set up in Oxford by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602, but the equally impressive library established at Lambeth Palace by Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1610) has not received the same attention. By the terms of his will, Bancroft bequeathed his collection—more than 470 manuscripts and almost 5,600 printed books—‘unto my successors and to the Arch-Bishops of Canterbury successively for ever’ and he made very strict conditions for its preservation. Under his successor George Abbot a catalogue was ‘accurately and exquisitely’ produced, King James himself being directly involved. In spite of various vicissitudes, including a direct hit to the Palace in the second World War, the collection remains virtually intact, many of the books in their original bindings. In this talk, Professor Carley will discuss the highly revealing preface to the 1612 catalogue, describe the original layout of the library, examine Bancroft’s sources—many of his books came from his predecessor John Whitgift—and look at representative examples. As the eighteenth-century antiquary John Bagford observed, it was, and is, a ‘well furnisht library’, full of unexpected treasures. View pictures >>
Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, “Female Paths to Holiness in Coptic Egypt”
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
A lecture by Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Heike Behlmer (Macquairie University); co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History. Christian literature, written in Coptic from Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt, has transmitted a number of lives of female saints, especially martyrs and ascetics from the 4th through the 6th centuries. In addition to giving an overview of this literature, the talk will focus on a second ‘female paths to holiness,’ namely the encounter of women with the protagonist in the (far more numerous) lives of the male saints. Dr. Behlmer studied Egyptology, Coptic Studies and the Ancient Near East at Göttingen University. Her dissertation, published in 1996, edited, translated and analysed a sermon by the abbot Shenoute, the foremost writer in Coptic, from a papyrus manuscript preserved in the Egyptian Museum, Turin, Italy. From 1995 to 2004 she was Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Coptic Studies at Göttingen University, in 2003/2004 Visiting Professor of Coptic Studies at Munich University. She joined Macquarie University in Sydney Australia in late 2004 to develop the new online M.A. program in Coptic Studies. View pictures >>
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: Disputing What Hell Is”
Thursday, May 15, 2008
With Professors David Riggs (Stanford University), Michael J.B. Allen (UCLA), Debora Shuger (UCLA).
One of the masterworks of the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus leaves its audience with an unforgettable picture of the heroic individual struggling against moral rules, religious constraints and academic conventions which were still stronger than any single person, however daring and ambitious. The low-born Faustus uses his learning, including mastery of the technique of disputation, to climb to fame and power. Dissatisfied with the ordinary rewards of success, Faustus turns to magic and overcomes time itself. The play becomes a psychomachia, a spiritual battle, between forces like the Good and Bad Angels of the play, which turns into a disputation about knowledge and the nature of hell itself. View video >>
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture, “The Son of God in Jewish Mysticism”
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Faculty/student seminar by Professor Moshe Idel (Hebrew University), “The Son of God in Jewish Mysticism.” Presented by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies; co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture, "Death by Effigy: The Power of Images and the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century"
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Lecture by Professor Luis Corteguera (University of Kansas), sponsored by the UCLA Department of Art History and the UCLA Department of History.
California Medieval History Seminar
Saturday, May 31, 2008
The California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance and come prepared to discuss them. The California Medieval History Seminar is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the CMRS, the Huntington Library, and the Caltech Huntington Committee for the Humanities.
