A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Courtly Conviviality and Gastronomy in Early Modern France and Italy: Society, Politics, and Aesthetics”
Thursday, April 2 – Saturday, April 4, 2009 This three-day conference will analyze the development of gastronomy and conviviality in Italy and France and the regions in between and/or bordering (Savoy, Grisons, Ticino, Belgium, etc.) from the times of Taillevent (Guillaume Tirel: 1310-1395) to the publication of Le Cuisinier Français by François-Pierre de la Varenne (1651). The center of this scenario is occupied by extremely significant historical events such as the Council of Costanz (1417) and the composition of the schism, the rebirth of Rome as capital of the Catholic world, and the sack of Rome in 1527. The central figures are, of course, Francis I, Catherine De Medici, her son Henri III, Marie de Medici and her husband Henry IV. The crucial shift from Stoicism to Epicureanism as it emerges from writings of Lorenzo Valla, Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi), and other humanists, as well as from the actual cookbooks (Maestro Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria; Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera; Cristoforo di Messisbugo’s Banchetti e composizione di vivande, culminating in La Varenne’sCuisinier françois) will be discussed. The gastronomical and convivial scene will be studied as the locus where Theater and Music (and Architecture) receive a vital impulse toward the creation of a multimedia event avant-la-lettre. Among the participants are Professors Luigi Ballerini (Italian, UCLA), Jean-Claude Carron (French and Francophone Studies, UCLA), Massimo Ciavolella(Italian, UCLA), Cynthia Skenazi (French, UC Santa Barbara), and PhD candidateGianluca Rizzo (Italian, UCLA). The conference is cosponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the UCLA Department of Italian. View pictures >>
CMRS Faculty Roundtable
“A Saracen Knight at King Arthur’s Court: Palamedes in the Prose Tristan”
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
In this talk, Sylvia Huot (Professor of Medieval French Literature and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge University) will discuss Palamedes, the Saracen knight, as the principal rival for Iseult’s love, resulting in a double triangle at the centre of the romance: Tristan, Mark and Iseult but also Tristan, Palamedes, and Iseult. Palamedes’s outsider status, as a non-Christian who is not a member of any of the royal courts, complicates his participation in the love intrigue. He can be compared to Galeholt, the fourth member of the central love intrigue in the Prose Lancelot, who, as a halfbreed giant, is similarly something of an outsider. View pictures >>
A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Writing Down the Myths: The Construction of Mythology in Classical and Medieval Traditions”
Thursday, April 16 – Sunday, April 19, 2009
Contemporary scholarly definitions of and approaches to myth, though influenced by the fieldwork and findings of anthropologists and folklorists working with living oral traditions over the last hundred years, are still grounded in venerable literary classics that purport to sum up ancient traditional stories about gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, primal events, and the beginnings of the world. Such texts, which assemble related narratives into “mythologies,” become canonical formulations that can function as sources, templates, and inspirations for other literary and scholarly works, both within their own literary-historical contexts and beyond them. There are cases, however, where these codified mythologies serve as epitaphs, seemingly marking the end of particular (oral) traditions instead of their (literary) revival. This conference will examine the various factors (literary, cultural, political) that led to the production of mythological compendia in the Classical and Late- Antique world, and the extent to which the agenda that produced parallel works in certain medieval cultures of northwest Europe (Ireland, Wales, Iceland) operated along similar or even historically related lines. Presentations and discussions will focus on the cultural and literary contexts behind the “mythographic urge” in Classical Greek and Latin literature, as well as in Western European traditions of the Middle Ages (particularly Celtic and Norse), and on the possible historical links and typological parallels among works such as Apollodorus’s Library, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, the Irish Battle of Mag Tuired, and the Welsh Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Some of the questions to be considered are: What was the transmission history of pre-medieval mythographic works in the Middle Ages, and to what extent and to whom were they available as models to the post-Classical world? How “authentic” are ancient and medieval mythographies, and how do we determine that authenticity? To what uses were they put? Are they attempts to negotiate received or developing concepts of history, or are they formulations of an anti-historical poetic? And what are the differences in function, approach, and subtext between these pre-modern “write-ups” of myth and modern learned and popular handbooks of mythology? Mythographic issues in other cultures will also be considered. Organized by UCLA Professors Joseph F. Nagy (English) and Kendra Willson(Scandinavian), and UCLA graduate students Malcolm Harris (English), Eric Kristensson (Scandinavian), Katherine McLoone (Comparative Literature), Anna Pagé (Indo-European Studies), and Elizabeth Thornton (Indo-European Studies). Download the program schedule as a PDF or webpage. View pictures >>
Sixth Annual Rebecca D. Catz Memorial Lecture
"20th-Century Travel Narratives: Portuguese Writers' Impressions of the United States "
Monday, April 20, 2009
Presented by Francisco Cota Fagundes (Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts, Amherst). View pictures >>
CMRS Seminar
"Vikings and Pre-Raphaelites"
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Presented by Professor Paul Acker (Department of English, St. Louis University; and Visiting Professor, English, University of New Mexico). This lecture is in conjuction with the CMRS Seminar, Advanced Old Norse Poetry (Norse 222), taught by Professor Kendra Willson (Scandinavian Section, UCLA).
CMRS Faculty Roundtable
"Mention my name in Verona; was Cassio really a Florentine?"
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 A discussion with Dr. Steve Sohmer (Fleming Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and CMRS Associate); from Air Force One to Spago's, a fanciful coterie of New Close Reading practitioners dig for (and discover) Michael Cassio's actual roots. View pictures >>
Annual Will & Lois Matthew Pepys Lecture
“Cold Comfort: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in the Middle Ages”
Thursday, April 30, 2009
This year’s distinguished guest speaker, Peter King of the University of Toronto, will present “Cold Comfort: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in the Middle Ages.” In this talk, illustrated with images drawn from manuscripts and works of art, Professor King will discuss the Consolation and the various medieval responses to the fact that the consolations Boethius offers don’t seem particularly palatable, or even Christian for the matter. View pictures >>
CMRS Faculty Roundtable
“Astrology and the Scientific Revolution: A Reappraisal”
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Dr. H. Darrel Rutkin (Dibner Fellow, Huntington Library) contends that the history of astrology, in particular, the story of its protracted criticism and ultimate removal from the realm of legitimate natural knowledge, is central for understanding the transition from premodern Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy to modern Newtonian science. This removal was neither obvious nor unproblematic. Astrology was not some sort of magical nebulous hodge-podge of beliefs; rather, astrology emerged in the thirteenth century as a fully mathematical system which served to integrate astronomy and natural philosophy, precisely the aim of the “new science” of the seventeenth century. As such, it becomes a fundamentally important historical question to determine why this promising astrological synthesis should have been rejected in favor of a rather different mathematical natural philosophy and one with a very different causal structure than Aristotle's. View pictures >>
CMRS Faculty Roundtable
“History Unauthorized: English Medieval Chronicles, Derivative Textuality, and Scribal Authorship”
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Professor Matthew Fisher (English, UCLA) will track the textual and ideological development of insular chronicles in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English from Bede to the middle of the fourteenth century. In particular, the talk will explore the dominant and antithetical paradigms of insular history writing as constructed by Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the elaborate reconciliations performed by thirteenth and fourteenth century vernacular texts. Ultimately, the talk looks to move away from print-culture assumptions about originality and derivativity, and considers medieval scribes as readers, revisers, and ultimately authors of medieval literary and historiographical texts. View pictures >>
“Dom Aræran: Anglo-Saxon Poets and Patrons” Thursday, May 14, 2009 Heather Maring (English, ASU Tempe), received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Having published articles on Old and Middle English literature in Oral Tradition and other periodicals, she is currently preparing a monograph on oral and ritual poetics in medieval English literature. Her talk will focus on the complex relationship between poet and patron in Anglo-Saxon England, as reflected in Widsith and other texts. Presented by the UCLA Colloquium for Oral and Popular Culture Studies (COPTS), the UCLA Department of English, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Campus Programs Committee Mini-Fund.
California Medieval History Seminar, Spring 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Papers are sent to registrants before the meeting and 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.
CMRS Seminar
“The Many Faces of Odinn”
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Professor Anatoly Liberman (German, Scandinavian, Dutch, University of Minnesota). View pictures >>
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Sagas and World View”
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
In this talk, Gislí Sigurđsson (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland) will focus on how the Icelandic sagas can be read as a reflection of a story-telling tradition in which knowledge about the outside world was mediated through descriptions of journeys and activities, with directions and information about land qualities and topographical features included as an integral part of the narrative, serving not only an artistic function but also a very practical one: To keep the knowledge about the geography of faraway places alive in a culture that did not use maps and books to store and mediate its learning. View pictures >>
A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and Geographical thought in the Latin West and Beyond, 300-1600”
Thursday, May 28 – Saturday, May 30, 2009 Geography as it was understood and practiced in the Middle Ages, within both eastern and western traditions, and as represented both graphically and textually, is a subject of renewed interest and importance among historians, philologists and geographers. This conference aims to promote an exchange between those of different disciplines working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance on two themes:“Translation, transmission, transculturation” and “Mapping, imagining, placing.” This conference was organized by Dr. Keith D. Lilley (School of Geography, Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast) and the late Professor Denis Cosgrove (Geography, UCLA). Support has been provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding from the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG. A PDF file of the conference abstracts is available at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/mapping_abstracts.pdf and the conference program is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/map_med_geos_conf.pdf. View pictures >>
