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Voces Nostrates Lecture Series (“Voices of Our Own”) UCLA’s world-class faculty in medieval and Renaissance studies includes scholars of the greatest eminence. Voces Nostrates, Voices of Our Own is a lecture series presented by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies that honors these distinguished members of the CMRS community and brings their voices to the many audiences that the Center serves. Over the course of the 2009-10 academic year, we will hear six UCLA faculty members, each speaking about a topic of his or her current research. Teofilo F. Ruiz on November 17, 2009 Susan McClary on January 22, 2010 V. A. Kolve on February 17, 2010 Calvin Normore on March 11, 2010 Debora Shuger on April 15, 2010 Joanna Woods-Marsden on May 6, 2010
November 17, 2009
Teofilo F. Ruiz (PhD Princeton, 1974) is Professor of History at UCLA. He has published more than fifty articles in national and international scholarly journals and ten books, most recently, Spain: Centuries of Crises, 1300-1469 (2007; Spanish translation 2008). His Crisis and Continuity. Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile(1994) was awarded the Premio del Rey prize by the American Historical Association as the best book on Spanish History before 1580 for 1994-95. He is currently working on books about festivals in late medieval and early modern Spain, and the history of the western Mediterranean. In 1994-95, he was selected as one of four Outstanding Teachers of the Year in the United States by the Carnegie Foundation. He received the Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2007-09 and was selected one of UCLA’s Distinguished Teachers in 2008. He joined the CMRS faculty in 1998. January 22, 2010
Professor McClary (Ph.D. Harvard, 1976) specializes in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. In contrast with an aesthetic tradition that treats music as ineffable and transcendent, her work engages with the signifying dimensions of musical procedures and deals with this elusive medium as a set of social practices. She is best known for her bookFeminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of Madonna. She is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992; Italian edition. 2007), and coeditor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (1987). Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Professor Normore, holds dual appointments as Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, and the Macdonald Chair of Moral Philosophy at McGill University, and is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Queensland. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on medieval philosophy, and has written extensively on that topic. He is also interested in the history of logic and political philosophy. Since 1997, Professor Normore has convened the annual E. A. Moody Medieval Philosophy Colloquium at UCLA. He became a member of CMRS the same year. Thursday, April 15, 2010
Professor Debora Shuger (English, UCLA) will discuss the Little Academy, most of whose participants were young women; it was they who founded the Little Academy and they who wrote the beautiful manuscripts preserving their conversations. However, the earliest accounts of Little Gidding do not mention the Story Books (so the manuscripts were called, “story” here meaning “history”) and later ones treated them (apparently sight unseen) as the work of Little Gidding’s presiding spirit, Nicholas Ferrar. Hence, although portions of the manuscripts were first printed in 1899, the remainder in 1938 and 1963, they have been totally ignored, despite the massive efforts of the past decades to recover the canon of early women’s writing. And yet, as Professor Shuger argues in this talk, the Little Gidding Story Books are the most significant, and most radical, female-authored texts between the fourteenth century and the English Civil War. Debora Shuger (PhD Stanford, 1983) is Professor of English at UCLA. Her research interests are wide-ranging and include Tudor-Stuart devotional poetry and prose, theology and biblical exegesis, political thought, legal history, rhetoric, and life writing (biography, memoires, diaries). She is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (2001) andCensorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (2006). She joined the CMRS faculty in 1989. Thursday, May 6, 2010
Joanna Woods-Marsden (PhD Harvard, 1979) is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at UCLA and a member of CMRS since 1984. She specializes in Renaissance courts and artists, portraiture, and gender studies. She is the author of numerous works including Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (1998), and edited Titian: Materiality, Istoria, Portraits(2007). She is currently completing The Visual Rhetoric of Male Power and Female Beauty: Gendered Identity in Titian’s Court Portraits.
Download and print the complete program brochure at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/voces_nostrates.pdf. (PDF 824 kb)
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University of California, Los Angeles
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Box 951485, 302 Royce Hall Los Angeles CA 90095-1485 310-825-1880 | cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu | www.cmrs.ucla.edu
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Professor 
The lurid biblical story of John the Baptist, King Herod, and Herod’s precocious stepdaughter became an operatic hit in 1905 when Richard Strauss composed a musical setting of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salome. Dripping with fin-de-siècle decadence, the opera features hyperchromatic harmonies, orientalist dances, the fetishizing of a saint’s body, plus the thrills of incest and necrophilia. Wilde and Strauss punish their Salome by crushing her to death at the final curtain. But an earlier musical version of this character — la Figlia in Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista (1675) — manages to triumph at the end, celebrating her seductive wiles even as Herod recoils in horror at what he has done. Not coincidentally, Stradella composed for Queen Christina of Sweden, who took up residence in Rome after her infamous abdication. The sole female patron among the popes and cardinals who called the shots in this city, she fostered representations of powerful women and even broke prohibitions that usually guaranteed that castrati played all high-voiced roles. In this talk, 
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The Little Gidding community, celebrated by T. S. Eliot in the last of his Four Quartets, was an extended family of around thirty persons, mostly young, who in 1625 purchased and renovated a dilapidated manor in remotest Huntingdonshire, where for the next three decades they adopted a semi-monastic lifestyle that included a regular cycle of daily worship and nightly vigils, tending the sick, sheltering the homeless, teaching the Psalter (and providing dinner) to local children, fashioning magnificently illustrated Gospel harmonies, and establishing the Little Academy where members of the community discussed theology, ethics, and history.
Professor 