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Calendar
Mellon Interdisciplinary Seminar Professor Christine Chism (English, UCLA) presents “Cross-Currents: Ibn Battuta, Ibn Jubayr and the Muslim Mediterranean.” Seminar Leaders: Eric Jager (English, UCLA) and James Schultz (Germanic Languages, UCLA. Information about the entire seminar series is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/mediterranean2.html.
CMRS Roundtable “Medieval Spolia in the Grand-St-Bernard: Continuing Sacrality from Jupiter Poenius to Mont Joux to Bourg-St-Pierre,” by Professor Patrick Hunt (Archaeology, Stanford University, and CMRS Associate). At the Alpine summit of the Grand-St-Bernard pass between Switzerland and Italy, the Vespasianic Roman temple to Jupiter Poeninus (circa 70 CE) was desecrated under Emperor Theodosius around 379 CE as extrapolated from Augustine (De Civitate Dei 5). Significant stone remains of the temple with conspicuous Roman epigraphy were later brought down to a monastic center in Bourg-St-Pierre, Valais, Switzerland, ten miles away and gradually reincorporated into various phases of the medieval church. Other relict stone materials were eventually built into the Grand-St-Bernard monastery at the summit by Bernard of Menthon and his followers, again in deliberate visual contexts. Professor Hunt discusses the use of spolia from the temple to Jupiter Poeninus in these medieval monasteries.
A Celebration of Father Burns’ Life, Scholarship, and Teaching
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Library, and the UCLA Departments of History and Spanish & Portuguese.
The CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series All of the medieval music that survives today does so as written texts, and the study of these texts has traditionally been separated into two spheres of inquiry: musicological study of the music—the “Work of Art”—itself; and codicology, the study of the manuscripts that transmit these musical works. This conference, organized by Professor Elizabeth Randell Upton (Musicology, UCLA), addresses the growing awareness among musicologists as well as medievalists in other disciplines that the study of manuscripts and the study of the texts they contain can and should be integrated to a greater degree. Some of the questions to be considered are: How does the act of writing change or shape the musical or poetic texts that are written? How does the nature of the material to be copied change the procedures of scribes and book-makers? How do the desires of composers, writers, readers and patrons affect the composition of works and the writing of books? How were the activities of medieval writers, composers, performers, scribes, and readers interrelated? And how can we, as scholars today, understand both the material that is being communicated to us and the recording technologies that allow us to hear sounds first uttered centuries ago? Support for this conference has been provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding provided by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science. A webpage schedule is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/conference_music_nov09_program.html. The complete program (PDF 1.3MB) is available to download and print at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/music_conference_2009.pdf.
Mellon Interdisciplinary Seminar Professor Adnan Husain (History, Queen’s University, Toronto) presents “The Question of Islam and Muslims in Europe’s Mediterranean.” Seminar Leaders: Gabriel Piterberg (History, UCLA) and Teofilo Ruiz (History, UCLA). Information about the entire seminar series is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/mediterranean2.html.
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture The language-world of early modern England was thick with oaths and vows, from casual profanity in taverns to the solemn undertakings of those marrying or accepting public office. There were religious, legal, and philosophical debates about what it meant to swear and how firmly one should keep a promise. The literature of the time reflects this, but Shakespeare’s plays are unusually rich in speech acts of this sort, doing structural, psychological and verbally minute, inventive work. Ranging across the output, but paying particular attention to Troilus and Cressida and The Winter’s Tale, this lecture by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar John Kerrigan (Professor of English 2000, University of Cambridge) seeks to rectify scholarly neglect of the topic, highlighting Shakespeare’s awareness of the paradoxes of oath-taking and vowing and their potency in performance. John Kerrigan is Professor of English 2000 at the University of Cambridge. Among his books are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (2008). He is currently completing a book on British and Irish poetry since the 1960s.
California Medieval History Seminar, Fall 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. To be added to the announcement list, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.Place: Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Mellon Interdisciplinary Seminar Professor Teresa Shawcross (Schulman Research Fellow in History, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University) presents “Identities in Transition: Historical Writing and Regime Change in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.” Seminar Leader: Claudia Rapp (History, UCLA). Information about the entire seminar series is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/mediterranean2.html.
Voces Nostrates Lecture Professor Teofilo F Ruiz (History, and Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA) will examine the emergence of discourses on purity of blood in mid-fifteenth century Castile from wider and more pervasive discourses on Visigothic blood and nobility. His talk will emphasize the contrast between literary imaginings of blood and lineage and how these ideas worked in the real world. 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. Information about the entire series at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/voces_nostrates.html. Download and print the complete program brochure at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/voces_nostrates.pdf.
Mellon Interdisciplinary Seminar Professor Alexander Metcalfe (History, Lancaster University) presents “The Language(s) of Power in Medieval Sicily.” Seminar Leaders: Christine Chism (English, UCLA) and Peter Stacey (History, UCLA). In the eleventh century, the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily brought together regions and peoples with an extreme diversity of laws, customs, languages and beliefs. The prevalent view of the Norman rulers is a positive one, not least because of their apparently tolerant and inclusive disposition towards the mixed population of Latins, Greeks and Muslims, who were seen as different but equal peoples. By examining the various roles that language played as an indicator of the region’s socio-political dynamics, this lecture presented by Alexander Metcalfe (History, Lancaster University) challenges many of the assumptions that underpin the perception of a benign and enlightened State. Instead, Dr. Metcalfe shows how the rulers’ inequitable distribution of power and hierarchical socio-religious organization quickly eroded the status of the Arab-Muslim communities, destabilizing them until their eventual collapse in the 1200s led to the creation of a lasting frontier between Latin-Christian “Europe” and Arab-Muslim North Africa. Information about the entire seminar series is at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/mediterranean2.html.
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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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