TO BE RESCHEDULED SPRING 2021 - CMRS Symposium The word “fool” is itself a performer, a loaded term prone to an explosion of meaning even when handled with care. Even before the Middle Ages, this figure of ambiguity—called variously jongleur, jester, madman, storyteller--was both castigated as vulgar and heralded as purveyor of literary art, derided for revealing humanity’s foibles and yet welcomed for speaking wisdom in the guise of nonsense. In the early modern period, virtually all fools wore the…

CANCELED - The Spring 2020 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The papers under discussion will be available for download in advance of the…

TO BE RESCHEDULED FALL 2020 - CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Susan Phillips (English, Northwestern University). What happens when the schoolmaster is banished from the early modern classroom? The popular vernacular textbooks that flooded the European market in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries posed precisely this question when they claimed—on title pages and in prefatory material—not simply to stand in for the schoolmaster, but to displace him altogether. Most were practical how-to guides that offered entertaining dialogues and real-world…

TO BE RESCHEDULED - Annual Armand Hammer Art History Lecture This lecture by Elizabeth Hill Boone (Art History, Tulane), focuses on the painted books of Aztec Mexico, sixteenth-century documents that some people consider to be works of Art and others consider to contain Writing.  The talk thus explores that place where our Western conceptions of Art and Writing come closest together. The Aztecs and their neighbors conceptualized writing and image-making as a single cultural category, one that involved a nonverbal…

CANCELED - “Gender, Architecture and Erasure in the Fifteenth-Century Andes” Stella Nair (Professor, Art History, UCLA) Women played critical roles throughout Andean History. Yet gender biases set forth in the Iberian colonization of the Andes and continued by scholars have silenced and effectively erased women’s roles in designing, constructing, and giving meaning to the Inca built environment. In this paper, Nair explores how surviving written and material records can provide critical clues to the ways in which indigenous women defined…

CANCELED - Demetra Vogiatzaki, History of Architecture, Harvard University 2020 UCLA Ahmanson Research Fellow This presentation investigates the continuum of dreams and architecture staged in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a 1499 publication that exerted significant influence in art and architecture for more than two centuries. Published by the press of Aldo Manuzio, the bizarre narrative of Hypnerotomachia unfolds in a series of imaginary worlds dreamt up by the protagonist and is accompanied by 172 woodcuts, most of them illustrating monuments whose designs…

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Celtic Colloquium, the Department of English, Dean David Schaberg and the Humanities Division, the Program in Indo-European Studies, and the Campus Programs Committee of the Program Activities Board. THURSDAY, MARCH 5 | UCLA ROYCE 314 2:00 Welcoming Remarks SESSION I - Chair: Joseph Nagy (Harvard/UCLA) 2:15 - Abigail Burnyeat (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands) “Ban-shenchus gu seanchas nam ban: Metatext, Audience, and the Co-creation of…

Annual William & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture Angela McShane (Head of Research, Wellcome Collection; Associate Fellow, History, University of Warwick) Pop-music collections are remarkable things: expressing individual taste and evidencing engagement with the products of the music industry, they become nostalgic compilations almost from the first moment of their construction. Judging how far an individual’s collection represents the popular music scene is relatively simple, since charts and catalogues, categorized by genre, ordered by performer, date of release and overall…

"Michael Servetus, his clashes with deans Tagault and Lax, and their serious consequences: his anonymous works from 1538 ahead, and his exile from Spain in 1527" Miguel Gonzalez Ancin (Independent Scholar) This paper examines the medical, grammatical, biblical and poetical works by Michael Servetus - studied by servetian González Echeverría- which were printed anonymously in the print-shop of Jean Frellon in Lyon. The main reason for their anonymity was the fierce trial that Servetus suffered in 1538  by the Univ.…

The Winter 2020 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. These are the researchers and their papers that will be discussed: Maya Maskerinec (University of…

Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies University of California, Los Angeles Royce Hall 314 February 7, 2020 9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast 10:00 – 10:10 Opening Remarks Anatolii Tokmantcev (Director of the 2020 Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) Dr. S. Peter Cowe (Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) Panel 1: Homeland and Diaspora: Displacement and its Effects Chair: Armen Adamian, Ethnomusicology, UCLA 10:10 – 10:30 Ani Shahinian, “The Martyrdom of Awag…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Mary Channen Caldwell (Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania). St. Nicholas was unquestionably one of the most popular and accessible saints in medieval Europe, serving as patron saint to everyone from sailors and unmarried women, to clerics, children, and repentant thieves. Due to his role as “everyman’s saint,” Nicholas was, from an early period, widely celebrated in song, drama, and literature in many forms and languages. Among the plentiful music composed in his name,…

This symposium presents an opportunity to think about different methodologies and different ways of writing history when faced with the challenge of sources. Can we still use the traditional narrative within a connected history of brokers, frontiers, and cultural transfers, or should we be thinking about different ways of telling history, developing, for instance, network narratives or fragmented narratives?  Organized by Zrinka Stahuljak (Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies; CMRS Director; UCLA) and Stephanie Bosch Santana (Comparative Literature, UCLA).…

CMRS Conference Organized by Jessica Goldberg (History, UCLA) and Luke Yarbrough (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA). Click here to see the complete conference schedule, how to register, and further details >> Preliminary drafts of petition to the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir (11th c. CE). Cambridge University Library, T-S Ar. 30.278, recto. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. This conference investigates how law shaped the boundaries of communities in the early medieval period in the Byzantine,…

CMRS Pop-Up Workshop Celine Dauverd (Associate Professor, History, University of Colorado Boulder) The Fall of Constantinople shook the western world. But it also forced the head of the Christian world to reinvent itself. Countless Muslim raids over the Italian peninsula coupled with the need to preserve Rome as a sovereign city-state compelled the papacy to design a new imperial theory. Ignoring the precepts of the bull In coenia domeni and demonstrating instead doctrinal inconsistencies, the rising tide of the Turks…

“The Hypocrisy of Signs: Hermeneutics of Action and Belief in the Aftermath of the Sephardic Diaspora (Italy and Catholic Europe, XVI-XVII centuries)” David Sebastiani (PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy) Each CMRS Research Workshop is based on a pre-circulated research paper that the presenter—who may be a CMRS faculty member, associate, affiliate, or graduate student—wishes to discuss with colleagues. All attendees must read the paper under consideration and be prepared to contribute to the discussion. Click here to register…

Richard & Mary Rouse Annual History of the Book Lecture Joshua Calhoun (Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison) Click here to register to attend. Paper loves water, but the hydrophilic property of paper is both a feature and a bug: it cannot be created without water, and it can be easily destroyed by water. This talk explores the revolutionary, vulnerable qualities of early handmade paper and considers the ecological resources we use to preserve the documentary evidence we…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture This lecture by Professor Ad Putter (Professor of Medieval English and Director, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, University of Bristol) explores the multilingualism of England in the fifteenth century by examining the life and works of the first English printer, William Caxton. In standard histories of the English language, Caxton and the printing press appear as agents in the standardisation of English, but Caxton's language was in many ways unusual, and shows the impact…

Sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. (Please note the time change, now starting at 5:00 pm, not 6:00.) Please click here to register to attend. No fee. limited seating. The Ornament of the World tells a story from the past that’s especially timely today: the story of a remarkable time in history when Muslims, Christians and Jews forged a common cultural identity that frequently transcended their religious differences. Ornament will retrace…

This talk will be based on Professor Calderwood's current book project, which examines representations of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia) in contemporary literature, film, television, music, and tourism. Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Harvard University Press, 2018). His articles have appeared in PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Journal…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Ivan Lupić (English, Stanford University). “Had I been toothed like him ,” says Venus in Shakespeare’s 1593 narrative poem, “with kissing him I should have killed him first.” We learn from the rest of the poem that Adonis has been transformed into a flower and that Venus has gone to immure herself at Paphos, but we do not learn what happened to the boar. The loving boar’s fate had, however, been the subject of…

CMRS Italian Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture This lecture by Professor Massimo Riva (Italian, Brown University) presents a pilot project of the Brown University Digital Publications Initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation: a digital monograph focused on Italy as an imagined country, and illustrious or forgotten figures from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian art, history and culture. Six tales, or case histories, that are also episodes of a larger narrative which describes the role played by curious optical devices such as…

“Jesuit Pulpits with Wood Sculptures of Africa, America, Asia, and Europe Personifications” Maryanne Horowitz (Professor, History, Occidental College; CMRS Associate) Each CMRS Research Workshop is based on a pre-circulated research paper that the presenter—who may be a CMRS faculty member, associate, affiliate, or graduate student—wishes to discuss with colleagues. All attendees must read the paper under consideration and be prepared to contribute to the discussion. Click here to register to attend.

CMRS Pop-Up Faculty-Graduate Student Workshop This workshop understands the term “passage” in two ways: first, as the physical passage or journey that serves, as much as the shore, to define Mediterranean spaces and, second, as the specific literary passage that grounds our thinking about “the Mediterranean” as theoretical, or even disciplinary, space. We hope this workshop will be of particular interest to graduate students. Although the core faculty members (see below) focus on medieval and early modern literatures, contributions from…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Jay Reed (Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University) The Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega’s three surviving Latin odes (from around 1532-36) have begun to be studied for the way they—like his much larger Spanish output—juxtapose and intertwine imperial and erotic themes. In both bodies of work there emerges a complex, ambivalent stance toward the project (which Garcilaso the courtier and soldier avowedly participated in) of the literary and political restoration of Rome in…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Jay Reed (Professor, Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University) considers John Clapham's Latin poem Narcissus (published in London in 1591) which heavily embroiders Ovid's ancient version of the myth with such later European traditions as the allegory of love and the Virgin Queen. This poem of the English Renaissance, as a product of its time and place, demands to be read with and against the vernacular traditions that it subsumes into its highly classicizing Latin.

The Fall 2019 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The papers under discussion are available for download in advance of the seminar. The papers…

“Franks that are Acclimatized are Better: Anecdotal History and Everyday Life in Usāma ibn Munqidh’s Kitab al I‘tibar” Gina Lorenz (Graduate Student, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) In his Kitab al I‘tibar, the warrior, gentleman, and poet Usāma ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) describes Franks as beasts, devils, and friends. He tells tales of epic battles and shared dinner tables, of conflict and mutual understanding. What is particularly compelling about Usāma’s text is that he focuses on the particular – on everyday…

A  conference presented by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,  UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center – David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, UCLA  ArtSci Center, and Caltech. This conference was proposed and brought to fruition primarily through the inspiration and efforts of Francis Wells. Organized by: Francis Wells (Cardiac Surgeon, Royal Papworth Hospital and Cambridge University, UK) Massimo Ciavolella (Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, UCLA) Noel G. Boyle (Professor of Medicine/Cardiology, UCLA) Morteza Gharib (Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering, Caltech)…

A Book Discussion with Lamia Balafrej (UCLA), Margaret S. Graves (Indiana University), Domenico Ingenito (UCLA), and Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University) Margaret Graves (Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Indiana University), Domenico Ingenito (Assistant Professor of Classical Persian, UCLA), and Kishwar Rizvi (Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University) will discuss The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), recently published by Lamia Balafrej (Assistant Professor of the Arts of the Islamic World, UCLA). This book…

CMRS Conference Narratives of metamorphosis, from human into other living and mineral forms, have long provided an important tool for thinking through the complexities of our relationship with the world around us. From Ovid to David Cronenberg, thinkers and artists have used the trope of physical transformation to figure the ways in which human and non-human agencies have evolved from and adapted to one another in a relationship characterized by fluctuating perceptions of friction and symbiosis, distance and proximity. This…

You are invited to join CMRS Director Zrinka Stahuljak and the Center’s staff for the annual Open House celebrating the start of the new academic year. This is the Center’s 57th year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies related to the years 600-1600 C.E. Please visit with and meet professors, students, colleagues, and friends who share scholarly interests. Find out more about the programs, fellowships, grants, and publications pertaining to Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. No fee. Limited seating.…

This conference explores representations of conflict in popular narratives, myth and folklore, with emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between social antagonisms—individual, local, or international—and the stories that help process, shape, or perpetuate them. Drawing on a variety of literary sources including ancient epics, Anglo-Saxon poetry and medieval romance, Celtic mythology, and early modern drama, as well as premodern medical and natural-scientific materials, speakers explore folkloric materials that depict literal clashes between nations, groups, or individuals, as well as more abstract…

This conference explores representations of conflict in popular narratives, myth and folklore, with emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between social antagonisms—individual, local, or international—and the stories that help process, shape, or perpetuate them. Drawing on a variety of literary sources including ancient epics, Anglo-Saxon poetry and medieval romance, Celtic mythology, and early modern drama, as well as premodern medical and natural-scientific materials, speakers explore folkloric materials that depict literal clashes between nations, groups, or individuals, as well as more abstract…

CMRS/Getty Conference This symposium (held in conjunction with the exhibition Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World at the J. Paul Getty Museum May 14-August 18, 2019) highlights new research on animals in medieval visual culture. The focus of the exhibition is the bestiary, perhaps the most important source of information about animals in the period. The animal stories and images contained within the bestiary served as inspiration for public sermons, daily reading for the religious, and entertainment…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture The perpetuation of Armenian liturgical chant was ensured over the centuries by a subtle relationship between the written and the oral transmission. The vulnerability of both brings up essential questions: what were the characteristics of the notation systems and of the oral transmission system which kept this singing tradition alive? How did this work especially among the cantor groups in cities and towns? Being at the same time an "insider" and a researcher on this…

Co-sponsored Workshop About a decade ago Malcolm Gladwell in his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking lauded the ability of art connoisseurs and other experts to make rapid judgments based on a small amount of information. While interesting and well-suited to our short-attention-span culture, the book leaves by the wayside the essential insights about works of art and other objects that can only be achieved through patient contemplation. The practice of “slow art” originated in the eighteenth century, and…

Alison Locke Perchuk gives a work-in-progress presentation of an interdisciplinary study of the art, architecture, and landscapes of Benedictine monasteries in central Italy, VI–XII c., including Montecassino, Sacro Speco at Subiaco, and Sant’Eutizio at Norcia, largely destroyed by earthquakes in 2016–17. The project’s methodological contribution is to bring ecocriticism into dialogue with art history, positioning landscape as protagonist in the construction of sanctity in the medieval Latin West and examining the ways in which monastic art and architecture established, communicated,…

The Spring 2019 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The papers under discussion will be announced. Advance registration is required. Participants must be graduate…

CMRS Lecture A talk by Raymond Waddington, emeritus professor at UC Davis:  How an English professor can become an Aretino authority.  Why Titian and Aretino are inseparable.  And why contexts are essential. Professor Waddington has published five books, over seventy articles, and co-edited three books.  Aretino's Satyr (2004) received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and was  translated into Italian (2009).  It was followed by Pietro Aretino: Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy (2013), and Titian's Aretino (2018).  He…

Organized by Professors Matthew Fisher (English, UCLA) and Arvind Thomas (English, UCLA), this two-day symposium features scholars working on the often fractious conflicts of the medieval past. Medievalists will consider both historic and also generic conflicts of interest in medieval England and on the Continent. The symposium will bring together a diverse community of scholars from around the world, and also include the work of graduate and undergraduate scholars. Collectively, we will explore how medieval conflicts of interest might be…

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture (presented in Spanish) Gemma Avenoza, Universitat de Barcelona Investigar sobre el libro antiguo es estar a la espera de encontrar una sorpresa. La profesora Gemma Avenoza, especialista en codicología y libro antiguo, nos acerca al mundo de la literatura perdida y hallada dentro de las tapas y refuerzos de encuadernaciones antiguas. Versiones desconocidas, fragmentos de ediciones perdidas, y todo un mundo literario medieval se rescatan en bibliotecas y archivos al rededor del mundo. Avenoza presenta un caso…

Organized by Professors Matthew Fisher (English, UCLA) and Arvind Thomas (English, UCLA), this two-day symposium features scholars working on the often fractious conflicts of the medieval past. Medievalists will consider both historic and also generic conflicts of interest in medieval England and on the Continent. The symposium will bring together a diverse community of scholars from around the world, and also include the work of graduate and undergraduate scholars. Collectively, we will explore how medieval conflicts of interest might be…

CMRS Roundtable In this Roundtable, Sara Burdorff (UCLA) reexamines the place of women in the Anglo-Saxon heroic system, as represented in Old English poetry.  Drawing on evidence from Beowulf as well as “The Wife’s Lament,” the “Dream of the Rood,” and other lyric poems, Burdorff explores the poetic equation of women and gold as evidence, not of their subordination, but of their transcendent indispensability to masculine heroic society. She suggests that this ‘golden girl’ motif identifies women as semiotic equivalent…

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture The Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), a climatic period marked by glacial expansion in Europe, brought droughts of unprecedented intensity to South Asia. In drought-ravaged north India, the beginnings of the Little Ice Age not only corresponded with the emergence of new techniques of landscape painting and riparian architecture that emphasized the materiality of flowing water but also saw the enunciation of a new theology of Krishna worship that centralized the veneration of the natural environment. Tracing…

Borrowing its title from Patrick Geary’s article “Visions of Medieval Studies in North America” published in the 1994 volume The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, this conference honors the distinguished career of Patrick J. Geary, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at the Institute for Advanced Study (2012–2019), Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA (1993–2011), Professor of History at the University of Florida (1980–1993), and Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (1993–1998). Celebrating both the…

CMRS Roundtable Professor Marianna Birnbaum (Germanic, UCLA) discusses her current work on Biblical topics as they appear in literature, connecting Biblical stories about fathers and daughters with plots in literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Her discussion includes, among others, Dinah and Jacob, Esther and Mordechai, and Lot and his daughters, with an analysis of the roles these fathers and surrogate fathers play, showing how the Biblical messages operate in belles lettres. Please click this link to register and let us know…

This symposium explores all facets of heroic poetry as written by Italian Renaissance women and aims to spotlight their heroic poems and place them in a tradition that has for the most part ignored their work. We are also interested in the ways these women authors handle specific conventions of the genre such as the difference between the romance and epic modes, the engagement with literary predecessors, and the representation of traditional female characters like the woman-warrior or the enchantress.…

Bringing Emmanuel Levinas to bear on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, has the virtue of recovering what is authentically other. Because Levinas refuses to leap to conclusions about values, about human nature, even about God’s nature, his phenomenological speculations regard the reality of existence as ethical encounter in the world itself—ontological questions are, for him, already ethical ones—Levinas is a textual and cultural critic of enormous value. Works of art are, for him, mediators between the consciousness of an author and that…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Gothic cathedrals were great engines of urban renewal in the High Middle Ages. The great religious works projects contributed to the revival of trades and to the new institutions of medieval towns. Not the least of these was the University of Paris, which grew out of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in the second half of the twelfth century. Using three sculptural programs on the outer walls of Notre-Dame alongside the example of Abelard, we…

CMRS Roundtable Bishop Reginald Pecock (d. ca. 1459) actively wrote for over thirty years of his life, from his mid-thirties when he left university until his mid-sixties when he was confined at Thorney Abbey and deprived of his writing instruments in the aftermath of his conviction of heresy. From this period, we have only five books remaining. This roundtable, however, is not about what survives. Rather, it is about the more than forty books that we know he had written—Pecock…

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture At the Maurice Amado Lecture in Sephardic Studies, Marc Michael Epstein (Vassar College)will explore issues of temporality (the way in which the passing of time is indicated or implied) in illuminated manuscripts made for Jews in the fourteenth century. What happens when, viewing images as a frozen snapshots in time, we consider the potentially politically subversive implications of the implied action that will ensue in the moment after the one that is frozen in the frame? What…

CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture In The Captive Sea, Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut) explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Despite their confessional differences, the lives of captives and captors alike were connected in a political economy of ransom and communication networks shaped by…

A Conference Organized by Angela Nuovo (University of Milan – EmoBookTrade Project) In the early stage of printing, Erasmus from Rotterdam provided a vivid account of his experience with the renowned humanist and publisher Aldus Manutius. In his 1508 Adagia, Erasmus described himself torn between Aldus’s rich library and his frantic printing shop where, allegedly, Erasmus was pressured by the publisher and his craftsmen to release the last-minute drafts of his texts moments before having them sent to press. Whether fictitious…

On the night of January 25th and 26th, 1904, a fire ravaged the National University Library of Turin, Italy, destroying 30,000 books and half its 4200 manuscripts. Among the latter were sixteen unique volumes containing the complete writings of Leone de' Sommi (c. 1525-c. 1590), the Jewish-Italian scholar, playwright, director, and actor from Mantua. Only a handful of Leone's works survived the conflagration. In anticipation of the carnivalesque Jewish festival of Purim, this program aims to reconstruct (to the extent…

CMRS Conference The Greek chorio has been a frequent subject of interest to anthropologists, who have written extensively about rituals, kinship structures, work, and gender. Increasingly, the subject has come under the scrutiny of archaeologists, who have carefully traced the material remains of villages and households in order to reconstruct the lives of those who lived outside of better studied cities and towns. This symposium aims to examine the Greek village diachronically and across disciplines — through its most ancient…

The Annual Colloquia in Armenian Studies are a forum for graduate and undergraduate students from various disciplines whose research bears on Armenian Studies to present scholarly papers in the humanities and social sciences, within disciplines as wide-ranging as Anthropology, Archaeology, Art history, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, History, and Political Science. Please go to https://nelc.ucla.edu/conference/agsc/ for the complete schedule and further details. Sponsored by the UCLA Department for Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.

Pontormo: Miraculous Encounters, on view at the Getty Museum from February 5 to April 28, 2019, brings together a small number of exceptional works by Jacopo da Pontormo, one of the greatest Italian artists of the sixteenth century. The exhibition features one of his most moving and innovative altarpieces, The Visitation, an unprecedented loan from the parish Church of Santi Michele e Francesco in Carmignano (Prato, Italy), alongside the Getty’s own, iconic Portrait of a Halberdier, and the recently rediscovered…

The Winter 2019 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. These are the papers under discussion at this seminar: Richard Rush (UCR), “Claudianus Mamertus and the…

Annual Armand Hammer Art History Lecture The eastern frontier between Islam and Christianity in the thirteenth century was extremely porous: artists, merchants and pilgrims carried ideas and goods across it with ease. The results of this movement are visible in the churches and mosques, monasteries and madrasas that survive in modern territories of Armenia, Georgia and eastern Turkey. These buildings are often all but indistinguishable in their construction and decoration, suggesting a picture of deeply interwoven populations. This lecture explores…

CMRS Roundtable To address the challenges of devising adequate world/global/planetary frameworks for studying art in a radically expanded field of objects and practices, in the current political situation with its accelerating climate crises, Professor Claire Farago (University of Colorado, Boulder; CMRS Associate) examines the usefulness of new borderless organizational concepts such as porosity, family resemblance, scale, topography, and topology. Focusing on links between now and the so-called medieval and early modern era (ca. 800-1800), it engages with critical efforts to rethink…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture This lecture by Leah DeVun, (History, Rutgers University) examines how certain ancient and medieval thinkers claimed that “hermaphroditism” was the original condition of humanity, created by God and documented in the first chapters of Genesis. The idea that Adam was a hermaphrodite fueled medieval debates about sex and gender, as well as about human nature. In the modern world, objections to transgender and gender-nonconforming people often cite the Bible, which is viewed as describing the…

The King James version, as we all know, has no illustrations, no glosses, no indices, no chronologies, and, basically, no nuttin except for a rather long and dull preface by Miles Smith, the soon-to-be Bishop of Gloucester. Earlier English bibles are much more interesting. They have multi-page charts that look like amusement park rides; woodcuts of the Annunciation with a star-faced Moses perched on the windowsill of Mary’s bedroom; patristic encomia on church music, celebrating its power to build community…

Open to UCLA students and faculty. Please contact Professor Fisher fisher@humnet.ucla.edu for  further details.

CMRS Roundtable Standard histories of drama understand the emergence of liturgical performance—as recorded in Æthelwold of Winchester’s late tenth-century monastic customary, the Regularis Concordia—in isolation. In this talk, Erica Weaver (English, UCLA) situates it alongside contemporaneous school texts to establish that it is actually part of a wider performative mode that promoted heightened concentration as the ultimate goal of monastic life. Please register below. No fee. Limited seating. Self-pay parking in lots 2, 3, and 4. Parking information at main.transportation.ucla.edu/campus-parking/visitors.…

The 28th Richard and Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture This year's History of the Book Lecture by Professor S.J. Pearce (NYU, Art & Science) explores the relationship between descriptive bibliography — writing in a detailed way about the contents of a library — and autobiography in the writing lives of medieval Jews and converts from Judaism in the Islamic west, that is, Spain and North Africa. Professor Pearce looks at autobiographical writings in which detailed library catalogues are…

CMRS Roundtable Please note: this Roundtable has been rescheduled from the originally scheduled date of October 29, 2018. In this talk, CMRS Affiliate Dr. Shannon Wearing explores the artistic and literary patronage of Alfonso II, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona (r. 1162–96), with particular emphasis on the Liber Feudorum Maior, a cartulary documenting the king’s territorial holdings and the hierarchical power relationships between the lords of Catalonia. The Liber is one of very few examples of its genre…

CMRS Roundtable Leena Löfstedt (University of Helsinki and CMRS Associate) relates how the Becket controversy and murder in the cathedral coincide with the introduction in England of Gratian’s newly compiled Decretum. Her paper examines the complex relationship of King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket using twelfth-century Gratian-related material: an Old French translation of the Decretum, a Latin Decretum-manuscript from 1170-1180 including marginalia, French and Latin texts of Thomas Becket’s letters sent in 1166. Unafraid of each other, the former…

Where the Only Light is the One You Create: A Modern Adaptation of Dante’s Inferno is a theatrical production scheduled for two performances at UCLA: Friday, November 16th at 6:30 PM Saturday, November 17th at 2 PM Both performances are at the Northwest Campus Auditorium near Carnesale Commons and Sproul Hall. Sponsored by: The UCLA Humanities Division; UCLA Franklin D. Murphy Chair; UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; UCLA Department of Italian;…

CMRS is pleased to be a co-sponsor of this conference organized by Professor Peter Cowe in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Complete conference details and schedules are found on their website. This conference seeks to contribute to a longue durée approach to Near Eastern engagement with Europe with an emphasis on the early modern period (16th-18thcc.), which marked the heyday of Armenian communities as a crucial component of international trade hubs in eastern Europe, involving an…

A lecture by Anne Regourd (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris) Watermarked papers, which served as media for Islamic manuscripts (codices and documents), were imported from Europe at least since the 13th century. The study of trade in papers brings us, therefore, to Global history. My approach is to treat the papers found in Islamic manuscripts as primary sources, which can be connected to narrative sources and archives, in order to map the routes that papers took as a…

CMRS Ahmanson Conference Medical Humanities is a relatively new and increasingly popular field of knowledge that is yet to be clearly defined. Broadly, it may be conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect, at a given historical time, with the humanities. As such it is a dynamic area of endeavor where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the arts and in the specific language of the various disciplines concerned…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture In this presentation, Mirko Tavoni screens and comments on selected clips from three films produced in the United States between 1924-1944, and two films produced in the late 1990s. These films actualize Dante's Inferno within five – very different – contemporary stories. In the three pre-war films – i.e. Dante's Inferno by Henry Otto (1924), the homonymous Dante's Inferno by Harry Lachman (1935), and the Harlemwood production Go Down Death! by Spencer Williams (1944) –…

The Fall 2018 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. These are the papers under discussion at this seminar: Anthony Perron (Loyola Marymount University), “Outlaw Corpses,…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Margaret Kim (Department of Foreign Languages,National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan) examines Marco Polo’s treatment of the other within the framework of historical immigration to China under Mongol rule. Marco Polo left Europe as a teenager and lived in Asia for more than two decades. He spent a great part of the most formative years of his life, certainly the peak of his youth and most of his middle age, in China. While medievalists…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture A talk by Ryan Szpiech, Associate Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Judaic Studies and an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Professor Szpiech studies the cultures and literatures of medieval Iberia, focusing especially on cultural interaction, exchange, and conflict. His interests converge around polemical writing (religious disputations and conflicts) and translation (of languages, alphabets, styles, beliefs, identities, and ideas) as elements defining the relations…

Ahmanson Research Fellow Project Talk Nicholas Fenech’s project is an immersion in the textual dimensions of historical knowledge, taking as its case-study a single Elizabethan treatise on foreign policy, ascribed to both Lord Burghley and Francis Bacon, existing in multiple variants with extensive but unrecognized debts to Florentine political theory and historiography. The implications of this study should be felt as much by scholars of Guicciardini and Machiavelli as by historians of Burghley and humanist politics. If the project is…

You are invited to join CMRS Director Massimo Ciavolella and the Center’s staff for the annual Open House celebrating the start of the new academic year. This is the Center's 56th year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies related to the years 600-1600 C.E. You are invited to come and meet professors, students, colleagues, and friends who share scholarly interests. Find out more about the programs, fellowships, grants, and publications pertaining to Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. Please register…

September 21-23, 2018, brings LA ESCENA, Los Angeles’ first Hispanic classical theater festival, to the Greenway Court Theater (544 N. Fairfax). Schedule details and tickets are at http://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/la-escena/ Cutting-edge Mexican company EFE Tres will present Lope de Vega’s El príncipe inocente (The Innocent Prince), a meditation on political power and culpability reimagined as a dialogue in a prison cell, and El Merolico (The Mountebank), a reworking of Cervantes’ comic interludes as delivered by a traveling performer in small-town Mexico (in Spanish, with English subtitles).…

Please join us for a guest lecture titled "Defining Medieval Stupefaction" from Ahmanson Research Fellow, Laura Godfrey, Ph.D candidate in Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation, "Be wholly out of body: Astonishment in Late English Literature," examines the limits of embodiment during moments of somatic overwhelm that lead to insight and understanding. Her work at UCLA Library Special Collections focuses primarily on late medieval medical understanding of sensory and cognitive loss. Laura will discuss her research, which…

Set in an isolated medieval village in France, Sorceress (Le Moine et la Sorcière) is based on the writings of Etienne de Bourbon, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar who is sent by the Pope to seek out heresy. Etienne discovers that, when their children are sick, the village women go to a forest woman, Elda, to help them heal their babies. Elda is schooled in the ancient arts of healing, the use of leaves, seeds, and bark, and, if need be,…

CMRS Roundtable The critical opinion of Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” has largely been that the lyric’s imagination of nationhood is ambiguous, unlike that in Milton’s Of Education. Of Education argues for a new style of education for national leaders that would improve on a “defect” of Sparta’s: Milton’s would be “equally good for both peace and war.” Using computational text analysis methods, Dr. Valerie Shepard (UCLA Graduate Student Resource Center and CMRS Associate) compares…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture As portrayed in a sixteenth-century bio-chronicle of the port city of Aden in Yemen, men of renowned piety performed miracles that delivered their devotees from pirates and tempests, ensured success in the marketplace, and calibrated the sometimes treacherously plural urban milieu. Can these miracles or their retelling be said to characterize a city-based identity, a distinctive maritime culture, and a networked transoceanic world in the context of the “pre-modern” Indian Ocean? The sea is a…

Medieval and Renaissance themes continue to have a profound influence on contemporary comic books and graphic novels. Join Dr. Kristina Markman (History, UCLA) for a panel discussion featuring comic creators Conor McCreery (Kill Shakespeare, IDW Publishers), GMB Chomichuk (Midnight City, Infinitum, Rust and Water, Raygun Gothic) and industry veteran Howard Chaykin (The Divided States of Hysteria, Image, Marvel, and DC Comics). Advance registration is required. Please click here to complete the short registration form. No fee. Limited seating. Self-pay parking in…

CMRS Medical Humanities Conference Humanity has always approached disease with a mixture of curiosity and dread. Medieval and early modern people were no exception, displaying a deep fascination with virulent ailments and all sorts of physical deformities. But despite this attraction, few artists of these eras engaged in the depiction of disease. When they did, their expression was particular to the medium used and differed among artists even when using the same medium. Since such an effort was outside their…

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture When Margery Kempe visited York Minster in 1417 she was befriended by two of the choral vicarii, John Kendale “and another preste whech song be the bischopys grave.” The grave in question belonged to Archbishop Richard Scrope, who was executed under Henry IV and whose semi-suppressed cult remained a matter of some delicacy. Kendale and his unnamed fellow were not only counseling Kempe, but introducing her to the Minster’s history, saints, and monuments—an official part…

The Spring Session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The papers under discussion at this seminar are: Allison Perchuk (CSU Channel Islands) “Landscapes of St…

Akira Kurosawa's brilliantly conceived re-telling of Shakespeare's King Lear magically mixes Japanese history, Shakespeare's plot and Kurosawa's own feelings about loyalty in the masterpiece, “Ran”. Set in 16th-century Japan, Lord Hidetora, announces his intention to divide his land equally among his three sons. This decision to step down unleashes a power struggle between the three heirs. (Running time: 2 hours, 42 minutes) Advance registration is requested. Please click here to complete the short registration form. No fee. Limited seating. Self-pay parking…

Second California Symposium on Catalan Studies Monday April 23,  Royce Hall 306 8:30 AM Breakfast 9:00 Welcoming Remarks: John Dagenais and Gemma Repiso 9:15 Linguistic Variation and Language in Contact | Moderator: Ji Young Kim Dues llengües, dues pronunciacions? Un projecte de corpus per a la fonologia bilingüe del castellà i català Monja Burkard (University of Vienna) El català i el castellà: comparació de les actituds lingüístiques a Palma i Barcelona Anna Tudela (Beijing Foreign Studies University) Flexibilitat sintàctica del…

Annual William & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture Samuel Pepys began his diary of the 1660s in shorthand, a measure designed to protect its contents from prying eyes in dangerous times. This proved a wise move, for, as a rising man in Restoration London, his journal was to be full of his private schemes, good and bad. The ‘bad’ make for impressive reading; they include adulterous designs, corrupt dealings, and Machiavellian ploys designed to advance him in Charles II’s government.…

CMRS Roundtable / Medical Humanities From poisoning to epilepsy, demonic possession to venereal disease, Shakespeare’s Hamlet touches on a wide range of bodily maladies, played out in the person of the Danish prince and echoed in the voices of those around him, including the ghost, the gravedigger, and Ophelia. Building on the fascination with demonology most often identified in King Lear, CMRS Associate Dr. Sara Frances Burdorff (English, UCLA) explores some of the ways in which Hamlet, too, is a…