Scholars of Yiddish literature have proposed that the first extant Purim Shpiel (Purim Play) continued the tradition of early modern German and English dramatizations of the Book of Esther. Jews would have gone to see these plays performed in the ports, inns, and streets of early modern Germany, and adapted them to their own, very...

CMRS Early Modern Conversions Conference Can objects convert? Exploring the relationship between objects and conversion can usefully complicate the usual distinctions between subjects and objects. From sacramental materials to holy wells, human hands to books, new kinds of food and drink to precious metals and forms of currency, objects can both convert and be converted,...

A one-day symposium follows the 1586 voyage of the ship Red Dragon. The ship’s little-known logbook, documenting its journey from England, to Sierra Leone, Rio de la Plata and Salvador da Bahia, illuminates the early interconnected histories of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Speakers: Vanessa Wilkie, Huntington Library Eleanor Hubbard, Princeton University David Wheat, Michigan...

CMRS Lecture In this talk, Herbert Morris (Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA) analyzes Michelangelo’s treatment of Adam and Eve in three panels of the Sistine Ceiling devoted to their creation, temptation, and expulsion. Delving into topics that have been minimally attended to in the critical literature or not at all, this...

The Hebrew Aljamiado Research Group of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies are offering a workshop in learning to read 14th-16th century Judeo-Spanish texts written using the Hebrew alphabet: Hebrew “aljamiado” writing.  Attendees will also learn about the cultural context of Hebrew aljamiado writing in the Peninsula...

CMRS Roundtable In the aftermath of the assassination of Duke John of Burgundy (1419), a pivotal event in the Hundred Years’ War, the duke’s shattered skull became a famous bone of contention in disputes about the past. The controversial skull was kept by Carthusian monks and shown as a curiosity to visiting royalty until the...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture The eleventh-century church of the Dormition (Koimesis) of the Virgin at Daphni on the outskirts of Athens is one of the most famous Byzantine monuments known, appearing even in general histories of art. Yet very little has been published on its mosaics in the past 60 years, and the program...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture   Please note the location of this lecture has changed from Royce Hall Room 306. The new location is Moore Hall Room 100. When discussing the Mediterranean economy many people focus on international shipping; but most economic activity—even today, never mind a millennium ago—is regional, and, above all, highly local....

This joint meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America (CSANA) and the 40th Annual UC Celtic Studies Conference features papers on all aspects of Celtic culture including language, literature, history, art, and archaeology, from late antiquity to the present day. The program is organized by Professor Joseph F. Nagy (Professor Emeritus, UCLA; Celtic...

CMRS Symposium The Bilingual Foundation of the Arts is staging one of Calderón’s most profound tragedies in Los Angeles April 13-22. This tragedy dramatizes the psychological downfall of Henry VIII (Enrique Octavo) whose sensual passion makes him vulnerable to the shrewd manipulation of his ambitious minister Wolsey (Volseo) and the seductive and no less ambitious...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Equine History Conference, 2018 Richard Nash, Indiana University – Bloomington Plenary Session, Friday 8:30am W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library, Tour of Special Collections Saturday 2pm W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center, Sunday Show Sunday 2pm To register visit: https://equinehistory.wordpress.com/conference/ University Library Building California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Pomona, CA Sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Arabian...

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 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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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?...

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...

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...

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...