CMRS Roundtable - In 1116, the burghers of Sahagún (Castile and León, Spain) forced the abbot of the local monastery to confirm a charter blunting the terms of their subjection to his local authority. When the burgher’s revolt was put down, and their charter destroyed, the monastery was left to restore its former sense of unquestionable dominance over the...

The topic of this year’s workshop, organized by Professor Calvin Normore (Philosophy, UCLA), will be “Francisco Suarez and his Contemporaries.” CMRS is one of the co-sponsors of the workshop. Schedule to be announced. Funding for this program is provided by the Armand Hammer Endowment for the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.

A CMRS Symposium February 26th is the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first encounter with the Holy Office of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. On that day he was warned by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine not to hold the Copernican thesis of heliocentrism, which a committee of the Holy Office had just declared to be heretical. In...

“Medical Traditions for the 21st Century” A CMRS Ahmanson Conference Registration is requested. Please complete the registration form below. No fee. Limited seating. Saturday, February 27, 2016 8:30 Registration, coffee, fruit, pastries 9:00 Welcoming remarks: Massimo Ciavolella (UCLA), CMRS Director; Lee Walcott (The Ahmanson Foundation), Managing Director Emeritus; David Schaberg, (UCLA), Dean of Humanities; Kathryn Morgan (UCLA), Conference Co-organizer). 9:10...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Patrick Boucheron (Professor, Collège de France) discusses his ongoing research on a political history of the commemoration of Ambrose, bishop and patron saint of the city of Milan. This history not only collects available and disputed recollections of the saint, but also attempts to grasp the manner in which memory is attached to place: topographical sites, but...

CMRS Roundtable Physical and visual descriptions are important elements of characterization in medieval literature. In this talk, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Clodagh Downey (School of Irish, National University of Ireland, Galway) considers the language and function of human beauty, and its opposite, in the context of early Irish narrative literature, and what this can tell us about literary conventions,...

The 38th University of California Celtic Studies Conference, organized by Professor Joseph F. Nagy (English, UCLA) and the UCLA Celtic Colloquium, features papers on all aspects of Celtic culture including language, literature, history, art and archaeology, from late antiquity until the present day. THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2016 — UCLA ROYCE HALL 314 2:30 pm Registration, coffee 3:00 Welcoming Remarks...

This program has moved from the originally scheduled date, February 18, 2016. This seminar for graduate students who study the Late Antique, Medieval, or Early Modern period, focuses on discovering intellectually stimulating and fulfilling career pathways that leverage the research, teaching, and service skills developed during the PhD. Come and share your ideas, questions, plans, and concerns,...

Annual William & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture Satan appears in the Hebrew Scriptures (Books of Job and Zechariah) as a celestial accuser and prosecutor of humans, eager to uncover the vices that lie below seeming virtue; he is a figure on the order of our own J. Edgar Hoover. This characterization persists throughout the New Testament, with Jesus predicting...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Simone Marchesi (Associate Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University) explores the cultural roots of a double variable correlation in medieval vernacular fiction. One correlation is basic and unsurprising: medieval vernacular writers often take their narratives into gardens, and these gardens tend to conform to the topical model of the Earthly Paradise...

CMRS Roundtable Ever since Eugène Bossard pointed out the similarities between Dante’s Commedia and Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus in 1885, modern scholars have recognized Alan’s epic as an important source of inspiration for Dante. However, one of Dante’s greatest debts to the Anticlaudianus, the central role of the author, has been underappreciated. In John of Hauville’s Architrenius, another twelfth-century allegorical...

A discussion with the authors of Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 1) and Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 2), published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. Authors: Rebecca Jean Emigh (UCLA, Sociology) Dylan Riley (UC Berkeley, Sociology) Patricia...

Morality plays are neither known nor studied for their serious contemplative content, much less their contemplative efficacy, partially because the plays seem so entrenched in the absurd, the grotesque, and the scatological. But these absurdist and comedic elements are part and parcel of the highly participatory mode of contemplation that these late medieval plays enact. In this lecture, CMRS Distinguished Visiting...

The UCLA Mellon program in Post-Classical Latin is pleased to present a lecture by Maureen C. Miller (Professor of History, University of California Berkeley). This lecture will argue for an updating of the conceptualization of the ‘crisis of church and state’ in the context of recent work on violence and conflict in Medieval Europe. Please...

UCLA Department of Germanic Languages Graduate Student Conference co-sponsored by UCLA-CMRS. http://uclagermanic.weebly.com/

From draped togas to shining armor to silken gowns, HBO’s award-winning drama Game of Thrones transforms diverse historical and geographical sources into costumes that both resonate with what we think we know about the past, and yet is also unfamiliar. As a result, we engage with the characters, prolonging our visual and mental negotiation between...

CMRS Roundtable The Second Targum of the Book of Esther, a “translation” of Esther from Hebrew into Aramaic, contains material about Solomon and Sheba not found in the Hebrew Esther, but found in the Koran. Targum Sheni was written in Byzantine Palestine before the rise of Islam and then used in Islam’s textual construction of...

The Spring session of California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to 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 us. Advance registration is required —...

Don Juan en las tablas / Don Juan on Stage El burlador mítico: renacimiento, barroco y hoy / The Mythical Trickster: Renaissance, Baroque and Today Coloquio-Taller / Colloquium-Workshop With roots in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the persistent Spanish myth of Don Juan first reaches Madrid's commercial stage around 1630 in the play, The...

This CMRS Ahmanson conference, organized by Professor Constance Moffatt (Pierce College) and Dr. Sara Taglialagamba (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne) explores the topic of water in the thought and works of Leonardo da Vinci. The topic of water appears in an obsessive way in Leonardo’s activity as both artist and scientist. Water is the...

Professor Guido Ruggiero earned an M.A. and a Ph.D at UCLA (where he studied first as a fellow of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and later as a University of California Regents Intern Fellow) and now teaches in the Department of History at the University of Miami. He has published on the history...

A conference sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and by the Freshman Cluster Course GE 30ABC, "Neverending Stories". Organized by Professor Joseph F. Nagy (English, UCLA). Friday, June 3, 2016 | UCLA Royce Hall, Room 314 3:00 pm Welcoming Remarks Patricia A. Turner, Dean and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education of...

This symposium is devoted to the study of the most important editions of the Comedy and of other visualizations of Dante’s masterpiece that were printed in the sixteenth century, and the analysis of the most important aspects and relationships that may emerge. Topics to be investigated are the relationship between text and image; the hermeneutic...

In this talk, Judith Herrin (Professor Emerita of Late Antique & Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow, King's College London) answers the question, "Why study Ravenna?" For 350 years this city served as the western capital of the Roman Empire where a very particular integration of Germanic and Roman occurred that had significant...

CMRS Conference Paul Freedman (Chester D. Tripp Professor of History; Chair, History of Science, History of Medicine Program, Yale University) is a scholar who cannot be easily classified. He is a medieval historian, a social historian, a scholar of Spain and of Church history. Additionally, he is firmly established as a leading scholar in food...

Glass was first created in Mesopotamia or Egypt as an artificial precious stone in the third millennium B.C.E. Until the late Hellenistic period, its use remained largely restricted to the highest echelons of society. The invention of the free-blowing technique in the first century B.C.E. along the Syrio-Palestinian coast led to an unprecedented expansion in...

Julius II Della Rovere (1443-1513) is the epitome of the Renaissance pope. Impetuous politician, determined pontiff, and magnificent patron of art, he embodied all of the grandiosity and contradictions that characterized the Renaissance papacy. With his bloody wars and splendid artistic patronage, Julius II has strongly shaped our collective conception of the Renaissance. But what...

Please join CMRS Director Massimo Ciavolella and the staff of the Center for our annual Open House celebrating the start of a new academic year.  This year marks CMRS’s 53rd year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies of the period from Late Antiquity to the mid-seventeenth century. Come meet faculty members, students, colleagues, and friends who share...

Join the musical duo Il Ruggiero (Emanuela Marcante & Daniele Tonini) for a performance of music, words and images that gives the poetry of Ludovico Ariosto a new musical life. The stories and unforgettable characters of Orlando Furioso (first printed in 1516) are sung and narrated on Renaissance airs and original musical intonations, intertwined with musical...

CMRS Roundtable Garnier (or Guernes) de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas Becket (finished by 1174) contains three letters, written in French alexandrines, sent by Thomas Becket in 1166 during his exile. Since E.Walberg’s 1922 edition of Garnier’s text, these letters have been considered translations of Becket’s official Latin letters (Desiderio desideraui, Expextans expectaui, and Mirandum et uehementer). In this...

CMRS invites graduate students in all fields of study to attend an informational social gathering to get acquainted with other students involved in topics pertinent to medieval and Renaissance studies and to learn about the support and resources available to graduate students from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Come by and meet new colleagues...

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette...

The fall session of California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to 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 us. The following papers will...

CMRS Roundtable Drawing on material from documents kept by the Inquisition, as well as Rabbinical and other Jewish sources relating to the 16th and 17th centuries, UCLA Research Professor of Germanic Languages, Marianna Birnbaum, identifies and discusses the lives and activities of five distinct groups as aspects of the Sephardic Jewish identity. Advance registration not...

CMRS Symposium The Renaissance was a period defined by visions of the future. Renaissance humanists including Petrarch, Dante, Leonardo Bruni, and Vasari expressed a concern for the future, fame, and posterity. At the same time, European explorers, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries traversed the globe fueled by visions of the future as well as imperial ambition....

CMRS Roundtable   Professor Bronwen Wilson (Art History, UCLA) Ancient debates about similarities and differences between animals and humans were rekindled during the sixteenth century in Italy. In visual imagery, treatises, dialogues, and orations, artists, natural historians, physiognomists, poets, and polymaths examined the physical characteristics of animals, how they communicated, and the moral, social, and...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) lived a dazzlingly varied life: bouncing between the courts of London, Paris and Rome, befriending everyone from Ben Jonson and René Descartes to Oliver Cromwell, and producing original works of theology, philosophy, and experimental science. Despite these achievements he has faded from most accounts of the...

Richard and Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture Dr. Erik Kwakkel with students. While medieval manuscripts in Special Collection libraries were generally produced and preserved for posterity, not everything written down in the Middle Ages was intended to be kept forever: some information was disposable. Introducing a range of transitory objects, Dr. Erik Kwakkel...

CMRS Roundtable Marta Albalá Pelegrín (Assistant Professor, Medieval and Early Modern Iberian literature and drama, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona) explores the vital role of Spanish patronage in the Roman curia, with a keen eye on the importance that theater came to have for diplomatic enterprises. Spain, second only after Italy in number of prelates,...

CMRS Ahmanson Conference Treatises discussing the origin, nature, and effects of love are prevalent throughout the European Renaissance. The Neo-Platonic tradition of love treatises has been studied for its philosophical and literary implications and for its influence on sixteenth-century culture; these studies have illuminated how the "ladder of love" model permeates poetry, prose narratives, and...

A murder mystery at a Benedictine abbey requires the sherlockian insight of Brother William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) and his young apprentice, Adso of Melk (Christian Slater). Confronted by the suspicious deaths of several friars amid the simmering tensions of monastic rivalries, the detectives come face to face with the Inquisition during their investigation. Join...

CMRS Symposium Umberto Eco (January 5, 1932 - February 19, 2016) is still best known today for his novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose). The novel was published in 1980 and became an international sensation, selling over 10 million copies worldwide. In reality, Eco was a Professor at the University of...

CMRS Roundtable Manuscript studies scholars are well versed in the rich illuminations and miniatures in late-medieval English manuscripts, but scholars have spent less time considering the culture of decorated manuscripts in the early modern period. This talk by Vanessa Wilkie (William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval and British Manuscripts, The Huntington Library, and CMRS Associate)...

The medical knowledge of ancient Greece has interested Western scholars for centuries. While Renaissance humanists read medical texts in whatever manuscripts were available to them, later scholars systematically sought out Greek medical texts. However, it took until the early 20th century for an inventory of Greek medical texts to be published. Although useful, this early...

The medieval sources produced in Rome and about Rome collectively exhibit a singular characteristic  which scholars have not yet adequately identified or addressed as a uniquely Roman feature. In contrast with most other cities and institutions, Rome and its church did not develop the diachronic relationship with their memory and territory that would have resulted...

Author and translator Raymond Scheindlin will present his new book, Vulture in a Cage, and the eleventh-century poet at its center, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, one of the most celebrated poets and philosophers of the medieval Judeo-Arabic Golden Age. The author of delicate and intimate devotional poetry that holds an honored place in the liturgies of...

CMRS Roundtable Professor Stefania Tutino (History, UCLA) uses the fascinating and dramatic story of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan Jewish nobleman Duarte Vaaz, Count of Mola, to discuss how the Roman Inquisition dealt with the economic implications of converting Jews. By investigating the complex relationship between theology, economy, and politics, this talk explores the important role that...

The winter session of California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to 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 us. Advance registration is required...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Breton – the Celtic language spoken in Brittany in the northwest of France – has been in close contact  with Romance (developing into French) ever since the Celtic migration from southern England and Cornwall. This contact has led to massive influence on Breton on all linguistic levels (especially phonology and lexicon)....

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Taking up a field of research familiar to many medievalists but largely unknown from an Armenian  perspective, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Tim Greenwood (Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, University of St. Andrews)  explores the character and development of legal practice and performance across medieval Armenia from Late Antiquity down...

Organized by Professor Calvin Normore (Philosophy, UCLA), the topic of this year’s workshop is the “Deadly Sins.” Saturday, February 25 10 AM - Peter King (Toronto) - "Moral Fatigue" 11:30 AM - Janelle Aijian (Biola) - "Wishing and Hoping: Diverging sources of understanding acedia" 1 PM - Lunch 2:30 PM - Bonnie Kent (U.C. Irvine)...

A distinctive feature of the new religious orders of the thirteenth century (Franciscans and Dominicans among others) was their adoption of apostolic poverty. Friars focused their action on charity and outdoor preaching to convert the urban poor from heretical practices. In this talk, Caroline Bruzelius (Anne Murnick Cogan Professor of Art and Art History, Duke...

Annual Armand Hammer Art History Lecture New digital tools are transforming the ways in which we do research and teach. Caroline Bruzelius (Anne Murnick Cogan Professor of Art and Art History) shares how at Duke University, the Wired! group has been experimenting with integrating technologies into traditional courses. They have also created a lab running...

CMRS Roundtable Throughout the Renaissance, the interest in insects lagged behind the study of zoology and natural history. Yet the honeybee represents an exception because of its symbolic dimension in the Bible as well as in the Greek and Roman literary heritage. In this talk, Professor Cynthia Skenazi (French and Italian, UC Santa Barbara, and...

This two-day symposium hosted at the University of California, Los Angeles and the J. Paul Getty Museum brings together scholars working on the aspects of image, text, knowledge, and culture that surround the bestiary tradition in the medieval world. Speakers will focus on how the development of encyclopedic texts and new structures of knowledge emerged...

The importation of French courtly material in thirteenth-century Norway and Iceland completes a cycle  of cultural transmission and expansion begun almost four centuries earlier with the Viking expansion  outward from the Northern peripheries of the known world to the neighboring insular regions of the  British Isles, to Northern France and finally to the medieval center...

CMRS Lecture CANCELED To Be Rescheduled Scholars of Yiddish literature have proposed that the first extant Purim-Shpil (Purim Play) continued the tradition of early modern English and German dramatizations of the Book of Esther. In this talk, Professor Chanita Goodblatt (Foreign Literatures & Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) will focus on the carnivalesque aspect...

Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Is it possible to derive historical meaning from the grubby fingerprints and torn leaves that scholars find inside medieval books? Can surviving medieval manuscripts be matched to contemporary accounts of the mistreatment of books – those of Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Wife of Bath famously tears leaves from her husband’s book; or...

King Richard III was one of the few English kings for whom the precise location of his grave had been lost. In 2012, during an excavation, his putative remains were found underneath a carpark in Leicester. Dr Turi King led the genetic analysis which led to the identification of the remains as those of King...

CMRS Roundtable Steve Sohmer (Fleming Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford) considers why Her Majesty's Government has yet to reveal the inspiration for Shakespeare's Jessica - and the identity of the bard's Jewish girlfriend. Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating. Funding for the CMRS Roundtable series is provided by the Armand Endowment for the...

A Conference Organized by the UCLA Mellon Program in Post-Classical Latin The starting point for this conference is the statement “they saw it with their own eyes”: this phrase appears frequently on Fra Mauro’s fifteenth-century map of the world, a landmark in cartography because of Mauro’s decision to use the most recent eyewitness testimony rather...

Annual Will & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture Professor Efraín Kristal (Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA) traces the emergence of Early Modern Spanish epic poetry to allegorical poetry from Burgundy, to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and to translations of these works from French and Italian into Spanish.  He gives pride of place to Jeronimo de Urrea's La...

CMRS Lecture We are so used to the idea of the royal mistress as a constituent element of the French king’s grandeur that we tend not to think about how strange it is that in Ancien Régime France nine women who were not part of the royal family exercised significant political influence, their position imagined...

“La Fée” is a film released in 2011 written and directed by Dominique Abel. Arriving at a small hotel, a mysterious woman named Fiona informs night shift worker Dom that she is a fairy and will grant him three wishes. After she grants his first two wishes--and he falls in love with her--she disappears, and...

CMRS Conference The tropes are as well-known as they are myriad. Deals with the devil. Hell running short of guests, or being robbed of its prey. Heaven dispatching angels to save individuals from their own folly. Ghosts and goblins shaking mortals from their mundane complacency. Gods and goddesses from various pantheons trying on human guise....

Of Books and Roses: First California Symposium on Catalan Studies “Of Books and Roses:  First California Symposium on Catalan Studies” grew from the idea of offering a point of reference on the west coast of the United States for scholars and students interested in Catalan Studies or related areas.  This year, we will hear presentations...

CMRS Roundtable How did noble women represent themselves through the objects they acquired, wore, and used to outfit their living quarters? In this roundtable, Professor Diane Ghirardo (Architecture, USC) addresses this question by examining Lucrezia Borgia's jewelry, library, art and religious objects, and the decoration of her quarters in the Estense Castle and Palazzo di...

The early modern period (c. 1450-1750) witnessed a massive dislocation of people and artifacts as a result of migration, religious conflicts, expanding trade routes, missionary activities, slavery, and colonization. The confrontation between materiality and mobility that ensued gave rise to new, often unexpected, forms of creativity. Focusing on art — on making and engaging with...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture How do human beings think about, talk about and prepare for contingency? How do we think about futurity – events to come, good or ill? In this talk, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Karla Mallette (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan) looks to the Muslim-Christian borderlands of the...

The spring session of California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss four pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to 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 us. Advance registration is required...

CMRS Roundtable The illustrations in Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, first published in Basel in 1543, were revolutionary in their number, their quality, and in their integration with the text. In this talk, CMRS Associate Monique Kornell (Independent Scholar) looks at Vesalius’s concerns for the legibility of the identifying characters in the Fabrica illustrations and those...

She heard a mission from God. They called it heresy. Join CMRS for a special screening of the 1928 silent movie masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer) with live musical accompaniment by renowned silent film pianist Cliff Retallick. Famous for its cinematography and early use of the close-up as well...

Marxiano Melotti (Università degli Studi Niccolò Cusano & Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca) speaks on Renaissance imagery as used in advertising. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of Italian. Advance registration not required. No fee. Limited seating. Funding is provided by the Armand Hammer Endowment for the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies and the...

CMRS Conference The threshold of the home constitutes a literal boundary between public and private, between the domestic and the political. It is also a border that, by its very nature, invites transgression. It is a boundary that exists to be crossed. This conference, organized by Dr. Sara Burdorff (UCLA, English) and the student group Colloquium...

Please join CMRS Director Professor Massimo Ciavolella and the staff of the Center for our annual Open House celebrating the start of a new academic year. This year marks CMRS’s 54th year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies of the period from Late Antiquity to the mid-seventeenth century. Come meet other faculty members, students, colleagues, and friends...

Wind down first week with an evening of food, drink, and socializing with your fellow medieval and Renaissance scholars. Catch up with old friends and make new ones. This event is exclusively for UCLA graduate students--all departments are welcome! No registration necessary.

Founded in 305 as a fortified villa of a retired emperor, Split developed into a medieval town, keeping traces from all periods and incorporating them into one harmonic whole. In 1979 the historic core of Split was declared a World Heritage Site on account of its well preserved architecture from all periods, and also because...

CMRS Roundtable Almost without exception, the established English-language scholarly and popular narratives of the history of Islamic Spain present the period of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and the era of the taifa kings that followed it as a “Golden Age” of tolerance, ethnoreligious diversity, and cultural dynamism.  In this view, the incursion first of...

In a famous passage of Survival in Auschwitz, the memoir that emerged from his harrowing experience in the concentration camp, Primo Levi strives to recall from his memory Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno – a canto that narrates the mad flight and tragic fall of the Greek hero Ulysses. Levi’s account of Ulysses’ speech to...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Over the course of the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — as they subdued, expelled, and enslaved Muslim populations — the kings of the Crown of Aragon recruited thousands of North African cavalry soldiers, whom they called jenets, to serve in their armies and in their courts as body guards, members of...

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Emerging Scholar conference directly engages the CMRS mission to support Graduate Student research. This one-day conference features UCLA graduate students from a variety of departments including Art History, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, History, French, and English presenting recent research from topics that relate to CMRS’s sphere...

CMRS Roundtable Even in this era of increasing skepticism about Petrarch’s break with the medieval past, his Latin epic, the Africa, is still seen as a major monument ushering in the Renaissance through its classicizing form and themes. Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, a Latin epic about Alexander of Macedon written almost two centuries earlier, can lay claim to most...

CMRS screens the 1922 Scandinavian silent film documentary classic Häxan (a version of which is known in English as Witchcraft Through the Ages), directed by Benjamin Christensen with live piano accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. Introductory remarks by Professor Arne Lunde (Scandinavian, UCLA). The CMRS Film Series is made possible by the Armand Hammer Endowment for...

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Spanish forces swept into North Africa and conquered a series of coastal towns from Morocco to Libya. Historians have seen this as a kind of mirror image of Muslim conquests in the Iberian Peninsula, and the subsequent occupation seemed to take place in the familiar context of...

The Fall 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 Roundtable The old Carolingian and medieval route through the Savoie French Alps connected Grenoble to Turin. The route followed what had been the Roman Road and before that a Celtic pathway that is often suggested as Hannibal’s route into Italy. Along the ancient pathway over the Col du Clapier-Savine Coche Pass, a ruined stone...

Claude L. Hulet, 96, of La Cañada, California passed away peacefully on August 22, 2017. He was born in 1920 in rural, Michigan. He worked hard growing up on a farm during the depression. At the same time he was able to maintain his studies and was eventually accepted to the University of Michigan. He...

Sound—whether thunder or psalmody—plays a role in the formation and perception of the sacred. Religions acknowledge the importance of sound, manifested in the voice of God, the call to prayer, collective chant, and other profound ways. Sound unifies communities in sacred worship and affirms sacred hierarchies. It is captured in images and contained in built...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Medieval treasuries provide a material witness to the interests and aspirations of the individuals and institutions that created them. For the central Middle Ages, there is extensive written evidence of the multiple uses made of treasuries and their contents by royal women and men. Treasuries could function as a source...

In the second half of the fifteenth century, Venetian, Greek, Albanian, Dalmatian, and Jewish merchants settled in the Southern Italian region of Puglia.  Here they played a major role in the organization of maritime networks and operating commerce along both the Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean routes. In spite of the unstable political situation in the...

Personifications of the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia, and America abounded in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. The continents, depicted as female (and sometimes male) figures, appeared in political processions, court performances, ceiling and wall frescos, maps, atlases, frontispieces, poems, travelogues, costume books, prints, paintings, textiles, ceramics, sculptures, wood pulpits, and sculptured tympanums. While the...

Set in the wake of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Salvador Carrasco’s stunning film La Otra Conquista explores the personal, social, and spiritual dimensions of conquest through the eyes of the conquered. Tracing the experiences of a young Aztec scribe facing the destruction and replacement of his faith and a well-intentioned friar charged with his...

CMRS Roundtable Completed in 1326, Peter of Dusburg’s Chronicon terrae Prussiae is the earliest known history of the Teutonic Order, its military victories against the Baltic pagans, and its wars against the Lithuanians. As many scholars have demonstrated, Dusburg’s chronicle was intended to provide legal and theological justification for the continuation of the Order’s wars...

CMRS Ahmanson Conference Although not as well-known as other prominent families such as the Medici, Visconti, or Borgia, the Malatesta of Rimini, especially during the leadership of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468), occupy a central position in the history of the Italian Renaissance. Gifted with great military skill and a profound sensibility for the arts, the...

Medical Humanities / CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture The inquisitiveness of the human intellect has provoked a desire to see inside the body of man and animals since early recorded history. However, the perceived utility of anatomical knowledge has waxed and waned in both the scientific and artistic communities over the centuries. Although it may...