University of Connecticut Medieval Studies

This talk considers the ways in which Thomas Hoccleve employs the image of eyeglasses to reflect on contemporary image-use. It will address the roles that optical discourses and media play in Hoccleve's defense of religious images, taking up Hoccleve's defenses of images in The Regiment of Princes and The Remonstrance Against Oldcastle. In it, Professor Gayk will argue that Hoccleve appropriates optical discourses both to respond to the Wycliffite critique of religious images and to explore the problem of "unsyte" as it relates to the representation of heresy. In short, the talk argues that the physical act of seeing (or inability to see), and in particular the physical means by which one's sight might be corrected or improved, come to serve as central analogies for Hoccleve's diagnosis of both his own epistemological uncertainty and the conflicted religious climate of the early fifteenth century.
Shannon Gayk is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University. She has published articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Yearbook of Langland Studies, and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. She is currently completing a book on changing attitudes toward religious images in the fifteenth century and editing a collection of essays with Kathleen Tonry entitled Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century.

University of Connecticut

CLAS 217 (Stern Lounge)

Storrs, CT

October

Friday, October 3

4PM

(Reception to follow at the Benton)

Lecture: "Hieronymus Bosch and the Problem of Origins"

Larry Silver ( Farquhar Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania)

Hieronymus Bosch formed his enigmatic art out of deep, late medieval pessimism and the central figure of Lucifer. Indeed the formative moment in his pictures remains the Fall of the Rebel Angels from heaven, whose consequences introduced the problem of evil into the world. This lecture will investigate Bosch's oeuvre through Satan's rebellion and the artist's own personal rebellion against the grain of the Flemish artistic tradition he inherited.

Larry Silver (Ph.D. Harvard, 1974) is a specialist in painting and graphics of Northern Europe, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, during the era of the Renaissance and Reformation. He has served as President of the College Art Association as well as the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and previously taught at Berkeley and Northwestern. He has also served as Editor in Chief of "caa.reviews," the on-line reviews journal of the College Art Association and is a member of the Print Council of America. Publications include a general survey, Art in History, and the recent Landscapes and Peasant Scenes (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005) as well as a museum exhibition on professional engravers of the sixteenth century Netherlands, Graven Images (1993). Penn hosted another exhibition, organized with graduate students, "Transformation: Jews and Modernity" (2001), and another exhibition on mural or frieze woodcuts of the sixteenth century, "Size Matters" is scheduled to originate at Wellesley's Davis Art Center (2007). Other current research centers on Rembrandt's religion for a book-length study co-authored with Shelley Perlove.

University of Connecticut

Benton Museum, Gallery

Storrs, CT

Thursday, October 9

1:30PM

Medieval Studies M.A. Workshop: What does it mean to be interdisciplinary?

University of Connecticut

CLAS 152 (Library)

Storrs, CT

Tuesday, October 21

4PM

(Reception to follow)

Lecture: "The Task of the Historian"

Gabrielle Speigel (President, American Historical Association)

Sponsored by History Department

University of Connecticut

Dodd Center

Storrs, CT

November

Friday, November 7

4PM

(Dinner to follow at the home of David and Pam Benson)

Lecture: "From Virgil's Rome to Chaucer's Troy: Reading Apollo in Troilus and Criseyde"

Jamie Fumo (McGill University)

The god Apollo, denounced along with other pagan “rascaille” at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde but also celebrated therein as a legendary builder of Troy’s walls and a locus of oracular wisdom, is a complex presence within Chaucer’s poetics of classicism. Chaucer highlights Apollo’s intricate agency in the doomed ancient city of Troy on historical, cosmological, and visionary levels. In so doing, he reaches beyond Boccaccio’s Filostrato to an earlier conception of Apollo as a national god, one that was seminally formulated in Virgil’s Aeneid and critically revised in several medieval Trojan legends. As a concerted study in the poetics of retrospection, Troilus and Criseyde conceives of the cultural and erotic significance of the Trojan Apollo within a contentious layering of authoritative and yet self-contradictory texts “besy for to bere up Troye” (as the House of Fame has it). The shadowy presence and tragic ineffectuality of Apollo in the Troilus points in particular to Chaucer’s critical apprehension of the imperial values of Virgil’s Aeneid, which are closely associated with the Augustan Apollo. In a bold move of retrospective completion that follows the precedent both of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Augustine’s City of God, Chaucer subversively re-imagines the Aeneid by designing his own Trojan poem in part as a “prequel” to Virgil’s narrative of Aeneas and his flawed gods.

University of Connecticut

CLAS 217 (Stern Lounge)

Storrs, CT

Thursday, November 13

4PM

Lecture: “Book Culture and ‘Experimental Science’ in Late-Medieval Herbals”

Iolanda Ventura (Catholic University of Louvain)

Her paper, entitled “Book Culture and ‘Experimental Science’ in Late-Medieval Herbals,” addresses connections between book culture and practical experience as represented by medieval herbals. As she demonstrates, herbals in the tradition of the famous text known as Circa instans long have been seen as textual compilations with very little practical use. Until now, scholars have reasoned that herbals like these could not have been used by those who collected herbs or prepared medical remedies.

Ventura reconsiders this question, addressing the role of “practical experience” in this setting. She considers the evidence for first-hand knowledge of the substances under discussion, evidence for the life and cultural background of the medieval compiler of the texts, and the medieval evidence for what historian Lynn Thorndike called “experimental science” including magic. Was there a conflict between the kind of medical and therapeutic knowledge delivered by medieval herbals and what Thorndike considered “experimental science”—or by extension, what we might consider scientific and pseudo-scientific knowledge?

This paper focuses on three well-known manuscripts of the Tractatus de herbis text (derived from Circa instans) all of which are available for further study. British Library MS Egerton 747 recently has been published in a facsimile; Manfredus de Monte Imperiali's Tractatus de herbis (Paris, BN, lat. 6823) is illustrated by the beautiful images in the database "Mandragore" on www.bnf.fr), and the so-called "Herbal of Rufinus" was published by Lynn Thorndike, and it remains a text that deserves to be analyzed by biologists, botanists, and medievalists alike.

Iolanda Ventura received her Ph.D. from the University of Florence in 1999. Since then, she has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Salerno, the University of Münster, and the University of Nancy. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain. Dr. Ventura’s publications include many articles on aspects of the medieval herbal, medical, and encyclopaedic traditions; two joint-edited volumes; and her book-length publication of Bartholmaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus rerum, Book 17--on plants (Brepols, 2007). Her widely anticipated edition of the medieval Tractatus de herbis and the herbal tradition of Circa instans is currently in press and will appear in 2009.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Department of History, and the Medieval Studies Program

University of Connecticut

BioPhys 130

Storrs, CT

December

Friday, December 12

6PM

Medieval Studies Annual Holiday Party

Home of Bob Hasenfratz

SPRING 2009

Friday, February 20

Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium Fifth Annual Graduate Student Conference

University of Connecticut

Student Union

Storrs, CT