Spring 2012 Events:
Eleanor Johnson (Columbia, English) "Medieval Vernacular Literary Theory: the Ethics of Form." Thursday, May 3rd at 3:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning 602 (poster).
What is “literary theory” in the Middle Ages, and what are its major concerns? It has become clear to scholars that there are Latin treatises that carefully theorize how literature works on the human psyche—more specifically, how literary experience promotes ethical improvement in a reader. But there were other types of works—fictive works and vernacular works—that contributed to the emerging conversation on the relation of ethics to aesthetics at least as much as did these Latin treatises. This talk will telescope in on a particular set of texts—fictive, mostly vernacular—that not only theorizes how literary reading promotes ethical transformation, but also puts that theory into practice.
Professor Johnson specializes in late medieval English prose and poetry, medieval poetics and philosophy, law and literature in the Middle Ages, early autobiography, and vernacular theology. She is finishing a book entitled Sensible Prose and the Sense of Meter: Boethian Prosimetrics in Fourteenth-Century England, concerning the literary-theoretical underpinnings of the efflorescence of prose and verse in late fourteenth-century England. She is also working on the medieval law of waste. Her recent works include an article on time and affect in The Cloud of Unknowing, published in the Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2011). Two collections of her poetry, The Dwell (Scrambler Books) and Her Many Feathered Bones (Achiote Press) were published in 2009 and 2010.
This talk is sponsored by Distinguished Professor Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture.
For more information, please contact the MRST Director, Professor Jennifer Waldron (jwaldron@pitt.edu), or consult the website: http://www.medren.pitt.edu.
Coming in 2012
The Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh presents a Lecture and Seminar Series for 2012 – 2013
“Speaking in Tongues”
Theme Description:
With the support of a collaborative research grant from the Humanities Center, faculty and graduate students working in medieval and Renaissance studies (and beyond) will hold a series of interdisciplinary reading groups, courses, and lectures during the 2012-2013 academic year on the theme, “Speaking in Tongues.” Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of “vernacularization” in this period: How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages? How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation? And how does a focus on vernacularization help us to reevaluate theories and practices of translation-whether from one language to another, from one medium to another, or from one cultural sphere to another?
First Fall Event:
ANN BLAIR (Harvard University)
“Latin Authorship During the Rise of the Vernaculars”
October 1 – 2, 2012
Graduate courses related to the theme:
Fall
Dennis Looney: “Renaissance Humanism” (ITAL 2315)
Ryan McDermott: “Drama, the Vernacular, and Material Presence” (ENGLIT 2105)
Spring
Jen Waldron and Dan Morgan,
“Theory/Technology/Media from Plato to Video Games”
Interested?
If have ideas about ways your research or courses might contribute to work on this theme, or if you would like to join a reading group, please email the Program Director, Professor Jennifer Waldron (jwaldron@pitt.edu).
Call For Papers:
Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy
Center for the Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
2-4 November 2012
The Medicine, Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution Initiative invites the submission of extended abstracts (approximately 1000 words) for individual paper presentations (limit 30 minutes).
The aim of the conference is to bring to the fore the medical context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and to explore the complex connections between medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Medicine and natural philosophy interacted on many levels, from the practical imperative to restore and maintain the health of human bodies to theoretical issues on the nature of living matter and the powers of the soul to methodological concerns about the appropriate way to gain knowledge of natural things. And issues of life, generation, ageing, medicine, and vital activity were important topics of investigation for canonical actors of the Scientific Revolution, from Boyle, Hooke and Locke to Descartes and Leibniz. Recent efforts to recover the medical content and contexts of their projects have already begun to reshape our understanding of these key natural philosophers. Putting medical interests in the foreground also reveals connections with a wide variety of less canonical but historically important scientists, physicians, and philosophers, such as Petrus Severinus, Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Lodovico Settala, William Harvey, Richard Lower, Thomas Willis, Louis de la Forge, and Georg Ernst Stahl. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern science, medicine and philosophy to examine the projects of more and less canonical figures and trace perhaps unexpected interactions between medicine and other approaches to studying and understanding the natural world.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an extended abstract of approximately 1000 words and a 1-2 page CV to Peter Distelzweig at pmd17@pitt.edu. Submission should have full institutional and contact information and should be in doc/docx or pdf format.
Deadline for submissions is 1 June 2012.
Decisions will be announced by 30 July 2012.
Partial funding will be available for accepted papers.
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