Recent Spring 2009 Events:

Stuart Clark (Department of History, Princeton University) "The Temptations of St. Anthony and the Art of Discernment." Friday, April 3rd at 4:30 p.m. at Carnegie Mellon University in the Erwin Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall A53.

Dr. Clark’s talk will explore the representation of St. Anthony the great – the father of monasticism – in European art of the 15th to 18th centuries and in the theology and demonology of the period. 

Stuart Clark studied at University of Wales, Swansea and at Cambridge. He was senior lecturer in the Department of History at UW Swansea from 1995-98 and then Professor from 1998 to 2008. He is currently teaching at Princeton University (2008 – 2009). He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Lilly Fellow at the National Humanities Centre, North Carolina. He was elected to the British Academy in 2000. His many publications include Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007), and Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1999).

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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Jonathan Sawday (University of Strathclyde in Glasgow), "Blanks: A Story of Absence" Thursday, January 22nd at 4:30 p.m. at Carnegie Mellon University in the Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A.

This lecture will trace part of the history of representing blanks -- gaps, absences, voids, -- in literature and in art from the Renaissance to the present. Jonathan Sawday holds the Chair in English Studies at Strathclyde University. His latest book is Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London and New York, 2007). (bio - poster)

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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Hannah R. Johnson (Department of English, University of Pittsburgh) "Allegories of Violence: The Medieval Ritual Murder Accusation and Scholarly Projects of Memory." February 19th at 4:30 p.m. at the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, room 501.

Hannah R. Johnson earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University after receiving an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of York (UK). Her teaching and research interests encompass medieval historical writing and modern historiography, contemporary philosophies of history, and the literary aspects of medieval cultural forms committed to truth-telling projects, such as saints’ lives and travel narratives. Her book manuscript, "Crimes and Libels: The Ethics of Memory and the Medieval Ritual Murder Accusation in Jewish History,” examines the intersection of ethical commitments and methodological questions in modern historical writing about the ritual murder accusation. Her most recent article, “Rhetoric’s Work: Thomas of Monmouth and the History of Forgetting,” appeared in volume 9 (2008) of New Medieval Literatures. She has been the recipient of a Mellon fellowship and several research awards.

Professor Johnson’s talk will be followed directly by a MRST Open House Reception. All Pitt/PCMRS students, faculty, partners, and friends are welcome! For location details contact Jen Waldron (jwaldron@pitt.edu)

Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program.

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James Martel (Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University) “Hobbes and the ‘Error of Separated Essences’: Rhetoric, Authority and Sovereignty in Leviathan.” Friday, February 27 at 3:15 pm at Duquesne University, College Hall room 220.

James Martel is the author of Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001) and Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia, 2007).

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss how the method we use to read a text effects, or even produces the meaning of a given text and also what the political connotations of such a reading might be. In particular, I will be discussing how we read Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, one of the central canonical texts for political theory. My argument is that when we read Leviathan according to the instructions for reading that Hobbes describes in that book, our understanding of the text changes from one where sovereignty is promoted at the expense of the individuals who form a society, to one in which sovereignty is actually undermined by precisely those individual subjects, or readers, who constitute what can, for lack of a better word, be called “the public.” Hobbes method of reading, demonstrated via his interpretation of scripture, is anti-idolatrous. He opposes what he calls “the error of separated essences” whereby a metaphor or other figure of speech supplants what it is meant to represent (his prime example is the soul, which is originally meant to simply represent “a person” but has superseded that person and become immortal). When we use language idolatrously, we produce an entire system of phantasms, what Hobbes calls “the kingdom of darkness.” When however we use language in a way that is explicitly aware of its representational nature, we engage in a humbler and, I would argue, more democratic, discourse. By analogy between author and text on the one hand and sovereign and subjects on the other (an analogy he frequently makes) we can apply the lessons that we learn about reading the text Leviathan to the political world that Leviathan describes. We see that the sovereign itself could be considered a “separated essence,” a figure who purports to stand for the public but in fact replaces them with its own inflated conception.

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Joanna Woods-Marsden (Department of Art History, UCLA) "L'Arme and Gli Amori: Gendered Identity in Titian's Portraits for the Este Court of Ferrara." Thursday, March 26th at 4:30 p.m. at the University of Pittsburgh, room 202 at Frick Fine Arts.

The lecture deals with two portraits by Titian. The first is that of Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara [Prado, Madrid]. Since his right hand rests on cannon that he cast himself, the talk begins with a focus on war and politics. The other portrait is that of his low-born mistress (the daughter of a hat-maker), Laura Dianti [Kisters Coll., Switzerland], so there is a gender component too, because mistresses of humble origins are rarely identified. She is accompanied by a black child page, the first to appear in Western art, so the paper also has considerable discussion about race in the Renaissance.

Joanna Woods-Marsden got her B.A. and M.A from Trinity College, Dublin University, and her Ph.D from Harvard University. After working in Canadian museums and universities, she joined the faculty at UCLA in 1984, where she is Professor of Italian Renaissance art. Her research interests include the social context for and the function of art, as well as issues of identity in portraiture; Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist was published by Yale in 1998. Her current book project also involves portraiture: The Visual Rhetoric of Power and Beauty: Gendered Identity in Titian's Court Portraits. She has long focused on feminist critical issues, and published “Portrait of the Lady, 1430-1520” in the exhibition catalog Virtue and Beauty, National Gallery of Art, 2001. While Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at CASVA (National Gallery of Art) in 2002-03, she did research toward a book-length study of Renaissance portraits of women. She has also published widely on issues of patronage, court art and artists (The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello's Arthurian Frescoes, Princeton, 1988, and many articles). As a Fellow of Villa I Tatti in Florence and the American Academy in Rome, and the recipient of many awards, she has lived in Italy for many years and traveled extensively in that country as well as throughout Western Europe.

Sponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, The Department of French and Italian, The Cultural Studies Program, and The Women’s Studies Program.

Recent Fall 2008 Events:

Colum Hourihane (Princeton University), “Quid is Veritas? Trying to Disentangle the Real from the Mythical Pilate” Thursday, October 9th at 3:30 p.m. in The University of Pittsburgh's Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 203.

Hourihane is Director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University, and the author of two recent studies of medieval art, The Processional Cross in Late Medieval England (2005) and Gothic art in Ireland,1169-1550 (Yale, 2003). He has also edited diverse essay collections, including Spanish Medieval Art (Arizona, 2007) and Objects, Images, and the Word (Princeton, 2003).

Sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Mauro Perani (University of Bologna) “What is the ‘European Genizah’? A Survey of Hebrew Manuscript Discoveries in Italy and Spain and their Importance for Jewish Studies” Monday, October 27th at 4:00 in The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Room 501.

University of Bologna Professor Perani is currently a Padnos Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies (University of Michigan). He has been Director of “The Italian Genizah Project” since 1992, and his recent publications include Talmudic and Midrashic Fragments from the ‘Italian Genizah’: Reunification of Manuscripts and Catalogue (Giuntina, 2004).

Co-Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of French and Italian at The University of Pittsburgh.

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Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine)Public Lecture:
Thursday, November 6th at 4:00 p.m. in the Cathedral of Learning G24, “Mrs. Polonius Goes to Italy: An Intimate Guide to Shakespeare's Europe”

This entertaining and educational jaunt through Shakespeare's Italy explores the weird and wonderful iconography of hotels, hospitality, safe sex, prescription medicine, and forbidden books in Romeo and Juliet, All's Well That Ends Well, and Othello. For more information, please see: www.thinkingwithshakespeare.org/index.php?id=277

Seminar for Faculty and Graduate Students:
Friday, November 7th, 1:30 p.m. in the Cathedral of Learning 362, “Shakespeare and Italy: Enter through Theory”

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, 2005) and Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996). She has written extensively on Shakespeare, religion, and psychoanalysis. See her website for more details: www.thinkingwithshakespeare.org

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Rosamond Purcell & Michael Witmore "Hearsay: On the Universal Languages of Nature" Friday, November 7, 4:30 p.m. at Carnegie Mellon University in the Erwin Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall A53.

Join Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon University to take part in a dynamic exchange between these two energetic and knowledgeable experts. Rosamond Purcell is a world-renowned artist that has photographed behind the scenes in the collections of major museums for more than twenty-five years. Michael Witmore is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Renaissance studies. (poster)

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Silver Eye Center for Photography.