“The Liberty Discourse in Early Modern Europe 1500-1650: Milton’s Areopagitica in context”, Professor Hilary Gatti
English Department Research Seminar, University of Sydney

Date: Wednesday April 6, 2016
Time: 3:00–5:00pm
Venue: John Woolley Building, Room S226, University of Sydney

All welcome!

My contribution will start by emphasizing the recent emergence of Milton the prose writer as a fully autonomous figure and no longer as a mere adjunct of the great epic poet (writing with his left hand). That the considerable recent attention to Milton’s prose has led to a lively interpretative debate is considered here as a positive aspect of the liberty discourse which is the subject of my recent book Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: from Machiavelli to Milton (Princeton University Press, 2015). The second part of the paper will reconsider the treatment of Milton’s Areopagitica in my book, emphasizing in particular the Italian influence on Milton’s idea of liberty, and the limits he places on that idea.

Hilary Gatti was born and studied in Great Britain, until she married and moved to Italy in 1961. She started teaching English Language and Literature in the Letters and Philosophy Faculty of the State University of Milan in 1964, and then as Associate Professor in the Letters and Philosophy Faculty of the State University of Rome “La Sapienza” until her retirement in 2006. She has published extensively on renaissance literature and philosophy, and is the author of The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (Routledge), Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Cornell University Press) and Essays on Giordano Bruno (Princeton University Press). Her most recent book, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: from Machiavelli to Milton was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. A Festschrift in her honor, edited by Martin McLaughlin of the University of Oxford, Ingrid D. Rowland of the University of Notre Dame, and Elisabetta Tarantino, was published by Legenda in October, 2015.

The Global Middle Ages Faculty Research Group emerged out of the research interests of a dynamic group of academics at The University of Sydney who are working on the medieval and early modern period from a non-Eurocentric perspective. Our group is especially interested in studying the cultural productions and material conditions of a number of different Medieval and Early Modern empires and civilizations, as well as in exploring the historical, economic, intellectual, religious interactions and exchanges between them and Europe.

2016 Seminar Series Programme

The seminar series takes place in the SOPHI Common Room (Level 8, Room 822 Brennan MacCallum Building or the SLC Common Room (Level 5, Room 524 Brennan MacCallum Building). Click here for map

For more information please contact, Hélène Sirantoine: helene.sirantoine@sydney.edu.au
Visit the Global Middle Ages Research Group website: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/global_middle_ages/

Wednesday 6 April 2016
Place: SOPHI Common room 8th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Prof Vrasidas Karalis (University of Sydney, SLC)
“Heretical Translations and their political implications: Revisiting Paul’s Romans 13, 1-7 as a translation problem”

Wednesday 27 April 2016
Place: SOPHI Common room 8th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Dr Jan Shaw (University of Sydney, English)
“Anger, laughter and cross-cultural exchange in The Prose Life of Alexander”

Wednesday 25 May 2016
Place: SOPHI Common room 8th floor
Time: 4pm:5.30pm
Assoc Prof Andrew Gillett (Macquarie, Ancient History)
“Lessons from an older sibling: Late Antiquity, Global Middle Ages, and the dialogue with European identities.”

Wednesday 3 August 2016
Place: SOPHI Common room 8th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Dr Francesco Borghesi (University of Sydney, SLC)
“Renaissance Culture and Religious Pluralism”

Wednesday 31 August 2016
Place: SLC Common room 5th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Dr Kimberley Knight (Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Sydney node)
‘Transmitting ideas to the peripheries: Scandinavian texts and their European context in the Later Middle Ages’

Wednesday 21 September 2016
Place: SLC Common room 5th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Dr Umberto Grassi (Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Sydney node)
‘Transgressions of the Flesh: Sex and Cross-Cultural Interactions in the Early Modern Mediterranean World’

Wednesday 26 October 2016
Place: SLC Common room 5th floor
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Dr Esther Klein (University of Sydney, SLC)
‘Theories of historiography in medieval China’

“Philippe Ariès and the Consequences: History of Childhood, Family Relations, and Personal Emotions: Where do we stand today?”, Professor Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona)

Date: Thursday 17 March 2016
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern seminar room 1.33, 1st floor, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia
Registration: All welcome. However, as space is limited, please register your attendance with Katrina Tap (katrina.tap@uwa.edu.au).

No other topic proves to be as relevant in the history of emotions as ‘children’. Huge debates have raged over the question whether the pre-modern world had a clear idea about and sentiments regarding children, following Philippe Ariès’s famous thesis (1960). Recent years have witnessed, however, a paradigm shift, with much new evidence confirming the highly positive approach toward children already well before 1800. This talk will examine a wide selection of literary texts from the European Middle Ages to underscore that, contrary to previous expectations, children mattered greatly, not as ‘little adults’, but as ‘children in their own rights’.

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at The University of Arizona, USA. In 83 scholarly books and more than 600 articles, he has covered a wide range of topics concerning the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century, including eighteenth-century Jesuit history in Arizona/Sonora. In 2015 he published his 3-volume Handbook of Medieval Culture, his latest monograph The Forest in Medieval German Literature, and his ninth volume of his own poetry, Sonora: Harsh Words. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access. He is visiting Australia as part of a collaboration between CHE and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS).

“The Pleasures of Allegory: Rethinking ‘Susanna and the Elders’”, Professor Patricia Simons (University of Michigan)

Date: Monday 21 March, 2016
Time: 6–7:30pm
Venue: Mills Lecture Theatre 209, RC Mills Building, The University of Sydney
RSVP: Free event with online registration here: http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/power-institute-lecture-professor-patricia-simons

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders is commonly read as a case of male voyeurism, in subject and purpose, or as mere moralizing allegory. This lecture moves away from each reductive extreme by reexamining the story’s history and visual effect.

Patricia Simons is Professor of Art History, University of Michigan. Her field of study includes the art of Renaissance Europe (primarily Italy, France and the Netherlands) with a special focus on the representation of gender and sexuality.

“Medieval War in Modern Memory”, Professor Andrew Lynch (UWA)

Date: 18 April 2016
Time: 6:00-7:00pm
Venue: Fox Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia
Cost: Free, but RSVP is required
RSVP: Online via: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/medieval-war-in-modern-memory-registration-21509657966

War is perhaps the predominant theme in what is called ‘medievalism’ – the imaginative reception and reconstruction of the medieval period in modernity – but with ambvalent effects. While war has been central to many positive evocations of the medieval past, it has also served as an image of regressive barbarism: recent military atrocities, such as in the 1990s conflicts in former Yugoslavia, are readily described as ‘medieval’; on the other hand, the Gulf War of 1990-91 was positively branded as a ‘crusade’ by its proponents. This talk will take up various possibilities of providing this perceived contradiction in modern cultural memory with a genealogy. One way is to invoke the long-term side-effects of the subjection of medieval intellectual and religious practices to humanist, Reformation and Enlightenment attacks, and the related nature of cultural defences of the medieval against such attacks: the glory of war (often symbolically adapted) became an important but sometimes fragile element of continuity and respectability allowed to the middle ages. Another way is to trace the use of medieval military history, chronicle and romance in Romantic medievalism and nationalist image-building, causing an identification of the middle ages with militarism which was later negatively reconfigured.

A third method examines how literature, film and other cultural products have treated war in their demarcation of the medieval from the period in relation to modernity. In investigating these matters, this illustrated talk ranges selectively from the immediate post-medieval period to the present day, but with an emphasis on the period 1800-2000, and will attempt to analyse some long-term trends in the discourse of war in both high-culture and popular medievalism.

Andrew Lynch is a Professor in English and Cultural Studies at UWA, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800. He has written extensively on war in medieval and modern medievalist literature and culture.

“Passion and Emotions in Late Medieval Literature: Lust, Life and Death”, Professor Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona)

Date: Monday 14 March, 2016
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

More than ever before, late medieval literature explored the wide gamut of human emotions, particularly within the contexts of love, marriage, sexuality and death. The corpus of late medieval verse narratives (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Kaufringer, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, Poggio Bracciolini, Georg Wickram, etc.) provides a wealth of insights into the way people interacted, giving a sense therefore of their feelings and concerns, their fears and worries. Marriage, above all, which became the focus of most of the leading poets of that time, has always been difficult and filled with tensions, and we can learn much about the central issues through this literary discourse.

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of the University of Arizona. In 83 scholarly books and more than 600 articles, he has covered a wide range of topics concerning the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century, including eighteenth-century Jesuit history in Arizona/Sonora. In 2015 he published his 3-volume Handbook of Medieval Culture, his latest monograph The Forest in Medieval German Literature, and his ninth volume of his own poetry, Sonora: Harsh Words. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access.

Objects of Conversion/Objects of Emotion
Workshop led by Benjamin Schmidt and Paul Yachnin

Date: Tuesday, 15 March, 2016
Time: 10:00am-12:00pm
Venue: Macmahon Ball Theatre, Ground Floor, Old Arts, The University of Melbourne, Parkville
RSVP: Register here: https://secure.alumni.unimelb.edu.au/s/1182/match/wide.aspx/?sid=1182&gid=1&pgid=8408&cid=12233
More information: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/objects-of-conversionobjects-of-emotion

From their first entrance in, even to their final end, the lives of our early modern forebears were bound up with matter: with material, tangible, resonant things. Utensils made of wood and pewter, clothing designed from wool and silk, books formed of parchment and ultimately paper. Likewise, the materiality of human bodies, even in death, preoccupied the early modern psyche, as the ubiquity of the memento mori in Renaissance art and theatre attests and as church reliquaries, to this day, still demonstrate.

In this cross-disciplinary workshop, Benjamin Schmidt and Paul Yachnin lead off a hands-on examination of the emotional and conversional power of material objects. They will speak to particular objects of their research, and they will also interrogate the object-subject relationship: how things are affective, and the effort early moderns made to affect things.

Participants are invited to bring moving objects of their own, objects that might be resonant with early modern lives or with our present lives in a postmodern world.

Also, with consent, participants will have the opportunity to have their object photographed and take part in a brief audio interview sharing its history, symbolism and importance after the workshop. Your moving work will become part of a digital archive that will be freely available to you following the event on the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions website (www.historyof emotions.org.au)

* If you are interested in participating in this activity, please note at the time of registration and email: penelope.lee@unimelb.edu.au to arrange scheduling.

Together the members of the workshop will consider how seventeenth-century and later objects, such as china, skulls, and many other things—mundane and sacred—shaped, moved, and even converted their bearers and users.

Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Among his publications are the books Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing (with Anthony Dawson); editions of Richard II (with Dawson) and The Tempest; and six edited books, including Shakespeare’s World of Words and Forms of Association. His book-in-progress, Making Publics in Shakespeare’s Playhouse, is under contract with University of Edinburgh Press.

Benjamin Schmidt is the Giovanni & Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). He is the author of Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World (2001; 3rd ed. 2006), which won the Renaissance Society of America’s Gordan Prize, awarded for the best book in Renaissance and Early Modern studies across all disciplines; and, most recently, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (2015).

St Hildegard of Bingen: Doctor of the Church

This extraordinary woman was not only a renowned abbess in her own time she was also a prophetic visionary, theologian, herbalist, physician, poet and composer of liturgical texts. This weekend will examine a variety of Hilde-gard’s writings and explore how they can offer us deeper insights into under-standing life today. The text for our reading for this weekend is: St Hildegard of Bingen: Doctor of the Church, by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, available at www.amazon.com or through the Institute.

For Bookings please contact Sr Carmel Posa sgs
Phone: 08 96548371
Email: carmel.posa@newnorcia.wa.edu.au

The New Norcia Benedictine Community is the official title of the group of Roman Catholic monks who have owned and operated the small town of New Norcia, which is located 132km north of Perth in Western Australia, since 1847. New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town, with the Monastery, where the monks live, work and pray, at its heart. The monks of New Norcia live according to the guidance and rhythms of The Rule of St Benedict, which has been followed by monks since the sixth century AD. Monks who do so are referred to as ‘Benedictines’. Unlike many priests and nuns, monks do not join an ‘order’ as such, but instead join an autonomous monastery where they promise to remain for the rest of their lives.

For more information, please visit: http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au

Sydney Opera House Presents Culture Club:: If Shakespeare were alive today…

Date: 15 March, 2016
Time: 11:00am (Running Time: 75 minutes)
Venue: Venue: Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
More Info and Tickets: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/culture_club_if_shakespeare_were_alive_today.aspx

Marking 400 years on from Shakespeare’s death, Bell Shakespeare’s Peter Evans (Artistic Director), actor Michelle Doake and director Damien Ryan discuss some ‘what if’s’ in the world of this legendary artist. What would he make of the 21st Century? What do contemporary audiences get out of the classics? If Shakespeare were alive what would he be writing, and perhaps more importantly, for whom?