Mary Carruthers to Deliver 2017 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography (Penn, March 20, 21, and 23)

Mary J. Carruthers, Professor of Literature Emeritus, New York University

Cognitive Geometries: Using Diagrams in the Middle Ages

Lecture Dates: March 20, 21, 23, 2017
All lectures begin at 5:30pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion
Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 6th floor
3420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA

Monday, March 20, 2017: "Geometry and the Topics of Invention"

Tuesday, March 21, 2017: "The Shapes of Creativity 1: Trees, Towers, Buildings"

Thursday, March 23, 2017: "The Shapes of Creativity 2: Hands, Spheres, Cubits"

Cognitive Geometries explores the close relationships in medieval creative practice among geometric shapes, meditation, and the human ability to create original works. Focusing on materials crafted in the twelfth century, chiefly on the basis of Biblical texts, and then disseminated widely during the thirteenth century, each lecture investigates the fundamental cognitive insight of medieval diagram makers: that shape and pattern not only envision what we already know but also invite us to discover surprising logical relationships that can provoke our thinking in new ways.

Mary J. Carruthers is the Remarque Professor of Literature Emeritus at New York University and a Fellow (Quondam) of All Souls College, Oxford University. She has written extensively on medieval literature, memory and the history of spirituality. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University (1965) and a B.A. in English from Wellesley College (1961). Carruthers is the author of twelve monographs including her 1990 canonical study, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge). She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and the recipient of many academic honors. She was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1996 and a Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy in 2012. In 2003, Carruthers was awarded The Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America for "the best book in the broad field of medieval studies during the past five years" for The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge).

For more information: (215) 898-7088; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

To RSVP please visit: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/rosenbachs.html

 

Call for Applications: 2017-2018 SIMS Graduate Student Fellowship (due 4/1)

The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) is now accepting applications for its 2017-2018 Graduate Student Research Fellowship. The fellowship has been established to encourage emerging scholars in the Delaware Valley area to engage with the rich manuscript resources at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and in Philadelphia.

This year, SIMS is pleased to offer the Graduate Student Fellowship in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia and the University of Fribourg-based project Fragmentarium (http://fragmentarium.ms), an international scholarly social network that enables libraries, collectors, researchers, and students to upload medieval manuscript fragments and to describe, transcribe, and assemble them online. Working under the guidance of SIMS’s Curator of Manuscripts, Dr. Nicholas Herman, the fellow will be responsible for researching manuscript cuttings and fragments from the John Frederick Lewis Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia and contributing the data to Fragmentarium.

The Free Library’s collection of over 2,000 European manuscript fragments, principally dating from the 11th to the 16th centuries, is one of the largest of its kind and remains relatively understudied. The fellow will have direct access to this extraordinary research material and the opportunity to engage in original scholarly research related to his or her field of study. Further, the fellow will become a participant in a major international digital humanities initiative while benefitting from extensive local expertise.

Applications are due April 1, 2017. For more information and how to apply, go to https://schoenberginstitute.org/graduate-student-research-fellowship-2/.

Francesco Marco Aresu, "Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida: Composition—Circulation—Reception" (Penn, 2/16)

In partnership with the Center for Italian Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is pleased to announce the following lecture:

Francesco Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies, Wesleyan University

Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida: Composition—Circulation—Reception

Thursday, February 16, 2017, 5:00-6:30PM, Class of 1978 Pavilion, Kislak Center, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 6th floor

This talk will explore the editorial and intertextual relations between Giovanni Boccaccio's autograph of the Teseida (preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Acquisti e doni 325) and two exemplars of the poem: Philadelphia, UPenn Codex 254 and Cambridge, Houghton, Typ 227. It will investigate to what extent the material configuration of these exemplars comply with the hermeneutic guidelines materially embedded by Boccaccio in his autograph in order to control the reception and interpretation of the poem. This compliance will be described in terms of Boccaccio's successful editorial project of inscribing his literary production within the canon of authoritative texts. The rich paratextual apparatus with which Boccaccio furnishes his autograph is at the basis of the affirmation of the Teseida as a classic and of the proliferation of comments and accretions around the text of the poem. By conducting this study under the aegis of material philology, the intent is to show how the interpretation of a text needs to be accompanied by an inquiry into the material conditions of its composition, dissemination, and consumption. The purpose is to show a paradigmatic example of the basic coincidence of textual datum and material unit, of content and medium, of verbal-iconic message and physical support.

Registration for this talk is free and appreciated! Please RSVP HERE

Rita Copeland, "An Emotional Anthology of Style: Glasgow Hunterian MS V.8.14" (Penn Material Texts, 2/20)

How did medieval teaching identify the “literary” or “literature” as a particular quality to be achieved and imitated? What was the role of style in defining the realm of the “literary”? I will address these questions through a material context: a modest anthology from the thirteenth century, MS Glasgow, Hunterian, MS V.8.15. This teaching collection, devoted to rhetorical manuals and poems that illustrate rhetorical technique, expresses its interests in terms quite different from what we associate with better known and prestigious poetic anthologies such as the Codex Buranus as well as other teaching collections. The Glasgow anthology reveals its motives in terms that are at once material and meta-literary. It represents itself as a material witness to a period of innovative teaching, and it signals a moment at which medieval rhetoric recognizes itself as the instrument for theorizing literary style as the engine of emotion.

Rita Copeland is Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her fields include the history of rhetoric, literary theory, and medieval learning. Her new project is on rhetoric and the emotions in the Middle Ages. Her publications include Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages; Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck), and most recently, the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558.

 

 

More Articles ...

Our Thanks

The DVMA would like to offer its sincere gratitude to the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and the Princeton Index of Christian Art for their continued support of our programs.

Find us on Facebook