Category Archives: lecture

2022 Aotearoa Gender History Network

This is a regular, online seminar. Each session (held via zoom) features 2 x 10–12-minute research presentations on current research in Gender History with a focus on Aotearoa New Zealand, followed by discussion. Please be in touch if you would like to present your own research – we have speaking slots available on Wednesday Rāapa 7 September.

Wednesday Rāapa 16 March, 12 pm – 1 pm, via zoom
Zoom link: https://waikato.zoom.us/j/97078105588


Speakers:
Amelia Barker
PhD Candidate, Massey University

Constance de Rabastens (d. c.1386): a woman who fought to be heard
Constance de Rabastens was a lay female visionary during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), a period in which Western Christendom was divided between two rival papacies, and political and religious differences divided communities and even families. Unlike most female visionaries at the time, Constance’s visions supported the “wrong” pope for her region, and she was forbidden from recording her experiences. Despite this, she fought to be heard by religious authorities, challenging their decisions, and eventually disappearing after being arrested. Her recorded letters and visions reveal her agency in making her voice heard, providing historians with a clear example of how medieval women were not just silent witnesses of great political and religious turmoil in their communities, but actively engaged and desperate to influence those in power.

Amanda McVitty
Lecturer in History, Massey University

Sexual regulation and the evolution of patriarchal judicial culture: Towards a feminist history of the legal profession
In his now-classic study, Robert Moore stressed the pivotal role of lawyers in transforming premodern Europe into a ‘persecuting society’ that was heavily invested in surveilling and regulating moral and sexual ‘vice’. This new project centres lawyers’ gendered agency in this process, asking how and to what extent these men created and enabled a patriarchal judicial culture in which were born ‘sticky’ myths and stereotypes about sexual misconduct, rape and gendered violence, and about those who perpetrate it. Using feminist methods, I aim to transform the way we think about and teach this legal history across the premodern-modern divide.

Coming up next:
Wednesday Rāapa 4 May, 12 pm – 1 pm, via zoom

Speakers:
Hayley Goldthorpe, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
The Three Graces against the Taranaki War, 1860-61

Rachel Caines, Australian Catholic University
Interrogating Gender through First World War Propaganda Posters


History on Wednesday Seminar series, University of Sydney

“Serendipitous findings: about the unexpected appearance of a daughter of King Arthur in a thirteenth-century piece of Spanish hagiography”

25 August | Hélène Sirantoine

12:10-1:30pm

Scholars finding themselves reading the late thirteenth-century Life of the Blessed Leander and Isidore, archbishops of Seville, Fulgentius, archbishop of Écija, and Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza might be surprised, as was the presenter of this talk, to find in it a puzzling detail. Among the eccentric kinship relations with which the author filled their text, a Visigothic queen, wife of King Reccared (586–601) and mother of King Liuva II (601–603), was made into no less than the “daughter of King Arthur”. But who was really Reccared’s spouse? And how come that, centuries later, some hagiographer imagined making her the offspring of famous, and legendary, King Arthur? Answering these questions led this bemused investigator to examine a wide range of materials, spanning from the sixth to the eighteenth century. This paper traces the steps of this investigation, the longue durée of this medieval legend, and reflects on the role played by serendipitous findings in the making of history.

Hélène Sirantoine is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. She researches Iberian medieval history with a focus on written culture, especially historiography, hagiography and pragmatic texts as tools of communication and memorialisation. Sirantoine is the author of Imperator Hispaniae: les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León, IXe-XIIe siècles (Madrid, 2012) and she co-edited with Julio Escalona Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir: Péninsule Ibérique et Occident chrétien, VIIIe-XIIe siècles (Toulouse, 2013) and the two first volumes of the series Epistola (Madrid, 2018) dedicated to epistolary practices in medieval Iberia.

You will be able to Join Zoom from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android
Password: History1

For further information on this talk and further talks in this series, please see the website.

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on February 18 at 4:00 PM AEDT:
“Erasmus on Emotion Between the Old and New Testaments,” presented by Kirk Essary (University of Western Australia)

Please see the seminar poster below. To RSVP for Zoom details, please email: MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.au.

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on Nov 19 at 2:00 PM AEDT: “Medieval Philosophy of Mind: the first treatise,” presented by Margaret Cameron (University of Melbourne)

Please find attached below the poster for this event. To RSVP and receive Zoom details, please email MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on 15 October at 2:00 PM (AEDT/GMT+11): “Blood rain, crucifixions and instruments of the Passion: Christ, visuality and religious identity in sixteenth-century prodigy books,” presented by Jenny Spinks (University of Melbourne)

For more information and an abstract, please visit our seminar webpage. To RSVP, please email: Mems.seminar@acu.edu.au.

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Studies Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on Thursday 17 September at 2:00 PM AEST: “Re-Reading the abuses of the age: from seventh-century Ireland to twelfth-century France,” presented by Constant Mews (Monash).

Please email MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.au for Zoom details and to RSVP. For more information on the seminar series see here.

ACU Medieval and Early Modern Studies Seminar Series

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on August 21 at 2:00pm AEST:

“Plague Time: Space, Fear and Emergency Statecraft in Early-Modern Italy”, presented by Nicholas Eckstein (University of Sydney).

Please find the poster for the event attached below. To RSVP for Zoom details, please email: MEMS.seminar@acu.edu.au.

ACU Seminar Series: ‘Dante, Theologian at the End of Time’

The Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University cordially invites you to attend lecture series by Prof. Denys Turner, hosted by the IRCI’s Religion & Theology program.

“Dante, Theologian of the End of Time” will include three separate lectures:

Wednesday 24 June, 8am AEST
Dante, Theologian-Poet
It doesn’t make a lot of difference to Dante if one calls him a medieval theologian, but it does make a great deal of difference to how one thinks of theology in the Middle Ages. This lecture explores the difference it makes for how we think about medieval theology to take the Comedy as a paradigm for theological work. One consequence is that letting Dante into the club relativises the theology of the university men by making their approach but one way of doing theology rather than definitive, which, by the same token, lets in a lot of women too.

Thursday 25 June 8am AEST
Dante, Augustine, and Confession
Curiously, Augustine does not appear by name in Dante’s Comedy. This lecture explores the possibility that this is because his influence on the theology of the poem is pervasive throughout its whole trajectory. It contributes something of significance to both theologies to compare the “confessing” strategies of them both.

Friday 26 June 8am AEST
Dante, Aquinas, and Hell
Recent critiques of “infernalist” theologies, in particular of Aquinas’s, raise the question of how far Dante’s Inferno entails a commitment to a doctrine of eternal punishment in hell for unrepentant sinners in the way in which Aquinas’ teachings on hell seem unmistakably to do. Do we have to read Inferno as descriptive, howsoever imaginatively, of a real condition of eternal punishment of unrepentant sinners? And if not, how may one legitimately read it as allegory?

Please send your RSPV to rachel.davies@acu.edu.au to receive a Zoom event link and instructions for joining. In order to ensure safety and security for our participants, you will not be able to join the lectures if you haven’t registered by email. However it isn’t necessary to confirm which of the three lectures you’d like to attend, as one RSVP will get you links for all three events.

Zoom Seminar: Reindert Falkenburg, ‘Pieter Brugel: Grounds for Speculation’

The members of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at ACU are delighted to invite you to attend our next virtual seminar on June 18 at 4:00 PM AEST (GMT +10):

“Pieter Bruegel: Grounds for Speculation” presented by Reindert Falkenburg (New York University / Abu Dhabi)

Lisa Beaven (La Trobe) will offer a response.

The poster for the seminar is attached below. To RSVP and to receive the pre-circulated paper along with Zoom details to join the meeting, please email: michael.barbezat@acu.edu.au.

Download (PDF, 2.94MB)

Medieval Academy of America Webinar: The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19

This coming Friday, 15 May, there will be a PUBLIC WEBINAR sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America:

The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19

15 May 2020
1 – 3 PM EDT
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89832471831

Questions can be submitted via Twitter by using the hashtag #MAAWebinar. The webinar and following Q&A will be recorded.

The session will, for the first time ever, bring together the world’s leading authorities on the “new paradigm” of plague studies, which uses new findings in the genetics of Yersinia pestis to argue that the Black Death was a real semi-global pandemic: affecting not simply Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, but most of Asia and probably major parts of Africa, too.

No registration is required. Just show up. Though it is recommended that you arrive early as spaces are limited. This will be the first Webinar dedicated to the Black Death since our new pandemic began. If you haven’t updated your Black Death teaching notes in the past decade (or more), you’re in for some big surprises.

For more information click here. To access the recording of this event, check out this MAA link a few days after the event to get the link to the MAA YouTube page where it will be posted. A bibliography is also being prepared that will be posted as a Google Doc.