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.

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.

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.

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)

Free public event, Dunedin, NZ – The 22nd Trendall Lecture ‘Straying from Myth’

The Academy’s Trendall Lecture series celebrates distinguished scholarship in the classics. The 22nd Lecture will be given by New Zealand artist Marian Maguire.
Dates: 6pm-8pm, 28 January 2020

Location: Dunedin, New Zealand

Overview: The Academy’s Trendall Lecture was made possible through a bequest made by Professor A.D. (Dale) Trendall AC CMG FAHA (1909–95), a Foundation Fellow of the Academy. He envisaged the lecture series as ‘an annual lecture or lectures by a scholar on some theme associated with classical studies’.

New Zealand artist Marian Maguire, best known for images which fuse ancient Greek vase painting with New Zealand colonial history, will deliver the 22nd Trendall Lecture — Straying from Myth.

The lecture will occur at the Australasian Society for Classical Studies conference at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, from 28 – 31 January, 2020.

Registration: Visit the Society’s conference website to register.

The National Oral History Association of New Zealand and Ngā Pātaka Kōrero o Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Libraries invite you to a presentation and discussion with visiting oral historian Indira Chowdhury.

Abstract:

This presentation draws on my attempts over the last decade and a half to create archives of different institutions and organisations in the context of oral history work undertaken in India. This presentation argues that the conceptual consequences of colonialism which defined Indians as being steeped in backward traditions and lacking in history need to be kept in mind when trying to assemble an archive of a formerly colonised people.

Brief Bio:

I argue that the insights gained from interacting with “unheard voices” also enable us to understand elite oral histories from Indian institutions. In what ways do new forms of historical representation incorporate older forms of cultural memory and oral traditions? This presentation will attempt to show how we might re-understand the idea of collecting an oral history archive and the critical ways in which we might interpret its contents within a postcolonial context.

Wednesday 25July, 2018

9:30-12:30pm

Level 3 Waitemata Room, Auckland Central City Library

Please register your attendance: treasurernohanz@oralhistory.org.nz

The Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation presents a free Lecture by Dr Stefano Carboni, director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia:

From Melancholy to Euphoria and More: Visual Representation of Emotions in Persian Illustrated Manuscripts

6pm-7pm Wednesday 27 June at the University of Melbourne

The common perception about Persian miniature painting – better described as book illustration because almost invariably it has a textual, literary or oral context – is that it is elegant, colourful, rather formal in composition, and overall restrained in the way the characters are emotionally involved in a particular moment of the story. Persian illustrators, however, had a clear set of tools and visual tropes to convey feelings such as surprise, love, grief, fear, heroism in the face of death, and many more. Many of the stories told in poetic works by Firdausi, Jami and Nizami, all of which were often illustrated, are heavily charged with impossible love, death-defying trials, heroic quests, and mystic ardour: the written language, often memorized by the reader, is the protagonist while the visual image provides in some way an oasis, a respite for the eye, breaking away from the incessant emotional narrative of the verses. A great chapter for the visual representation of emotions, however, was written during the Ilkhanid (Mongol) period in Iran in the 14th century, a time during which all pictorial rules – if they previously existed – were subverted and we can witness a full range of demonstrative engagement with the viewer.

This lecture is part of the From Melancholy to Euphoria: The Materialisation of Emotion in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Symposium, made possible by support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Crescent Foundation. Full symposium details at: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/2ct6

Free lecture. All welcome. Bookings essential. For full details and registration: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/6p56

Dr John Gagné (Department of History, University of Sydney), will give a lunchtime talk for the Medieval and Early Modern Centre on 12 April.

John is freshly back from a visiting Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence. He will talk on:

“Dinner with the Greatest Man on Earth, or, Erasmus’s Sword and D’Alviano’s Pen”

Time: 1pm
Date: Thursday 12 April
Place: Rogers Room (Level 3, John Woolley Building A20), University of Sydney

Lunch will be provided, so please RSVP by Friday 6 April if you intend to come, and would like lunch (daniel.anlezark@sydney.edu.au). Please advise of any dietary requirements.