“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Monday 7 November 2016
Time: 12:30-1:30pm
Venue: John Medley Building, 4th Floor Linkway, The University of Melbourne

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.

Adam Potkay and Vivasvan Soni – Joint Seminar

Date: 3 November, 2016
Time: 12:30pm-2:30pm
Venue: 2nd floor meeting room, John Medley Building, The University of Melbourne
Register: Register online here

“Something Evermore about to Be: The Transformation of Hope in the Romantic Era”, Professor Adam Potkay (College of William & Mary)

In my talk, I’ll sketch what happens to the Janus-faced figures of hope in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My argument is this: hope, once a theological virtue and potential secular vice, features in the eighteenth century as a neutral element of secular psychology. As a psychological mechanism, hope comes in the Romantic era to underwrite a new, semi-secularized virtue: the hope, more or less independent of revealed religion, for more life, a better or perfected condition of the individual or of the species in time or eternity. This new and indeterminate hope directs us, however, towards a receding horizon. It is hope that aims “beyond hope,” and beyond conceptualization: William Wordsworth’s “something evermore about to be”; Percy Shelley’s hope for a hope realized beyond “its own wreck”; John Stuart Mill’s imaginative hope that arises on the far side of his rebuttal of all arguments for immortality. While Romantic-era hope doesn’t supersede or displace the orthodox theological virtues, it does supplement or vie with them, and thus figures in what has been called the modern “differentiation” between religious and secular/poetic modes of authority.

Adam Potkay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA. His most recent books are Wordsworth’s Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. The Story of Joy has been translated into Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, and Polish. Professor Potkay is currently working on a glossary of ethics/emotions in literature.

“”Gigantic Shadows of Futurity”: Some Modern Anxieties about Representing the Future”, Associate Professor Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University)

Modernity is often characterized by a fascination with change, revolution, novelty and the future. One might think, for example, of Bacon’s proposals for a futuristic academy of science at the end of New Atlantis, or the aesthetics of novelty as it comes to be articulated in the eighteenth century. Moderns, we are told, are so obsessed with their orientation to the future, their desire to bring about the future, that they risk becoming unmoored from the past and tradition. Yet there is a paradox lurking here, namely that there is also within modernity a pervasive unease about representing the future. My paper will explore this unease, and some of the reasons for it. I will begin by discussing some examples from contemporary critical theory, such as Derrida’s messianism, Jameson’s “utopian archipelago,” or Edelman’s No Future. I will then consider how the aversion to representing the future might have its genesis in certain cultural and intellectual formations of the long eighteenth century: Bacon’s critique of final causes; Locke’s account of motivation in the Essay; Mandeville’s articulation of a market logic of cognition that becomes so pervasive in the period; certain aspects of realist representation in eighteenth-century novels; Romantic imaginings of the the future in Wordsworth’s Prelude or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

Vivasvan Soni is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. His book, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (2010), won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. He is working on a project that probes the long history of our discomfort with judgment, tracing its genesis in eighteenth-century discourses of empiricism and aesthetics.

“Emotional Arenas: Historicising Emotions through Spaces and Places in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” Associate Professor Mark Seymour (The University of Otago)

Date: Thursday 27 October 2016
Time: 6:15pm–7:30pm
Venue: Arts West North Wing-361, Collaborative Learning Room, Bld 148, The University of Melbourne
Enquiries: che-melb-admin@unimelb.edu.au

Registration not required.

The ARC’s CHE and other centres around the world attest to the fact that over the past decade emotions have emerged as a dynamic field of historical inquiry. In the process, terms such as ‘emotives’, emotional ‘regimes’, ‘communities’ and ‘practices’ have now established secure places in the scholarly lexicon. Yet historians pursuing this evanescent quarry could still do with further conceptual tools that might help to pin down, visualise, and analyse moments and mechanisms of emotional change in the past. Based on ideas developed through research on marriage, love affairs, a murder and a sensational trial in 1870s Italy, this seminar proposes historicising emotions in a way that emphasises space and place. Italy’s rapid transformation from ancien-régime backwater to constitutional nation provides the context for my argument that the spaces and places of modern western life function as ‘emotional arenas’, where subjective feelings meet the external world in a process of mutually re-shaping interplay.

Mark Seymour is Associate Professor of History at The University of Otago, New Zealand. He received a BA (Hons) from The University of Sydney, and an MA and PhD from the University of Connecticut. His research area is nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy, with a particular interest in the nexus between private life and more public, institutional forces. His first book, Debating Divorce in Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), reconstructed Italy’s long struggle (1870–1970) to introduce a divorce law. He has since published articles in Social History, Rethinking History, Gender and History, Storicamente, and the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2012, with Penelope Morris and Francesco Ricatti, he co-edited a special issue of Modern Italy on ‘Italy and the Emotions’ and the volume Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 ad oggi (Rome: Viella). His most recent article was a review essay for the Journal of Women’s History on love and politics from eighteenth-century America to twentieth-century East Germany (2015). He is co-editor of the journal Modern Italy.

CHE Workshop: “The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages and Dante”, Professor Lino Pertile (Harvard University)

Date: Thursday 20 October, 2016
Time: 3:00pm–5:00pm (afternoon tea served in Tea Room 1.13 from 2.45pm)
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (First Floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia
Register: This event is free, but please email Katrina Tap (katrina.tap@uwa.edu.au) to register by 19 October, 2016.

Professor Lino Pertile is Harvard College Professor and Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Pertile is a renowned scholar on Italian literature, with a particular focus on the medieval and Renaissance periods. He has also been Director of the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2010-2015). His extensive list of publications include Dante in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1996 and 1999) and The New Italian Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 1993).

Event information: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/the-song-of-songs-in-the-middle-ages-and-dante.

“Scrapbook Shakespeare: James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and the preparation of a nineteenth-century Shakespeare edition”, Paul Salzman (La Trobe University)

Date: Thursday 20 October, 2016
Time: 12:00pm–1:00pm
Venue: Leigh Scott Room, Level 1, Baillieu Library, The University of Melbourne
RSVP: Free but RSVP required. Book here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/scrapbook-shakespeare-james-orchard-halliwell-phillipps-and-the-preparation-of-a-nineteenth-century-tickets-26274722402

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps was responsible for one of the most beautiful and most expensive complete editions of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. In this talk Professor Paul Salzman will explain how the edition was put together, and how Halliwell-Phillipps created an extensive series of scrapbooks to help with his annotation, creating them in part through a process of slicing pages out of old books, including a number of Shakespeare quarto and folios. Professor Salzman will speak about about the way Shakespeare was edited in general in the nineteenth century, a time when approaches to editing combined with the elevation of Shakespeare into the role of national and indeed international icon.

Paul Salzman, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at La Trobe University. He has published widely on early modern literature; his most recent book is Literature and Politics in the 1620s: ‘Whisper’s Counsells’ (2014).

Early Modern Depictions of Dancing Others and What We Can Infer of Their Viewers’ Emotional Response, Associate Professor Alessandro Arcangeli (The University of Verona)

Date: Monday 10 October, 2016
Time: 6:15pm‒7:45pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre C, Old Arts Building, The University of Melbourne
Registrations: Online here

In a forthcoming article and book project, ‘The savage, the peasant and the witch’, Alessandro Arcangeli takes these three figures as examples of meaningful ‘dancing others’ in the European tradition. He analyses the extent and way in which dance has been a contributing component of cultural stereotypes ‒ in particular hetero-stereotypes, depicting (by words and images) a variety of ‘others’ as significantly characterised by dancing. Dancing can project judgementally charged connotations on the represented groups and on dance itself as their specific attribute. The emotional aspect is a significant part of the story, for such images contribute to the definition of cultural identities. Dancing is able to give bodily and visible expression to felt emotions and thereby assists perceptions of inclusion in ‒ and exclusion from ‒ complex and multiple communities, through feelings of attraction and repulsion, as well as a mix of aesthetic judgements concerning the value and function of dancing habits and performances.

Alessandro Arcangeli is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Verona and the current Chair of the International Society for Cultural History (http://www.culthist.org). He is the author of Cultural History: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2012) and has published widely on dance (Davide o Salomè? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima età moderna (FBSR-Viella, 2000)) and leisure (Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, 1425‒1675 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In a forthcoming article in the Rivista Storica Italiana he discusses how cultural history and the history of emotions have been mutually redefining each other over the past generation, to such an extent that the one has become inseparable from the other.

“About Music: Manuscripts and Music: the Sydney Spanish Liturgical Chant Manuscript Collection”, Dr Jane Morlet Hardie (University of Sydney)

Date: 10 October, 2016
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Recital Hall West, The Sydney Conservatorium of Music
More information: Christa Jacenyik-Trawöger (scm.research@sydney.edu.au)
Register: Free entry, registrations required. Information on how to register: http://music.sydney.edu.au/events/about-music-jane-hardy-10-10-2016

Over the last ten years the University of Sydney has been building a collection of Spanish Liturgical Chant Manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries. While on the surface these books seem to present just a collection of often barely decipherable dots on parchment they all originally had lives of their own, and hidden within them are stories, contexts and meanings. Today, as we take a journey from manuscripts to meanings, with some side trips along the way we will rediscover some music of earlier centuries as we interrogate some of these unique artefacts and uncover
some of their secrets.

Jane Morlet Hardie PhD, FAHA is a musicologist and librarian has published extensively on Spanish sacred polyphony of the Early Modern period. Following postgraduate study in the United States, she taught at the Universities of Michigan and Sydney and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Harvard where she wrote a book on Spanish sources and music. She is now an elected member of the Directorium of the International Musicological Society, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and attached to the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney.

“Adjusting Our Lenses to Make Gender Visible”, Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Date: 7 October, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Austin Lecture Theatre (1.59, first floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia

This is a free event. You don’t need to RSVP – just come along.

The oldest surviving examples of eyeglasses in the world, dating from around 1330, were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the nuns’ choir in the Cistercian Kloster Wienhausen near Celle in northern Germany. Several pairs were stashed there, along with prayer books, small pictures, devotional objects, and the materials used for making these, such as scissors, beads, cloth, paper, and needles, most likely when Duke Ernest the Confessor attempted to introduce Lutheran practice to the convent in the 1520s. Using these wooden rivet spectacles as both material object and metaphor, my talk will examine the ways that scholarship in many disciplines over the last forty years has sharpened our view of gender in the medieval and early modern periods, allowing us to see greater complexities in things close at hand and a wider panorama beyond.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She specialises in the history of early modern Europe, with research interests in women’s work in Germany, the history of Christianity (especially gender and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations), and global history. Professor Wiesner-Hanks is currently the Senior Editor of Sixteenth Century Journal and an Editor for the Journal of Global History. Her recent publications include: A Concise History of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). She is also the editor of: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World: Critical Concepts in Women’s History, 4 volumes (Routledge, 2015); Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2015); Cambridge World History, 7 volumes in 9 books (Cambridge University Press, 2015); (With John P. McKay, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Roger B. Beck, Clare Hara Crowston, and Jerry Davila), A History of World Societies, 10th ed. (Bedford/St. Martins, 2015); (with Andrew D. Evans, William B. Wheeler, and Julius R. Ruff, Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence, 7th ed. (Cengage, 2014).

New Norcia Institute for Benedictine Studies Annual Institute Lecture 2016:

“Longing for Ecstasy: Monastic Theologies and their Influence”, Professor Constant Mews (Monash University)

Date: Saturday 1 October, 2016
Time: 10:00am-3:00pm
Venue: Institute for Benedictine Studies, New Norcia
Cost: $60 ($35 concession) Includes morning tea and lunch. You can now book and pay on-line at http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/products; or contact either Carmel Posa sgs (carmel.posa@newnorcia.wa.edu.au, phone: 08 9654 8371) or Jill O’Brien sgs (jill.obrien@newnorcia.wa.edu.au, phone: 08 9654 8371).

Professor Mews will consider the way monastic writing in the twelfth-century drew attention to the Song of Songs in a personal way. To under-stand and appreciate what these monastic writers had to say, we need to take seriously how much they valued what the Song had to say about long-ing for the experience of ecstasy.

Constant Mews is Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at the School of Historical Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. Professor Mews has published widely on intellectual and religious history within the twelfth century, with particular reference to Abelard and Heloise, and to Hildegard of Bingen.

“Histories of gender, families and children: what do we still want to know?”, Dr Stephanie Tarbin (School of Humanities and Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence of the History of Emotions, UWA)

Date: 11 October, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia
RSVP: This is a free events, but RSVPs are requested: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/tarbin

The lives of medieval people are far in the past and were often unrecorded. Nonetheless, in recent decades, gender and social historians have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the quotidian experiences and mentalities of the children, women and men of the pre-modern period. Reading conventional sources ‘against the grain’ has enabled feminist scholars to explore women’s agency and self-perception, while combining legal records with personal accounts allows us to better understand how children acted in and viewed their social worlds. The recent ‘emotional turn’ in history has re-posed long debated questions about affective relations within families and households, offering fresh frameworks for assessing the emotional lives of ordinary people.

Stephanie Tarbin has research interests in the gender and social history of late-medieval and early modern England. She has published essays on moral regulation, masculinity, women’s friendships and children’s experiences, which is the focus of her most recent research. With Susan Broomhall, she is co-editor of Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008).