Daily Archives: 13 November 2014

Professor Piroska Nagy, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture

‘A woman of passion, or the powerful emotions of Lukardis of Oberweimar (d. 1309)’, Piroska Nagy, (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Date: Tuesday 18 November
Time: 12:00-2:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney
Enquiries: Craig Lyons, T +61 2 93516859, craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

All welcome.

According to her vita, Lukardis of Oberweimar began her career as a young Cistercian nun suffering from various ailments. Her passions make her a stigmatized holy woman, who undergoes a spiritual pregnancy and visible stigmata, and eventually shares her charisma with the sisters of her convent of Oberweimar. In this paper I propose reading her life as a text in which the transformative power of emotions is central, both in her own life and in that of the convent. Her transformation is an emotional transformation, happening through the bodily performance of passions, a word which merits comment; her sanctity and emotional sharing transform the convent into an emotional community which, most probably, does not last. Exploring the power of emotions as represented in the vita offers an opportunity to reflect, first, on the importance of emotions in late-medieval anthropology, and secondly on the problems a (medievalist) historian meets while working on emotions in history.

Piroska Nagy is Professor of Medieval History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), having also taught at the Université Paris I, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Université de Rouen, and the Central European University. She is author of Le don des larmes au Moyen Age: Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution, Ve-XIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000) and co-author, with Damien Boquet, of Sensible Moyen Age: Une histoire culturelle des émotions et de la vie affective dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Seuil, forthcoming in 2015). Her research centres on the relation between collective religious emotions in the medieval West and change in history. In 2006, with Damien Boquet, she launched the first French research project in the history of emotions, EMMA, EMotions in the Middle Ages, http://emma.hypotheses.org, and co-edited with Boquet Émotions médiévales (2007); Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge (2009); Politiques des émotions au Moyen Âge (2010); and La chair des émotions au Moyen Âge (2011).

Qatar Digital Library – Now Online

The British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership has launched the Qatar Digital Library – a new, bilingual, online portal providing access to previously undigitised British Library archive materials relating to Gulf history and Arabic science.

The portal makes the modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, particularly its connection with Britain, available through vividly documented personal and official archives, photographs, maps and recordings of traditional music held at the British Library.

The Qatar Digital Library, which is in English and Arabic, will improve understanding of the Islamic world, Arabic cultural heritage and the modern history of the Gulf providing researchers around the world with the opportunity to perform ground-breaking research in subject areas such as the history of Gulf trade and politics, key individuals in the Gulf and the history of science in the Arabic-speaking world.

For more information, please visit: http://www.bl.uk/qatar

To access to Qatar Digital Library, please visit: http://www.qdl.qa/en