“Passion and Emotions in Late Medieval Literature: Lust, Life and Death”, Professor Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona)

Date: Monday 14 March, 2016
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

More than ever before, late medieval literature explored the wide gamut of human emotions, particularly within the contexts of love, marriage, sexuality and death. The corpus of late medieval verse narratives (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Kaufringer, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, Poggio Bracciolini, Georg Wickram, etc.) provides a wealth of insights into the way people interacted, giving a sense therefore of their feelings and concerns, their fears and worries. Marriage, above all, which became the focus of most of the leading poets of that time, has always been difficult and filled with tensions, and we can learn much about the central issues through this literary discourse.

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of the University of Arizona. In 83 scholarly books and more than 600 articles, he has covered a wide range of topics concerning the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century, including eighteenth-century Jesuit history in Arizona/Sonora. In 2015 he published his 3-volume Handbook of Medieval Culture, his latest monograph The Forest in Medieval German Literature, and his ninth volume of his own poetry, Sonora: Harsh Words. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access.