“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).

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

Date: Wednesday 26 October, 2016
Time: 5:30pm–6:30pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room (First Floor, John Woolley Building A20), The University of Sydney
Enquiries: Craig Lyons (craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au)

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.

“Medea’s Pathological Passions: Seneca’s Dramatic Inversion of Stoicism”, Tara Auty (UWA)

Date: 20 September, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Arts Lecture Room 6 (G.62, ground floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia

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

Traditionally, Seneca’s Medea has been problematised when considered against his prose works. However, recent scholarship has shown that, far from showcasing the failure of Stoicism, Medea inverts the ideals advanced in Seneca’s prose works in order to prove the effectiveness of Stoic philosophy by that very inversion. This paper will demonstrate that Medea is not a character whose reason succumbs to her passions, but rather, that her passions in fact arise from a from a system of reasoning that is internally coherent. The development and sustenance of her passions from and through her reason can thus be read as evidence of one of the most basic tenets of Stoicism, that emotions are based on value judgements. Her practise of constancy – advocated by Seneca to foster consistent character – consolidates her motives and solidifies her drive, so that she develops from being a character temporarily experiencing certain emotions to a character defined by the permanency of those emotions.

Tara Auty is a PhD candidate in Classics and Ancient History at The University of Western Australia (UWA), working under the umbrella of the Languages and Emotion research cluster, contributing to both the Meanings and Change programs of ARC CHE. Her current research project for her PhD, due in 2018, is a study of the effect of community emotions in response to the Fall of Constantinople on the production of neo-Latin epic in the Quattrocento. This project benefits from, and contributes to, fields as varied as scholarship on Latin Humanism, the study of Classical Latin epic, early Modern Italian history, and the cultural history of the emotions.