Title: Poetic Supermen & Villains: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Masculine Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern North India & Nepal
Speaker: Chris Diamond
Date: Friday 2 September 2022
Time: 3:00-4:30pm AEST (UTC +10)
Venue: Zoom, Register here for link
Abstract: This presentation will explore how memory, music, and masculinity were packaged and transmitted across time and spaces in a uniquely Maithili manner. A thief in the night, a jilted lover, a noble king, and discerning princes – the heroes, villains, and characters that populate the landscape of early Maithili literature are compelling. These captivating characters and the language associated with their poetic tradition, Maithili, were formalised by the multilingual poet-scholar-saint Vidyāpati Ṭhākura (c. 1360-1450 CE). Full abstract here.
About the speaker: Dr Chris Diamond is a Lecturer at the School of Culture, History & Language in the ANU College of Asia the Pacific. Chris’ current project concerns the literary legacy of a medieval multi-lingual poet from the North Indian region of Mithila, Vidyapati (c. 1370-1450). His, at the time, new vernacular language of song and poetry became a standardized classical style across Nepal, the Eastern Gangetic Plains, Bengal, and further afield. Chris is currently working on a new edition and translation of some of the oldest manuscript that contain this poet’s songs and a critical analysis of the ways kings and brahmins in Nepal and Bihar employed them to project their own power and prestige.
Tag Archives: online seminar
Middle English Ekphrasis: Aesthetics and Socioeconomics in Late Medieval Poetry
Middle English Ekphrasis: Aesthetics and Socioeconomics in Late Medieval Poetry
An online seminar hosted by The University of Western Australia
Date: Wednesday 21 September 2022
Time: 4:00pm AWST / 6:00pm AEST
Venue: Online via Zoom, hosted by The University of Western Australia
Enquiries and to register: marina.gerzic@uwa.edu.au. Please register by Friday 16 September.
Ekphrasis has attracted a long history of scholarship as a pronounced form of aesthetic display in literary texts. Where major touchstones of scholarship on ekphrasis (Heffernan, 1993; Krieger, 1992) had previously been drawn to classical and modern materials, more recent work has begun to take stock of the peculiarity of medieval ekphrasis (Johnston, Knapp and Rouse, 2015). This paper explores some related avenues of enquiry about the nature, significance, and functions of ekphrasis in major Middle English poetry (Chaucer and Alliterative poetry, especially St Erkenwald and the Piers Plowman tradition). Surveying the vocabulary of cultural production available to late medieval poets, the paper suggests that much work on ekphrasis is theoretically antithetical to an understanding of patronage and artistic production in an age before ‘the Arts’ became defined. Instead, I focus on key passages of Middle English poetry to show how the trope of ekphrasis could be used to distinct effect in different texts: binding cultural production (both poetic and plastic) to the socio-economics of patronage; as a hostile, satirical form of verbal display; and as a mystery, a deliberate enigma, in the examples of St Erkenwald and John Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes.
Chair
Dr Jane Vaughan (The University of Western Australia)
Speaker
Mike Rodman Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nottingham (UK), and works on medieval and early modern literature. His second monograph is forthcoming in the Studies in Renaissance Literature Series with Boydell and Brewer. He spoke at the “Feeling (for) the Premodern” Symposium at The University of Western Australia in 2016; the paper was published in Exemplaria 30:3 (2018). Email: Mike.rodmanjones@nottingham.ac.uk.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medievial and Early Modern Studies, Inc (ANZAMEMS), the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group, Inc, and the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions.
For more information please see the event website.
CEMS ANU Online Seminar – Helen Hills, “Desiring Silver: Saving Souls, Travelling Light, and the Other Side of the Coin.” June 15
“Desiring Silver: Saving Souls, Travelling Light, and the Other Side of the Coin.”
Centre for Early Modern Studies, Australian National University Online Seminar 2 2022, Wednesday 15 June 9:00 am (BST); 6.00 pm (AEST); 4:00am EDT.
Please join us to hear Helen Hills, Professor Emerita of History of Art at the University of York, speak on her current research project on silver: “Silver is particularly fraught, agile and transformative material. Embedded in power relations, coloniality, and matters of refinement, early modern silver was a particularly generative site. Might its peculiar paradoxes be usefully thought in terms of a materiality of trauma? I will consider this through the lens of silver in Naples, capital of the Spanish empire in Europe.” The seminar will be followed by a Q&A discussion and run for 75 minutes.
Time: Wednesday 15 June 9:00 am (BST); 6.00 pm (AEST); 4:00 am (EDT). Time/date converter
Register to receive a link for the event (and the event recording). Eventbrite registration.
2022 Aotearoa Gender History Network
This is a regular, online seminar. Each session (held via zoom) features 2 x 10–12-minute research presentations on current research in Gender History with a focus on Aotearoa New Zealand, followed by discussion. Please be in touch if you would like to present your own research – we have speaking slots available on Wednesday Rāapa 7 September.
Wednesday Rāapa 16 March, 12 pm – 1 pm, via zoom
Zoom link: https://waikato.zoom.us/j/97078105588
Speakers:
Amelia Barker
PhD Candidate, Massey University
Constance de Rabastens (d. c.1386): a woman who fought to be heard
Constance de Rabastens was a lay female visionary during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), a period in which Western Christendom was divided between two rival papacies, and political and religious differences divided communities and even families. Unlike most female visionaries at the time, Constance’s visions supported the “wrong” pope for her region, and she was forbidden from recording her experiences. Despite this, she fought to be heard by religious authorities, challenging their decisions, and eventually disappearing after being arrested. Her recorded letters and visions reveal her agency in making her voice heard, providing historians with a clear example of how medieval women were not just silent witnesses of great political and religious turmoil in their communities, but actively engaged and desperate to influence those in power.
Amanda McVitty
Lecturer in History, Massey University
Sexual regulation and the evolution of patriarchal judicial culture: Towards a feminist history of the legal profession
In his now-classic study, Robert Moore stressed the pivotal role of lawyers in transforming premodern Europe into a ‘persecuting society’ that was heavily invested in surveilling and regulating moral and sexual ‘vice’. This new project centres lawyers’ gendered agency in this process, asking how and to what extent these men created and enabled a patriarchal judicial culture in which were born ‘sticky’ myths and stereotypes about sexual misconduct, rape and gendered violence, and about those who perpetrate it. Using feminist methods, I aim to transform the way we think about and teach this legal history across the premodern-modern divide.
Coming up next:
Wednesday Rāapa 4 May, 12 pm – 1 pm, via zoom
Speakers:
Hayley Goldthorpe, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
The Three Graces against the Taranaki War, 1860-61
Rachel Caines, Australian Catholic University
Interrogating Gender through First World War Propaganda Posters
History on Wednesday Seminar series, University of Sydney
“Serendipitous findings: about the unexpected appearance of a daughter of King Arthur in a thirteenth-century piece of Spanish hagiography”
25 August | Hélène Sirantoine
12:10-1:30pm
Scholars finding themselves reading the late thirteenth-century Life of the Blessed Leander and Isidore, archbishops of Seville, Fulgentius, archbishop of Écija, and Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza might be surprised, as was the presenter of this talk, to find in it a puzzling detail. Among the eccentric kinship relations with which the author filled their text, a Visigothic queen, wife of King Reccared (586–601) and mother of King Liuva II (601–603), was made into no less than the “daughter of King Arthur”. But who was really Reccared’s spouse? And how come that, centuries later, some hagiographer imagined making her the offspring of famous, and legendary, King Arthur? Answering these questions led this bemused investigator to examine a wide range of materials, spanning from the sixth to the eighteenth century. This paper traces the steps of this investigation, the longue durée of this medieval legend, and reflects on the role played by serendipitous findings in the making of history.
Hélène Sirantoine is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. She researches Iberian medieval history with a focus on written culture, especially historiography, hagiography and pragmatic texts as tools of communication and memorialisation. Sirantoine is the author of Imperator Hispaniae: les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León, IXe-XIIe siècles (Madrid, 2012) and she co-edited with Julio Escalona Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir: Péninsule Ibérique et Occident chrétien, VIIIe-XIIe siècles (Toulouse, 2013) and the two first volumes of the series Epistola (Madrid, 2018) dedicated to epistolary practices in medieval Iberia.
You will be able to Join Zoom from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android
Password: History1
For further information on this talk and further talks in this series, please see the website.
