Jane Burns - Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from Medieval France
Mélusine, a fourteenth-century snake-tailed woman who can fly, derives in part from medieval narrative traditions of fairies and mermaids. It is her e...
CMRS Lecture Series
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About
Each year, the Center hosts a series of lectures by visiting scholars on an annual theme, with a culminating "public" lecture in the spring that is aimed towards a general audience. Speakers represent a broad range of academic fields of study and historical periods.
Joel Kaye, Why a History of Balance?
Virtually every discourse in the medieval period was constructed around the ideal of balance. In my recent book, A History of Balance, 1250-1375, publ...
Fiona Somerset Part I, 'In Cuntrey Hit is a Comune Speche': Vernacular Legal Theory in Mum and the Sothsegger [Silence and the Truthteller]
It is not a new insight that what is probably the early fifteenth century’s most sustained and thoughtful response to Piers Plowman, the alliterative,...
Jeremy Smith, "Music, Death, and 'Uncomfortable Time': William Byrd’s O that most rare breast and Shakespeare’s "Excellent Conceited Tragedy" of Romeo and Juliet"
Arguably few playgoers today are aware that Act 4 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ends with musicians engaging in badinage with a clown. Treated gen...
Robert Henke, "Shakespeare and the Commedia dell' Arte"
Especially if one views the “commedia dell’arte” in its relationship to Italian scripted comedy of the day, Shakespeare thoroughly absorbed the Italia...
Tom Burman (Tennessee); Ryan Szpiech (Michigan), “The Polemics and Projects of Ramon Martí O.P.: Debating the Legacy of Medieval Iberia's Greatest Linguist”
The Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí (d. after 1284) was the most learned polemical author of the later Middle Ages. He was part of the thirteenth-centur...
Timothy McGee, Ceremonies and the Arts in Late 15th Century Florence
The arrival of Girolomo Savonarola in 1490 had serious implications for the traditional public ceremonies in Florence as well as the practices of musi...
Kathleen Donegan, Things That Seemed Incredible: The Starving Time at Jamestown
In the desperate winter of 1610, mass starvation reduced the settler population of colonial Jamestown from 500 to 60. This paper uses the specter of s...
Joan Fitzpatrick, The Hungry Courtier: Gourmets and Ascetics in Early Modern Drama
This paper will trace attitudes to excessive consumption and fasting in the early modern period. By considering the church line on gluttony and fastin...
Sam Barrett, The Sites and Sounds of Early Medieval Latin Song
The music of early medieval Latin song has hitherto been known to only a handful of specialists. Notations survive in manuscripts from ecclesiastical ...