Juggling the Middle Ages, Jongleur de Notre Dame by Jan Ziolkowski
The Medieval Review, 2023
In his six-volume The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity (2018), Jan Ziolko... more In his six-volume The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity (2018), Jan Ziolkowski offered the community of medievalists and numerous other readers the most comprehensive reception history of any medieval text ever produced. Geared towards a mixed audience of specialists and non-specialists alike in style, tone, and scholarly apparatuses, they offer a uniquely rich resource on modern European and world medievalisms in high and popular culture, scholarship, the arts, music, and media. The free access to Ziolkowski's academic research via Open Book Publishers, an independent open access publisher for the humanities and social sciences, makes his publication an enviable example of how medievalists might reach audiences beyond academe.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 164, no. 2 (2022) 1–25., 2022
The Medieval Review, 2021
The Medieval Review, 2021
Review by Richard Utz of Volumes III-IV of the Juggle of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Mode... more Review by Richard Utz of Volumes III-IV of the Juggle of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. The review was published online in September 2021 for The Medieval Review (TMR 21.09.23).
Exhibition catalog for "Juggling the Middle Ages" exhibition that ran from October 2018 to Februa... more Exhibition catalog for "Juggling the Middle Ages" exhibition that ran from October 2018 to February 2019 at Dumbarton Oaks.
Table of Contents of The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, Volume 1: The ... more Table of Contents of The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, Volume 1: The Middle Ages.
Table of Contents and Excerpt
Table of Contents and Excerpt
Table of Contents and Excerpt
Table of Contents and Excerpt
Table of Contents and Excerpt
The event took place in the Fellowship House Oak Room.
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Juggling the Middle Ages, Jongleur de Notre Dame by Jan Ziolkowski
rudimentary novel with twenty episodes. In 2009 the “original” received
at last an edition and translation with commentary as Harvard Studies in
Medieval Latin 1. Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, volume 4
in the series, displays the mysteries of the tradition. Solomon relates
to the biblical king, but did Marcolf originate in Germanic or Eastern
regions? Here lovers of literature and folklore may explore, in English
for the first time, relevant texts, from the twelfth through the early
eighteenth century. These astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces,
from Iceland in the North and West through Russia in the East and Italy
in the South, have been translated from medieval and early modern
French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian. The book opens
with snapshots of two nineteenth-century polymaths, the Englishman John
M. Kemble and Russian Aleksandr Veselovskii, whose hypotheses can now be evaluated. An appendix documents awareness of Solomon and Marcolf in
late medieval and early modern times
the modern Italian Bertoldo, and Old French texts of Salemon and Marcoul.
The Latin prose Solomon and Marcolf is known for being both important and mysterious. It pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. One of its two parts is a dialogue, in which the king and jester, sage and fool, prophet and blasphemer bandy back and forth questions and comments. Whereas Solomon is solemn and pompous, Marcolf resorts to low language and earthy topics. The other part comprises twenty short chapters in which Marcolf tricks Solomon time and again. These episodes are as impudent and scatological as is the dialogue. Together, the two parts constitute a rudimental prose novel or “rogue biography.”
Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.
Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.
This essay situates the Poem of Walthare within nostalgia studies.
The examination reviews the many different types of nostalgia
that have been identified lately. Alongside private and collective,
it touches on the role of consumerism and the politicization of
nostalgia, especially by (neo-) Nazis, white supremacists, and their
opponents. At the same time, the study delves into the earlier medical
view of nostalgia: this syndrome was diagnosed among Swiss
mercenaries in the late seventeenth century.
The recent debates have interesting consequences for the short
medieval epic, which is rooted in the events of a distant Germanic past,
which produced legends of exiles who yearned for their homes and
peoples. Yet the Latin of the Middle Ages does not fit naturally within
modern national languages and literatures. Since the late eighteenth
century, the poem has been coordinated with early medieval German
culture. Jacob Grimm, who played a foundational role in this research,
paid heed to the longing for a German homeland that he felt. Joseph
Victor von Scheffel had his own nostalgia for long-ago Saint Gall.
Some thirty years ago Michael Herren burst on the medieval Latin scene with his edition and translation of the notoriously difficult Hisperica Famina, and followed this a few years later with his translation of the prose works of Aldhelm. Notice was given that a junior scholar, unafraid to tackle some of the most obscure, complex, and arcane Latin, wished to make it accessible to non-Latinists as well as to those Latinists who lacked his particular skills. Not content with labouring alone in that field, Herren gathered scholars in Toronto to a conference on “Insular Latin Studies,” the proceedings of which he published two years later. Over the years he shed considerable light on such obscure texts and authors as Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, John Scottus Eriugena, and the Cosmographia by the pseudonymous Aethicus Ister. His research trail led him again and again to Ireland, and the Irish contribution to early medieval Latinity and to English, Carolingian, and even Italian culture. Recognizing the rich diversity of medieval Latin, Herren in 1990 founded The Journal of Medieval Latin and has, as its editor, provided a home for medieval Latinists of all stripes.
The fourteen colleagues and former students who have contributed to the present volume wish to express their thanks to Herren for creating a venue in which medieval Latinists can come together, exchange ideas, learn from each other, and teach each other. In their careers, they have all learned from Herren who either supervised their theses or performed editorial magic on articles submitted to The Journal of Medieval Latin. The essays here gathered focus, though not exclusively, on the insular Latin of Ireland and England, as well as on some Irish centres on the Continent such as St. Gall. The Hisperica Famina, so strongly associated with Herren, though mentioned only in passing by some of the studies here, provides the half-line which was chosen as the title and the most suitable address to Herren: insignis sophiae arcator – “excellent teacher of wisdom.”
Gregory Hays, Flumen Orationis – Haijo Jan Westra, Frisians, Saxons, and Franks: Ethnogenesis and Ethnic Identity in Roman and Early Medieval Sources – Scott G. Bruce, Hagiography as Monstrous Ethnography: A Note on Ratramnus of Corbie's Letter Concerning the Conversion of the Cynocephali – Danuta Shanzer, The ‘Cosmographia’ Attributed to Aethicus Ister as ‘Philosophen’ or ‘Reiseroman’ – Westley Follett, Cassian, Contemplation, and Medieval Irish Hagiography – Bernice M. Kaczynski, Reading and Writing Augustine in St. Gall – Brent Miles, Irish Evidence for Shared Sources of Classical Mythology in Anglo-Saxon England and Medieval Ireland – Jan M. Ziolkowski, Blood, Sweat and Tears in the ‘Waltharius’ – Carin Ruff, The Perception of Difficulty in Aldhelm's Prose – Gernot R. Wieland, A New Look at the Poem 'Archalis Clamare Triumuir' – Charles D. Wright, The ‘Prouerbia Grecorum’, the Norman Anonymous, and the Early Medieval Ideology of Kingship: Some New Manuscript Evidence – Roger Wright, Latin Glossaries in the Iberian Peninsula – Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Peter Riga's ‘Aurora’ and its Gloss from Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Peter, Ms. A.VII.6 – Paul Gerhard Schmidt, ‘Narrationes mirabiles’: Geistliche Unterhaltungsliteratur in einer Handschrift des Zisterzienserklosters Quarr – Bibliography of Michael Herren's Publications
Invited to think about what seemed to each the most exciting new ways of investigating the early development of western European civilization, this impressive group of international scholars produced a wide-ranging discussion of innovative types of research that define tomorrow's field today. The contributors, many of whom rarely publish in English, test approaches extending from using ancient DNA to deducing cultural patterns signified by thousands of medieval manuscripts of saints' lives. They examine the archaeology of slave labor, economic systems, disease history, transformations of piety, the experience of power and property, exquisite literary sophistication, and the construction of the meaning of palace spaces or images of the divinity. The book illustrates in an approachable style the vitality of research into the early Middle Ages, and the signal contributions of that era to the future development of western civilization.
The chapters cluster around new approaches to five key themes: the early medieval economy; early medieval holiness; representation and reality in early medieval literary art; practices of power in an early medieval empire; and the intellectuality of early medieval art and architecture. Michael McCormick's brief introductions open each part of the volume; synthetic essays by accomplished specialists conclude them. The editors summarize the whole in a synoptic introduction. All Latin terms and citations and other foreign-language quotations are translated, making this work accessible even to undergraduates. The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies presents innovative research across the wide spectrum of study of the early Middle Ages. It exemplifies the promising questions and methodologies at play in the field today, and the directions that beckon tomorrow.
Before focusing first on the issue of symbolism and then on genre, a few preliminary words about the seemingly more straightforward business of the animal are required - and I specify 'seemingly,' since the simplicity of the topic proves rapidly to be illusory. In many respects the Middle Ages were theocentric and Christocentric and hence, since man was made in God's image, anhropocentric."
Writings of both sorts exist from many periods: for instance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the animals of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books could be contrasted to those of Ernest Thompson Seton and Jack London, in the late Middle Ages the animals of the Renard the Fox cycle to those of the bestiaries. Two Latin poems composed during the reign of Charlemagne are especially interesting because, although closely related to each other, they already embody these same extremes in the literary depiction of animals."
sociology. A specific form of verbal aggression, namely, the exchange of insults in the manner of a duel, has aroused particular interest. Such duels have been recorded and analyzed by sociolinguists as they occur in today's ghettos in the United States (where they are known as "playing the dozens" or "sounding") and in Turkey. At the same time, invective exchanges in ancient and medieval literature have been collected and scrutinized. As part of this effort, formal exchanges of insults and threats in Old English and Old Norse writings, which are often labeled 'flytings', have won their share of the attention. Correspondingly, the tantalizing remains of flytings in medieval Latin have also aroused interest. Indeed, a corpus is gradually taking shape: the seventh-century Irish 'Hisperica famina' has been re-edited, a tenth-century English 'Altercatio magistri et discipuli' has been published for the first time, and the resemblance of these poems to previously known pieces (such as the mutually vituperative give-and-take between the early eleventh-century scholars Warner of Rouen and Franbald) has been pointed out. Although undoubtedly more documents in manuscript await discovery, the moment seems ripe to give preliminary attention to a special type of flyting which has been neglected - the medieval Latin beast flyting. Besides having intrinsic merits, the beast flytings raise intriguing questions about the influence of popular theater on medieval monks and suggest that it is wrong to assume that vernacular beast and bird debates, in particular the Middle English 'Owl and the Nightingale', were exclusively learned in inspiration."
The fate of Shakespeare's bird poses in a particularly memorable fashion the problem of imitation which has to be central in the discussion of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi's poetry, as well as of so many other Neo-Latin poems. In this essay I will deal with Strozzi's Ad psyttacum, a poem about a talking bird in which imitatio of past poetry plays a central role. Let us look first at the author and the context in which he wrote (Ferrara) and then at the parrot poem and the literary background against which it was written (classical Latin parrot poems)."
"The Poem: Whereas numerous articles have been written about the other three of Walahfrid's vision poems, the short poem entitled De quodam somnio ad Erluinum has been almost entirely shunned by scholars. One explanation for this avoidance is prudery; for although in the poem Walahfrid deals with the seemingly earnest subject of heaven seen by a dreamer, the vision he relates almost transmogrifies bis verse treatment of Wettin's pious vision. Another reason for the neglect of De quodam somnio ad Erluinum is its refusal to comply with expectations of medieval visions. More than one scholar has remarked upon the monotony of early medieval visions, owing to the repetitiveness with which they employ various motifs, images, and concepts. Unlike most of its contemporaries, Walahfrid's poem has no part of such conformism. It sits provocatively at the juncture between learned and popular traditions."
Comparative literature has always worried its supporters as well as its skeptics. At the same time it has experienced a constant crisis within. In each episode it has responded by enlarging its purview and self-definition. Thus in the late 20th century it transcended the European literatures that had long been its bedrock to embrace East-West literary and cultural relations in ever-broader outward orbits, encompassing eventually first Edward Said's orientalism, then Homi Bhabha's deconstructivist postcolonialism, and finally Gayatri Spivak's eclecticism. The models that served during the extended pax americana seem poorly suited to terrorism, war, and globalization. Supranationalism cannot be lightly readjusted to fit transnationalism. But comparative literature can and will survive, so long as balances persist between theory and practice, so long as interdisciplinarity does not come at the cost of disciplinarity, and so long as the indivisible relationships uniting humanism, humanities, and humaneness are not forgotten. While comparative literature retains its emphases on language-training and critical skills, and while it satisfies desires of students to transcend boundaries culturally, interpretatively, and otherwise, it will not only always remain alive but even often thrive.
appetite for industrial espionage by finding out how things have been and are being done at other institutions. As a comparatist, I have felt duty- and honor-bound to explore
what sorts of programs and proclamations about Comparative Literature have been issued at colleges and universities around the country. I had performed the same kind of research (it is tempting to call it "comparison shopping") before in an administrative capacity, whenever our program undertook to revamp its rules and requirements, and I collected and read all sorts of publications on the nature and future of Camp Lit (as the name is often affectionately and efficiently truncated); but I never had a motive to synthesize my findings systematically and process them intellectually."
https://www.press.umich.edu/1204480/fairy_tales_from_before_fairy_tales
Includes a review published in Marvels & Tales: Journals of Fairy-Tale Studies, 22.2, 2008.
The same two-thousand-year period has witnessed much greater fluctuation in suppositions about the groups that represent the opposite of blushing girls and that indulge with particular abandon in "dirty talk." Yesterday's preconceptions do not match today's prevailing beliefs -- that men who engage in manual labor (sailors, dockworkers, truckdrivers) are peculiarly predisposed to use earthy language and that among old people it is old men who are especially prone to think dirty and, if given the opportunity, to talk correspondingly. If in the Middle Ages any collection of individuals was implicated strongly in obscene language and was perceived to be habitual offenders, that group was old women, above all old brothelkeepers. After all, it was from old bawds that the very notion of bawdry derived."
On Philology brings together the papers delivered at a 1988 conference at Harvard University's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. The topic "What is Philology?" drew an interdisciplinary audience whose main fields of research ran the gamut from ancient Indo-European languages to African-American literature, signaling a certain sense of urgency about a seemingly narrow subject.
These papers reveal that the role of philology is more important than ever. At a time when literature in printed form has taken a back seat to television, film, and music, it is crucial that scholars be able to articulate why students and colleagues should care about the books with which they work. Just as knowledge will be lost if philological standards decline, so too will fields of study die if their representatives cannot find meaning for today's readers.
On Philology will be of interest not only to students of philology but also to anyone working in the fields of hermeneutics, literature, and communication.
By way of introduction I will describe how the event originated. My description will explore a few of the reasons why an interdisciplinary conference of a dozen speakers and respondents attracted an audience of more than two hundred, and why a topic that 'may sound rarefied drew participants whose main fields of research and teaching interests ran the gamut from the most ancient Indo-European languages to the most recent African American literature. In short, I will offer tentative explanations for the urgency of the topic to students, professors, and independent scholars who engage in philology, linguistics, literary history, literary criticism, and literary theory."
"The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship," by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and, "Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern," by Seth Lerer.
Speakers considered the degree to which such influences were filtered to the Italian poet through Patristic and late-antique texts (by Origen, the Cappadocians, Dionysius the Areopagite, and others), since Dante could have been introduced to at least some of the original ancient literature by way of these intermediaries. The symposium also investigated very broadly the medieval assimilation of Greek thought into Christian culture. This assimilation includes Byzantine influences on political thought, particularly on the centrality of the emperor and the empire as ideas and ideals (Justinian and the juridical and political thought of the Eastern Roman Empire). This issue relates particularly, but not exclusively, to Dante's De monarchia.
Beyond a strict concern with Dante lies the challenge of setting him in a broader context with regard to the perception and reception of Greek in the thirteenth-century West. Latin Christians manifested a schizophrenic outlook, instead of a single Greekness there were several, not all of them even interconnected. First of all were the pagan Greeks and then the Byzantine Greeks. Even the Byzantines were far from uniform, since Westerners responded very differently to the traditions of the Greek Church fathers and of their own contemporary Greeks. Thus Greek was not only a past language or culture, but also a present (and often rival) religious and political entity. To each of these layers Latins related somewhat differently. Doctrinal, political, linguistic, cultural, educational matters all played important roles in shaping attitudes, and in this regard travel and diplomacy are perhaps as relevant as translations.
Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante’s day and explores the bases for Dante’s images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
Review included from Modern Philology 114.1, published online May 27, 2016.
This edition brings into print for the first time the Nigel's remaining poems. From British Library Cotton Vespasian D xix are edited his account in rhymed hexameters of the passion of Saint Lawrence and thirteen epigrams; from Cambridge, Trinity College B. 15.5(342) are published newly discovered marginal poems that shed light upon his techniques of poetic composition.
The volume opens with a general introduction on Nigel's writings, his life at Canterbury, and notable features of his verse. Each of the three texts or sets of texts is preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a detailed commentary, which glosses difficult words and constructions and which points the reader to literary sources and analogues. The volume concludes with indexes of names and of notable words.
This new edition deepens our perspective upon Nigel of Canterbury and upon intellectual life in Canterbury after the death of Becket.
The restriction to one party in the exchange of letters demands an immediate explanation. The number of words in known texts that have been ascribed to Abelard amounts to a total far more than ten times greater than in those attributed to Heloise, which means that the grounds for any sort of statistical or quantitative analysis are much more substantial in a comparison geared to his writings rather than to hers. In other words, the data available for a comparison of the man's texts in the Epistolae with Abelard are considerably richer. Accordingly, I have privileged Abelard in my own samplings, not because I like him more than Heloise, and not because I take pleasure in stifling a woman's voice, but rather for simple statistical reasons."
These "personal" letters form the basis for bestselling compilations of works by Abelard and Heloise in translation, such as the recently revised Penguin The Letters of Abelard and Heloise or the new Hackett Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings. They hold fascination for the light they shed on the relationship between the man and woman, as teacher and student, lovers, husband and wife, monk and nun, abbot and mother superior, and much more.
The popularity of the "personal" letters has generated considerable fanfare for the publication of another set of correspondence printed under the title The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. The authorship of all these letters has been contested repeatedly, with the last-mentioned collection being the center of a present firestorm.
Generally ignored have been nearly a dozen other letters or letter-like texts, unassailably the work of Peter Abelard. Jan M. Ziolkowski's comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and theologian in a variety of contexts. One group shows him engaging with Heloise and nuns of the Paraclete, another with Bernard of Clairvaux, and a third with four entirely different addressees on four entirely different topics. Broadening our panorama of the twelfth-century Renaissance, the picture presented by these texts complements, complicates, and enriches Abelard's autobiographical letter of consolation and his personal letters to Heloise."
The oldest extant fragment of the Arabic Thousand Nights, which through a very modest inflation later acquired the title The Thousand and One Nights dates from the ninth century. The inaugural European version of The Thousand and One Nights began to be published in 1704, when the first of six volumes ( 1704-1717) by the French Orientalist Antoine Galland (1646-1715) came into print. Since that year the text has enjoyed enormous popularity, becoming famous in English under the telegraphic title of The Arabian Nights. However it is entitled, "no work of Arabic or even Islamic literature is as well known to the Western world".
Auerbach responds to reviews of his Mimesis that appeared in the first six years after its initial publication.
"The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) are a collection of Goliardic medieval Latin poems found on ten leaves (ff. 432–41) of the Codex Cantabrigiensis (C, MS Gg. 5.35), now in Cambridge University Library.
The songs as they survive are copies made shortly before or after the Norman Conquest (1066). They may have been collected by an English scholar while travelling on the continent sometime after the last datable song (1039), and brought back with him to the church of Saint Augustine at Canterbury, where they were copied and where the Codex was long kept. The original manuscript was possibly lost in a fire that struck Saint Augustine's in 1168. The dialect of the few vernacular portions found in some of the songs is in the North Rheno-Franconian dialect of Old High German, suggesting that the Goliard or Goliards who composed them came from the north or middle Rhineland, probably the area between Trier, Cologne, and Xanten. It has been suggested that some of the songs originated in France or Italy. While most of the Cambridge Songs survive only in the Cambridge manuscript, a few are duplicated in a manuscript, W, from Wolfenbüttel.
The Cambridge Songs were long thought to be forty-nine in number, but a missing folio that contained twenty-seven more was discovered in Frankfurt and returned to the University Library in 1982. All these songs were copied in the same hand. Seven songs in a different hand, but occurring in the same Codex (after the first forty-nine) have since been identified as probably part of the collection. The total number of Cambridge Songs is now considered to be eighty-three. Some of the verses are neumed and it is assumed that the entire collection was to be sung. Four of the original forty-nine are called modi (melodies, namely sequences). The purpose of the collection has also eluded scholars. It was probably either a book of instruction on Latin verse, a songbook for wandering minstrels (the clerici vagabundi: vagabond clerics), or an anthology for private enjoyment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Songs
The Cambridge Songs were long thought to be forty-nine in number, but a missing folio that contained twenty-seven more was discovered in Frankfurt and returned to the University Library in 1982. All these songs were copied in the same hand. Seven songs in a different hand, but occurring in the same Codex (after the first forty-nine) have since been identified as probably part of the collection. The total number of Cambridge Songs is now considered to be eighty-three. Some of the verses are neumed and it is assumed that the entire collection was to be sung. Four of the original forty-nine are called modi (melodies, namely sequences). The purpose of the collection has also eluded scholars. It was probably either a book of instruction on Latin verse, a songbook for wandering minstrels (or the clerici vagabundi, vagabond clerics), or an anthology for private enjoyment.
--Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Songs"
"This study of medieval Latin beast poetry provides scholarly discussion and idiomatic translations of a number of important poems that have been largely neglected by Anglo-American scholarship. The author's thesis-that these early writers were pioneers working with a new genre and therefore had a freedom forced upon them-permits him to employ a formalistic approach showing how the underlying meaning of these works is often determined by the writers' use of classical and Christian source materials. Ziolkowski's source work, along with his translations, is itself a pioneering effort, making a little-known group of poems more accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists." -- Michael P. Kuczynski, Speculum, 1994
"Although fables of course figure largely in medieval beast literature, the use of animal characters extends far beyond the exemplary genre. The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and The Parliament of Fowls, the Roman de Renart and its analogues in other languages, all witness to the range of texts in which animals speak up. The present study focuses on the Latin development. In that tradition, one of the arguable masterpieces of twelfth-century literature, the Ysengrimus, and one of the same period's most successful and widely read works, Nigel Whiteacre's Speculum stultorum (Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Daun Burnel the Asse), both employ the anthropomorphic mode." -- David Townsend, The Review of English Studies, 1996
vernacular authors such as Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer. In his scholarly and lucid monograph, Jan Ziolkowski helps the modern reader to understand and share this appreciation of Alan's work by introducing him to an area of culture familiar to a medieval audience, but now obscure: the study of grammar. Many of the most apparently rebarbative passages in De planctu naturae turn out to be elegant wit once their relation to Alan's central grammatical conceit is grasped. Impropriety in grammar (and versification) stands for sexual impropriety. For homosexuality —which it is Alan's particular purpose to decry — there are a number of especially appropriate grammatical metaphors: in using 'Venus's grammar', some men 'embrace only the masculine gender'; the 'active sex' degenerates into the 'passive'; the same term 'is both subject and predicate'.
After a chapter devoted to a detailed examination of such metaphors in De planctu, Professor Ziolkowski broadens the scope of his survey. First, he shows that the figurative use of grammatical terms to describe sexual relationships was not an idiosyncrasy of Alan's: it is found in the writings of many places and periods, from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Islam and the medieval West, where it was particularly popular among Alan's near-contemporaries, such as the poet Walter of Chatiilon and the literary theorist Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Grammatical metaphors were common in those cultures because in all of them the study of grammar was an important part of education. So Ziolkowski goes on — in a wide-ranging survey — to describe the role of grammar in the school curriculum of Alan's time. Then, by considering the relations between grammar and twelfth-century theology, he brings his broader discussion back to Alan. Although theologians were highly trained in grammar, they were aware of its limitations within their subject: the Bible's Latin is sometimes faulty, but its authority is irrefragable; and, indeed, some mysteries of the faith (such as the Trinity, which is both one and many) seem to defy normal grammar. Alan shared this ambivalent attitude and, as Professor Ziolkowski illustrates, this made grammatical metaphors an important tool for him in describing divine things: just as he likens sexual aberrance from natural order to grammatical solecism, so be compares God's miraculous deviation from the rule of nature to grammatical novelty. When God becomes incarnate, 'a new trope is created . . . a new construction. A new rhetorical color appears in this compounding, a new metaphor'.
Professor Ziolkowski does more than merely illuminate an interesting but particular aspect of a talented and influential twelfth-century writer. He also provides an excellent, brief, general introduction to medieval ideas about grammar and to the work of Alan of Lille. Both subjects have often suffered in recent presentations from the narrowness of modern scholarly disciplines: grammar is viewed, for instance, exclusively in the context of medieval interest in the classics, or exclusively in the context of logical and semantic theories; Alan is seen either as a poet, or as a philosopher, or as a theologian. By contrast, Ziolkowski shows how the literary, logical, ethical, and theological implications of grammatical study were interrelated in the twelfth century, and how they were brought together in many of Alan's writings. Had C. S. Lewis lived to read this study, perhaps he would have found his attitude to Alan much altered and rancour replaced hy understanding and even admiration." --John Marenbon, Modern Language Review, 1988
"The overarching topic Auctor et Auctoritas of both the congress and this volume was born from the need for a broad theme that would accommodate the interests of many scholars. During the meeting of the Board in Toronto, Gunilla Iversen first proposed as theme “authoritative texts and textual authorities”. Michael Herren then suggested “Auctoritas in the Latin Middle Ages”, in the sense of reflection about auctoritas in Medieval Latin texts, and about the auctoritas of Medieval Latin texts. The precise title eventually emerged from a proposal from Walter Berschin and Gunilla Iversen: Auctor et Auctoritas in Latinis Medii Aevi litteris. The Board was keen to promote profound reflection on the concept of auctoritas in medieval culture. They had in mind consideration of the authority of Latin as an oral and written language; the authority of writing, authors, and their sources; the relation between anonymous and declared authorship; and other, related issues."
While there are many works on myth and mythology, and on the study of this genre of traditional narrative, there is little scholarship to date on the venerable activity of actually writing down the myths (mythography), attested throughout history, from the cultures of the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean to those of the modern world. By assembling studies of the major literary traditions and texts through a variety of critical approaches, this collection poses - and seeks to answer - key questions such as these: how do the composers of mythographic texts choose their material and present them; what are the diverse reasons for preserving stories of mythological import and creating these mythographic vessels; how do the agenda and criteria of pre-modern writers still affect our popular and scholarly understanding of myth; and do mythographic texts (in which myths are, so to speak, captured by being written down) signal the rebirth, or the death, of mythology?
This is a collection of essays on the subject of lament in the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on parental grief. The analysis of texts about pain and grief is an increasingly important area in medieval studies, offering as it does a means of exploring the ways in which cultural meanings arise from loss and processes of mourning. The international scholars who come together to produce this volume discuss subjects as diverse as lament psalms in Old and Middle English, medieval Latin laments, mourning in Anglo-Saxon literature, mourning through objects, medieval art and archaeology, Old French poetic elegy, skaldic poetry, medieval women’s writing, Old Polish drama, English massacre plays, and Middle English nativity lyrics.
The book is divided into three parts, corresponding to the theoretical principle of organic development: “Beginnings?”, “Perfections?”, “Transitions?”, thus questioning the validity of a similar evolutionistic model.
Because of the numerous points of contact between Latin and the national literatures, the volume is of particular relevance for the studies of the European literary history.
Contributors include: Davide Canfora, Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Sander Goldberg, Thomas Haye, Marc van der Poel, Michael Roberts, Francesco Stella, Wim Verbaal, Gregor Vogt-Spira, and Jan Ziolkowski.
You can read more on the last IMC 2014 in this newsletter, as well as on the call-for-papers for IMC 2015.
Anyone who ponders advent will think of adventures that the holy family underwent in their travels. Latinists—and I confess to being one!—may find themselves reflecting on the whole cluster of words to which advent belongs. For instance, as in all seasons, in advent we need to put our minds to prevention and intervention. Few academics live in convents, but after Christmas many must attend conventions."
Portions of this Minute were previously published by Jan Ziolkowski, “In Memoriam: Edward L. Keenan,” Department of History website, March 9, 2015, http://history.fas.harvard.edu/news/memoriam-edward-l-keenan.
Memorial Minutes are tributes to the lives and service of deceased members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences written by their colleagues, that have been spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty since the year 2000. For information on earlier Memorial Minutes, contact the Secretary of the Faculty.
The memorial service was sponsored by Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Ukrainian Research Institute, and Departments of History and of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Memorial Minutes are tributes to the lives and service of deceased members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences written by their colleagues, that have been spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty since the year 2000. For information on earlier Memorial Minutes, contact the Secretary of the Faculty.
“Passion, Personification, Sickness, Sin: Brooding on Envy in the Aetas Covidiana.”
Host, The Medieval Podcast
Medievalists.net
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Celebrates the 100th Episode
with two-minute episodes from past podcasters
Recent research has moved beyond the study of burial mounds to focus on the cultures of those nomads who moved into areas neighboring the Byzantine Empire or into Hungary between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. These studies have emphasized the processes of sedentization, conversion to Christianity, and eventual assimilation. The study of local settlements in the Balkans has revealed great differences between their relations with sedentary populations north and south of the Danube. Pioneering research in bioarchaeology has only begun to enrich the already complex picture of the archaeology of medieval nomadism in eastern Europe."
Florin Curta is professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida. His books include The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, ca. 500–700 (Cambridge, 2001), which received the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association; Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250 (Cambridge, 2006); and The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050 (Edinburgh, 2011). Curta is the editor of five volumes, most recently The Steppe Lands and the World Beyond Them: Studies in Honor of Victor Spinei on His 70th Birthday (Iaşi, 2013), and he is also the editor in chief of the Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.
Rewriting and Invention of the Canon."
The moment is ripe for reconsidering the significance of the classic in general. This paper will start by recapitulating the evolution from Classical Latin (sic) of the term classic and its close relations
classicism and classicality. Thereafter it will relate the classic to two clusters of key concepts. One includes canon and curriculum. Another is world literature, which has a lineage that leads from Goethe through Erich Auerbach. World literature leads in turn to global literature.
The relationship of the classic to the Greco-Roman classics will be considered in connection with the charge of Eurocentrism that has been leveled against the system for determining classicality. The discussion will then turn to the context of postcolonialism that Mukherjee has established.
Other issues that require treatment have to do with market forces. The classic and the bestseller are distinct phenomena. Can the classic survive in the face of the bestseller? Can the conventional classics from earlier times, starting with classical antiquity, retain their importance, when their sales and impact are harder to measure? How likely are texts in non-global languages to attain the status of classics-and will doing so require the sacrifice of their original tongues?
To close, attention will be paid to new techniques of research that have become possible thanks to the digital humanities. At the very least tools that are now available will facilitate the study of reception in hitherto-impossible ways. Digital methods reliant upon algorithms that are conducive to graphs, maps, and trees may open new doors for literary historians. It remains to be seen whether or not such methods will lead to greater enlightenment about what is a classic.
Dr. Rudenstine will offer the first talk in a series of six lectures and panels over the course of the year from a range of professional humanists who will share thoughts about their vocations and the practical steps they have taken to forge their careers. Conceived to celebrate and launch our new Humanities Fellowships, we hope that the series will provide useful insights not only to our postgraduate fellows, but also to the Dumbarton Oaks community and its friends and partners.
Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.
Official website https://medialatinitas2022.ff.cuni.cz/
Abstract deadline December 10, 2021
The founding donors, Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss, called upon future policy-makers “to remember that Dumbarton Oaks is conceived in a new pattern, where quality and not number shall determine the choice of its scholars; that it is the home of the Humanities, not a mere aggregation of books and objects of art; that the house itself and the gardens have their educational importance and that all are of humanistic value.” These ambitions continue to guide Dumbarton Oaks, but with close attention to ensuring that the Blisses’ “new pattern” retains its vitality through constant renewal.
The study of this historiographical shift is a way into understanding changing attitudes about the values and functions of images and the development of visual cultures. The value of objects – and how this was expressed – is a critical issue in modern cultural and art history, and iconoclasms provide a neat way into these debates by raising questions about how images are used to mediate power relations. Images are good to think with, and they always have been.
Some comparative work has been done on the different constructions of ‘iconoclasm’, but little has been done on how the similarities and differences between these phenomena (and their historiography) illuminate discourses about cultures. The themes and questions that we would like the scholars involved in this round table to consider are aimed at addressing how words about images – and words not used about images – open up larger cultural issues about how and why the visual communicates, about the interface and friction between verbal and written communication, and about what later understandings of earlier practices tell about the reception and reconception of the past.
It is as if one had entered heaven itself with no one barring the way from any side, and was illuminated by the beauty in changing forms (polymorphos) shining all around like so many stars, so is one utterly amazed. […] It seems that everything is in ecstatic motion, and the church itself is circling around. For the spectator, through his whirling about in all directions and being constantly astir, which he is forced to experience by the variegated spectacle (poikilia) on all sides, imagines that his personal condition is transferred to the object
(Photios, Homily X, sect. 5,1, & Photiou Homiliai, ed. Laourdas, 101, tr. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 185).
The phenomenological effects gliding over the surfaces of objects stirred a sense of motion in the spectator, who in turn projected his psychological state, his pathema, back onto the object, transforming it in his perception into an empsychos graphe.
We have tended to study Byzantine objects in isolation and under steady electric light. As a result, we no longer have access to the Byzantine poikilia of phenomenal effects. By contrast, nineteenth-century scholarship right at the advent of photography and electricity was keenly aware how the mutable and polymorphous presence of Byzantine art could be drained by these new technologies. Nikodim Kondakov remarked on the emerald-jewel-like effect of green enamel, filled with the energy of iridescence. He observed how this same shimmering 'fish-scales' quality vanished in the steadied photographic snapshot.
This colloquium focused on the poikilia of changing appearances of icons and luxury vessels set in shifting ambient conditions and explore the power of this spectacle of phenomenal changes to generate a sense of animation. Following are some of the main questions this colloquium addressed: how did Byzantine objects perform in space; how was the spectacle of poikilia staged and experienced; to what extent was the Byzantine poikilia culture-specific especially when compared to Western or Islamic objects and their display?
In its thousand years of existence—from the reign of Anastasius (491–518) until that of the last emperor, Constantine Ⅺ (1448–1453)—the Byzantine state was almost constantly at war with one or another of its neighbours. This reflected its geography and strategic situation, centred as it was on the southern Balkans and Asia Minor. It had constantly to fend off challenges to its territorial integrity from the Persian and then Arab or Turkish Islamic powers to the east, or its Balkan or central European neighbours to the north west and north. As the western and central European powers grew and matured—first in the form of the Carolingian empire, then the German empire and the kingdom of Hungary—so Byzantine political pre-eminence came to be challenged, until by the end of the twelfth century the empire had become a second-rate state, subject to the power politics of powerful western kingdoms and the commercial strength of Italian merchant republics such as Venice, Genoa and Pisa.
Byzantium was a society in which the virtues of peace were extolled and war was usually condemned, certainly when taken for its own sake. Fighting was to be avoided at all costs. Yet the empire nevertheless inherited the military administrative structures and, in many ways, the militaristic ideology of the expanding pre-Christian Roman empire in its heyday. These tensions were overcome through the blending of Christian ideals with the political will to survive and the justification of war as a necessary evil, waged primarily in defence of the Roman world and the Orthodox faith. Late Roman and medieval Christian society in the eastern Mediterranean/south Balkan region thus generated a unique culture which was able to cling without reservation to a pacifistic ideal while at the same time legitimating and justifying the maintenance of an immensely efficient and, for the most part remarkably effective, military apparatus.
This symposium examined some of these themes in an attempt to re-evaluate Byzantine as well as other perceptions of warfare and the military, to understand how the Byzantines organised for war, and the reasons for their success or failure."
With an open-ended definition of selfhood, as constructed both by participation in collective identities and by individual choices, this colloquium explores aspects of the Byzantine self through different disciplinary perspectives applied to a series of Byzantine texts and practices. This is the second of three Dumbarton Oaks colloquia on the individual, personal relations, and social networks in Byzantium.
earlier and later archaeologies, and with ministries of tourism in the host country. The afternoon brought further elaboration and discussion of all these, but also added a
theoretical aspect in analysing the tensions between Byzantine and medieval, and between archaeology as an institution and archaeology as a critical practice. Participants broke into four groups to brainstorm solutions to problems of job-creation, funding, the integration of Byzantium into diachronic archaeological projects, and
ways for the AORCs to collaborate with each other and with other organisations.
Talk of social networks may seem bound to this era of instant messages and Facebook revolutions. But pre-modern worlds were just as dependent on personal interaction, conducted through various cultural categories and modes of communication. For generations scholars have studied the friendships and patronage ties of classical Greece and Rome, the personal loyalties of medieval western Christendom, the threads of mentorship among early rabbis and early Islamic sages, the role of fama in consolidating (or disintegrating) communities. In each case, they have found amorphous webs of attachment, shaping community life more deeply than formal institutions. Byzantine society featured distinct patterns of relations, between civil and military elites, clergy and laity, landlords and peasants, merchants and bureaucrats. Equally Byzantium owed its distinction to links outside the empire, and the centrality of its members in wider Mediterranean relations.
Since the 1960s sociologists have developed methods to map and measure modern social attachment, and to conceptualize the interplay between social interactions and individual and communal identity. Historians have variously adapted these methods and concepts to study Byzantium and other Mediterranean societies. But how should we understand the workings of pre-modern social networks, given the vast differences in technology and culture? How can we perceive these networks through our limited sources? How might we discern the way pre-modern social interactions employed cultural constructs and in turn shaped selves and communities?
This colloquium explored social connectedness in Byzantium and other related communities. Building on the recent Dumbarton Oaks colloquia about friendship and the self, this gathering focused on the use of network analysis and network concepts with a range of evidence (from collected sayings to documentary papyri) over the whole Byzantine period (from classical to late medieval and beyond). Special emphasis was placed on probing various methodologies for use in pre-modern studies and comparing the social and cultural patterns of Byzantium with those of its predecessors and neighbors.
Woltz will discuss this project and three others at a range of scales in which contemporary designs emerge from the firm’s extensive cultural and historical research. Projects include The Cedars in Old Brookville, New York, Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee, and Citygarden in St. Louis, Missouri. For each of these projects, the design team first conducts extensive research into the region’s geologic, ecological, and historical contexts. From this broad view, the research then focuses on the specific uses of the site to discover historical and cultural traces through maps, letters, photographs, and archaeology.
Thomas Woltz was named Design Innovator of the Year by the WSJ. Magazine in 2013. In 2011, he was invested into the American Society of Landscape Architects Council of Fellows, among the highest honors achieved in the profession. He was educated at the University of Virginia, receiving master's degrees in Landscape Architecture and Architecture. Current work includes projects at Hudson Yards (NYC), Memorial Park (Houston), Devonian Botanic Garden (Alberta, Canada) and Cornwall Park (Auckland, New Zealand). Woltz serves on the Boards of Directors of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, Washington, D.C., and the Municipal Art Society of New York.
To learn more about Thomas Woltz and Nelson Byrd Woltz visit: www.nbwla.com/
In the Middle Ages and beyond, legal, documentary, exegetical, literary and linguistic traditions have organized the relationship between image and letter in diverse ways, whether in terms of equivalency, complementarity or polarity. In this symposium, we wish to explore those situations in which letter and image were fused, forming hybrid signs that had no vocal equivalent and were not necessarily bound to any specific language. Although imagistic scripts work on the visible, arranging representation, they challenge the legible in terms of linguistic signification. The incorporation of figures, objects, colors, even events, within the letter insists on the material dimension of the sign. As the iconicity of the letter transforms reading into gazing, the script-like character of the image compels consideration of the co-signification of sign forms. In mediating each other into altered formats, the script-image disrupts a-priori models and ideas and thus redefines both text and image in terms of their signifying and representational processes. The disruptive effect of imagistic script inheres in a suspension of meaning that opens the system of representation and signification in which it was produced and circulated.
During the three-day conference, we propose to bring together scholars of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Pre-Columbian cultures from numerous disciplines – art history, history, literature, religion, linguistics, and law – to consider the purpose, operations, agency and specular forms of iconic scripts. What sort of communication did they facilitate? Did they imply reception by the inner eye? In prompting recognition of the aesthetic dimension of texts, did they open governance, law, literature, diplomatics, and theology to sensorial appreciation? Did they enforce a latent principle of non-representability? Does their use imply what might be called an iconomy, a practice of policing images?
The symposium is organized with Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (New York University) and Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Harvard University). Symposium speakers include Elizabeth Hill Boone, Ghislain Brunel, Anne-Marie Christin, Tom Cummins, Vincent Debiais, Ivan Drpić, Antony Eastmond, Beatrice Frankel, Cynthia Hahn, Herbert Kessler, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Didier Méhu, Irvin Cemil Schick and Irene Winter.
In this symposium, we attempt to bring these two areas of debate closer by proposing new modes for the description and understanding of gardens, whether in the context of history or in the present – as they have been, or are, experienced by those who make and use them across many different areas of the world.
Gardens are the result of a selection of plants, objects and animals for intentional purposes. This has led in turn to the transformation of those plants, objects and animals; that is to say, they have been appropriated for human communication, and become representations in poetry, imagery, religion and myth. The same process has taken place with features of the wider landscape. So, if we provisionally bracket off the categories relating to nature and culture in the western world, we find that the challenge of interpreting descriptions of gardens and landscapes impels us to rediscover the specific categories involved in constituting them as representations. The papers in this symposium cover in equal measure western and non-western traditions, and range from individual case studies to analyses of long-term historical developments. The aim is to show how garden and landscape studies illuminate the many different modalities of transforming the world in which we live and act.
The ficus—all of which has ramified from the northeast corner of this orangery—provides vivid evidence for the sustained quality of gardening at Dumbarton Oaks. The vine also speaks to the conservativism of this institution.
The traditionalism of the place sometimes makes it hard to conduct experiments, but all the same you are here to make a success of one. No one has recited more often than I the local mantra of Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies. No one values and supports our three fields of studies more than I. But no one is more acutely aware that we cannot (to risk a seriously troubled metaphor) rest on the laurels of fields as framed 75 or 50 years ago, and that failure to adapt and grow may well mean contraction or even worse extinction. The cultural marketplace of the United States, even under the aegis of a university such as Harvard, is a site of unending Darwinian struggle, never more than now.
So I am very grateful to the co-organizers of this symposium, the wonderful duo of Yota Batsaki and Sarah Burke Cahalan, for the innovation and imagination behind this symposium. They have knocked themselves out to produce the display of books, the online exhibition of digitized images, and above all the conception of this symposium.
The period saw widespread exploration, a tremendous increase in the traffic in botanical specimens, significant taxonomic innovations, and horticultural experimentation. We aim to revisit these developments from a comparative perspective that will include Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Main themes for discussion are global networks of plant discovery and transfer; the quest for medicinal plants and global crops such as ginseng, tea and opium; the economies of gift, trade, patronage, and scientific prestige in which plants circulated; imperial aspirations or influences as reflected in garden design; and visual strategies and epistemologies. Individual papers will explore the contributions of naturalists such as William Bartram (North America), Paul-Émile Botta (Levant), and François Le Vaillant (South Africa).
The symposium is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Rare Book Room at Dumbarton Oaks, and will feature an exhibit of botanical works from our collections.
While at Dumbarton Oaks, Dr. Lee has contributed to a number of in-house publications, including Clio in the Italian Garden and the forthcoming symposium volume Technology and the Garden.
The Ficus—all of which grows out of the northeast corner—constitutes a testimonial not only to one way in which nature and culture may come together. It is also evidence of the conservativism of this institution. But that is not all we are..."
The evening began with a concert in the historic Music Room, featuring violinist Keir GoGwilt with composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin on piano. (Aucoin was resident musician at Dumbarton Oaks in 2015.) The duo performed works by Bach and Mozart, as well as the premiere of Aucoin’s piece Its Own Accord.
After the concert, the entire museum was open to the public for an extended evening. The rare book reading room was also be open, and several special exhibitions were on view. For more details, please visit the event page here: https://www.doaks.org/news-events/events/eumc-concert-and-open-house.
If you wish to subscribe to the Friends of Music, or for more information, please contact Cindy Greene, Concert Coordinator.
For information about performing at Dumbarton Oaks, or to be considered for the series, please contact Valerie Stains, Artistic Director.
This illustrated lecture is presented in association with the current exhibition in the Dumbarton Oaks Museum, Inspiring Art: The Dumbarton Oaks Birthing Figure.
But that was then, and this is now. We have come together for something cheerful, on the order of a cast party after the final performance in the successful run of a great play. Since January of 2013, the institutional calendar has not seen a single month without a reception, tour lecture, talk, special event, or some combination of them.
Between 1940 and when they died in the 1960s, the Blisses founded their bequest upon their collections. But a foundation does not a whole edifice make. The two were intent on making Dumbarton Oaks, as it is formally named, a Research Library and Collection so that fellows could study here and produce advanced scholarship. The emphasis of the Blisses on art as amplified and contextualized by archaeology, history, art history, epigraphy, and other humanistic disciplines has served us well, since the focus in Pre-Columbian studies shifted decades ago from the collection of objects to the study of the ancient American past, through exhibitions, archives, scholarly programs, fellowships, and much more."
This exhibition is the first to bring together examples of Wari, Inka, and Colonial khipu. Less than a dozen complete Wari khipu are known to exist in museum collections, and three will be on display at Dumbarton Oaks, along with interactive displays that will help visitors understand the way khipu worked, how they were made, and how information was encoded.
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses; half a century later, in the summer of 1566, the Protestant iconoclastic fervor of the Beeldenstorm gripped the Netherlands. Taking these two events as its point of departure, this talk explored how images became a central manipulative element in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how America was in many ways the crucible. It focused on one of the most famous texts about the Spanish in America: Bartolomé de las Casas’s Breuíssima relación de la destruycion de las Indias (1552) and subsequent editions with illustrations.
Thomas B. F. Cummins is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art at Harvard University. Recent research interests include the analysis of early Ecuadorian ceramic figurines and the study of late Pre-Columbian systems of knowledge and representation, especially Inka, and their impact on the formation of sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial artistic and social forms.
http://www.doaks.org/research/pre-columbian/scholarly-activities/mirrored-reflections-spanish-iconoclasm-in-the-new-world-and-its-reverberations-in-the-old
Epitomizing the radiating sun and perpetuating the cycles of life and time, fire was and continues to be a central force in the Mesoamerican cosmos. In the Mesoamerican worldview, heat and flames are animate forces and signify strength and vitality; the most powerful of individuals are embodied with immense heat. Moreover, fire is transformative; it is both a means to destroy and to transport offerings to otherworldly places. The importance of heat and flames is evident in a spectrum of ritual practices, ranging from the use of sweat baths to the burning of offerings, especially copal.
In Pre-Columbian times, human bodies were among the most valuable resources heated or consumed by fire. The collection of papers in this symposium revolves around the body and represents a diversity of approaches to the uses and multilayered meanings of fire in ancient, historic, and modern Mesoamerica, including archaeology, bioarchaeology, epigraphy, iconography, ethnohistory, and ethnography.
The symposium is organized by Vera Tiesler (Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán) and Andrew Scherer (Brown University). Symposium speakers include Ximena Chávez (Tulane University/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), Oswaldo Chinchilla (Yale University), John Chuchiak (Missouri State University), Danièle Dehouve (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), William Duncan (East Tennessee State University), Markus Eberl (Vanderbilt University), Christophe Helmke (University of Copenhagen), Stephen Houston (Brown University), Jesper Nielsen (University of Copenhagen), Guilhem Olivier (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Joel Palka (University of Illinois, Chicago), Grégory Pereira (French National Centre for Scientific Research), Pedro Pitarch (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Prudence Rice (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), and Gabrielle Vail (New College of Florida). John Verano (Tulane University) will provide concluding remarks.
Gary Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the Founder/ Director of the Khipu Database Project at Harvard University and author of numerous articles and books, including Inca Myths and Signs of the Inka Khipu.
Maria Teresa Uriarte is head of the Cultural Affairs department of the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM) and director of the project “La pintura mural Prehispánica.” She is the author of over forty publications and co-editor of Olmeca: balance y perspectivas and Pre-Columbian Architecture in Mesoamerica.
The Pre-Columbian program at Dumbarton Oaks was founded in 1963 to support the study of the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas. This research encompasses cultures that thrived in the western hemisphere from northern Mexico to southern South America, from the earliest times to the sixteenth century.
The activities of the Pre-Columbian program include a series of scholarly meetings, ranging from an annual symposium addressing major topics in the field to smaller gatherings focusing on specific problems in the anthropology, archaeology, art history, and history of the ancient Americas. These meetings are augmented by public lectures featuring recent research by scholars in the field of Pre-Columbian studies. An active publications program produces two series, one based on symposium and colloquium papers and a second featuring specialized studies in Pre-Columbian art and archaeology.
Research opportunities in the Pre-Columbian program include residential fellowships, short-term pre-doctoral residencies, one-month post-doctoral stipends, internships, and grants for field research. Scholars in residence have access to the significant holdings of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, as well as the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art and specialized archives.
Presenters will examine dimensions of ancient economy, including artisans who produced goods as part of their livelihood, merchants (and other individuals) who exchanged and moved a wide range of goods over space, and the trade and distribution networks through which goods were exchanged, bought, and sold.
Many scholars speak of the "accuracy" of drawings, maps and models, implying a greater faithfulness to "truth," yet how and in what ways are these images culturally informed by the interests and trends of their own times? How do these presentations of data and reconstructions shape our perceptions? Finally, the symposium will also look at contemporary 3D models and the future of archaeological illustration. What is the heuristic value of contemporary presentations (i.e., "beyond illustration")? This symposium will bring together scholars working on specific critical histories of representations as well as broader approaches to the understanding of visual conceptualizations.
The activities of the Pre-Columbian program include a series of scholarly meetings, ranging from an annual symposium addressing major topics in the field to smaller gatherings focusing on specific problems in the anthropology, archaeology, art history, and history of the ancient Americas. These meetings are augmented by public lectures featuring recent research by scholars in the field of Pre-Columbian studies. An active publications program produces two series, one based on symposium and colloquium papers and a second featuring specialized studies in Pre-Columbian art and archaeology.
Research opportunities in the Pre-Columbian program include residential fellowships, short-term pre-doctoral residencies, one-month post-doctoral stipends, internships, and grants for field research. Scholars in residence have access to the significant holdings of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, as well as the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art and specialized archives.
On the occasion of his retirement, Stephen recently gave an interview for the Dumbarton Oaks Oral History Project. First introduced to Dumbarton Oaks in the late 1970s as a student from New York University, Stephen’s long and fruitful curatorial tenure has spanned a third of the institution’s history, over a quarter of a century, through four directorships and through two major renovation projects.
The first of these major renovation projects occurred between 1987 and 1989 when the Director, Robert Thompson, launched a construction project that would literally change the shape of the museum. Working with then Curator of the Byzantine Collection, Susan Boyd, Stephen redesigned the galleries and reinstalled the collection, taking advantage of this opportunity to reinterpret the collection and to reimagine its narrative implications. Twenty years later, under the directorship of Edward Keenan, another major construction project gave Stephen a second opportunity to completely reinstall the collection under the guidance of the current Director of the Museum, Gudrun Bühl. Few curators have the opportunity to affect such profound and long-lasting change on the presentation of a museum’s permanent collection, but Stephen has done it no less than twice at Dumbarton Oaks.
Stephen’s plans for his retirement include a wealth of scholarly projects, and Dumbarton Oaks looks forward to his continued contributions to Byzantine Studies.
"The past year has made me feel very proud and lucky to be associated with Dumbarton Oaks, not so much because of its immaculate beauty and impeccable elegance as because of the people who enable it to project those qualities. When this position was offered to me, one appeal of it to me was the size of the community. Nearly one hundred is too big to be a family, but it is still a size where we can know each other and appreciate each other."
"While increasing activities, we have become tied more closely to our neighbors in Georgetown and Washington as a whole and to DC area universities, embassies, cultural institutes, and museums. And though the heart of Harvard university is located over four hundred miles away, exchanges between Cambridge and Dumbarton Oaks have expanded exponentially."
Please join me in welcoming Alan!
But dead of night is really not an accurate phraseology, since the wee hours actually tend to be the liveliest hours for our most complicated incidents involving security. It is then that vagrants who have pitched tents in the park below DO light campfires that burn up into our property. It is then that the lunatics—and I choose my word very deliberately, since the full moon seems to drive them—come out, or rather onto DO property. And, last but not least, it is then that in the summer young neighbors and others decide to undertake the local rite de passage by clambering over the walls and going swimming in our pool. Sometimes they get caught, which means deciding how to handle the trespass. Other times they escape, but get hurt in the process, which brings fresh worries. Once in a while they make their get-away after skinny-dipping, but leave behind clothing. Ask Arthur about the couple who hailed a taxi and boarded it, wearing in toto one piece of a bathing suit between them."
Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne’s move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king’s ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.
Supplementing McCormick’s major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.
"At its worst, microhistory is merely antiquarian button counting. But at its best, as exemplified here, small things serve as touchstones for studies of wider-ranging significance. McCormick examines the Basel Roll, a ninth-century manuscript relating the information gathered by envoys of Charlemagne, who inquired into the financial needs of churches in and around Jerusalem. The roll preserves three documents that provide personnel numbers and sizes of building roofs in area churches and monasteries, as well as partial annual expenditures for the patriarch of Jerusalem...McCormick shows that the Jerusalem church had shrunk since late antiquity; that contemporary Frankish houses were larger and richer; and that Einhard did not exaggerate Charlemagne's interest in faraway Christian communities. Among the many strengths of the book is the full-size facsimile of the Basel Roll included as a stand-alone poster. (C. J. Chandler Choice 2012-11-01)"
In this volume Giles Constable provides a critical edition of the Latin text and a facing English translation. Extensive notes, produced in collaboration with other experts, guide the reader through the political, geographical, economic, military, and historical context of this fascinating work.
In 1204, brothers Alexios and David Komnenos became the unwitting founders of the Empire of Trebizond, a successor state to the Byzantine Empire that emerged after Crusaders sacked Constantinople. Trebizond, which stretched along the coast of the Black Sea, outlasted numerous rivals and invaders until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1461. Though this empire has fascinated writers from Cervantes to Dorothy Dunnett, few Trapezuntine writings survive.
This volume presents translations from the Greek of two crucial primary sources published together for the first time: On the Emperors of Trebizond and Encomium on Trebizond. In the fourteenth century, Michael Panaretos, the emperor’s personal secretary, penned the only extant history of the ruling dynasty, including key details about foreign relations. The encomium by Bessarion (1403–1472), here in English for the first time, praises the author’s native city and retells Trapezuntine history from antiquity to his own moment. It provides enlightening perspectives on Byzantine identity and illuminating views of this major trading hub along the Silk Road.
The History survives in hundreds of manuscripts in Geoffrey’s standard text. This volume presents the first English translation of what may have been his source, the anonymous First Variant Version. This shorter and less polished Latin version of the History is attested in just a handful of manuscripts. It belonged to and was probably written by Archdeacon Walter of Oxford, who died in 1151.
This edition of Architrenius brings together the most authoritative Latin text with a new English translation of an important medieval poem.
This volume, which illustrates the literary variety of saints’ Lives, presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.
The Tria sunt, named for its opening words, was a widely used and highly ambitious book composed in England in the late fourteenth century during a revival of interest in the art of poetry and prose.
The backbone of this comprehensive guide to writing Latin texts is the wealth of illustrative and instructive sources compiled, including examples from classical authors such as Cicero and Horace as well as from medieval literature, and excerpts from other treatises of the same period by authors from Matthew of Vendôme through Gervase of Melkley. Topics treated at length include methods for beginning and ending a composition, techniques for expanding and abbreviating a text, varieties of figurative language, attributes of persons and actions, and the art of letter writing.
This anonymous treatise, related especially closely to work by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, served as a textbook for rhetorical composition at Oxford. Of all the major Latin arts of poetry and prose, it is the only one not previously edited or translated into English.
In 1204, brothers Alexios and David Komnenos became the unwitting founders of the Empire of Trebizond, a successor state to the Byzantine Empire that emerged after Crusaders sacked Constantinople. Trebizond, which stretched along the coast of the Black Sea, outlasted numerous rivals and invaders until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1461. Though this empire has fascinated writers from Cervantes to Dorothy Dunnett, few Trapezuntine writings survive.
This volume presents translations from the Greek of two crucial primary sources published together for the first time: On the Emperors of Trebizond and Encomium on Trebizond. In the fourteenth century, Michael Panaretos, the emperor’s personal secretary, penned the only extant history of the ruling dynasty, including key details about foreign relations. The encomium by Bessarion (1403–1472), here in English for the first time, praises the author’s native city and retells Trapezuntine history from antiquity to his own moment. It provides enlightening perspectives on Byzantine identity and illuminating views of this major trading hub along the Silk Road.
The prose, verse, and epistolary texts in Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad help trace the persistence of old clichés as well as the evolution of new attitudes toward Islam and its prophet in Western culture. This volume brings together a highly varied and fascinating set of Latin narratives and polemics never before translated into English.
A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff’s famous cantata—no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.
A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff’s famous cantata—no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.