Events

Roundtable and Reception
Friday, December 12th, 4:30-6:30
College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI)
1211 East Atwater Avenue (Corner of Ballantine and Atwater)

Mark your calendars for the last 2014 event of Renaissance Studies, the 6th roundtable of graduate students working on Renaissance and early modern materials. The roundtable will begin at 4:30 and will be followed by a reception.

Through short presentations by doctoral students on their exciting research, these annual roundtables explore issues of general interest to scholars of Renaissance and early modern studies. This year, Joshua Held (English) will discuss the concept of conscience in the Renaissance by focusing on the influence of one particular description of the conscience in Paul’s epistle to the Romans (2:14-15). Through the imagery of this Pauline text, Reformers and Renaissance writers from Luther to Milton depicted the conscience as inner by nature but responsive to the outer demands of both divine and human law. Tony Hessenthaler (Spanish and Portuguese) will examine conquest narratives from the early Spanish Philippines with a special attention to the ways in which they conceptualized ethnic and religious differences in the case of indigenous groups in and around the Philippines (particularly the Chinese living in Manila) who did not clearly fit the Spanish models from continental New Spain. Anna Goodman (Art History) will study the representation of female spirituality in 16th-century northern Italy with a focus on five paintings of holy women executed by Moretto da Brescia between 1540 and 1550 and the ways in which these works functioned as devotional tools for female viewers. Finally, Elizabeth Elmi (Musicology) will reflect on the courtly practice of improvised sung poetry in the Aragonese court of 15th-century Naples. As an unwritten practice, the reality of this performance tradition has been lost; yet, numerous written sources of both music and poetry, as well as contemporary descriptions of court life, allow us to gain some understanding of what these performances sounded like.

We will also welcome new faculty and graduate students, advertise the Renaissance Studies minor and certificate, announce the speakers for the 2015 lecture series titled “Forms of Knowledge and the Renaissance Uses of the Liberal Arts,” as well as other events. This will be a great chance to meet people working in other disciplines.

I hope to see you there!
Massimo Scalabrini
Director of Renaissance Studies