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2012 Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference, "Renaissance Borders" will take place April 13-14 in 106 McCormick Hall.  Please see the program.  The Call for Papers can be found here.

For questions on the conference, please email Elizabeth Petcu epetcu@princeton.edu or Will Evans wee815@gmail.com.

• Tuesday, October 25th
  Richard Halpern, Johns Hopkins University
  "The Same Old Grind: Milton as Sub-Tragic Hero"
  4:30 PM, McCosh 40
  This paper explores the strains endured by classical conceptions of tragedy when a protagonist who labors is forced upon it. Milton’s Samson, chained to his giant mill wheel, is trapped at a level below that of heroic action, history, and even genuine tragic suffering. At the same time, his labor adumbrates a universalism that, for later thinkers such as Hegel and Kierkegaard, characterizes all genuine tragic fictions.  The torsion exerted on tragic drama  by Milton’s laboring hero is symptomatic, I claim, of a dilemma afflicting tragedy more broadly in the modern era.

• Monday, November 14th
  David A. Boruchoff, McGill University
  "The Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times: An Idea and Its Public"
  4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell House
  Important ideas are usually simple and seductive, able to catch and hold the imagination of a public, which then makes the idea its own.  One especially long-lived example is the claim that divine providence reserved certain key discoveries and inventions for modern times.  This idea--which arose in conjunction with the European Reconnaissance of the fifteenth centuries, cut across political and religious divisions, and assisted self-proclaimed Moderns to assert their independence from intellectual and cultural forebears---soon crystallized about three inventions in particular: the magnetic compass, the printing press, and firearms.  For unlike eyeglasses, distillation, the water mill, or the mechanical clock, these three inventions enlarged the horizons of European society, and changed how peoples and nations would henceforth relate to one another.  In this paper, I seek to trace the amazingly swift dissemination of the commonplace of the three greatest inventions and its use by a "who's who" of European letters.
  

• Tuesday, December 6th
  Gary Tomlinson, Yale University
  
  2011-2012 Eberhard Faber Lecture
  "Music, Affect, and Sign: A Ficinian Genealogy"
  4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell House
  Current speculation on the nature of musical effect and expression takes off from terms defined in a post-Romantic musical discourse exemplified by the opposed positions of Wagner and Eduard Hanslick.   Behind this discourse, however, there extends a hidden history reaching back through Vico’s New Science to the musical psychologism of Marsilio Ficino.   This lecture will describe a constellation of cultural topoi not usually juxtaposed, discovering in the process unexpected affinities between premodern magic and postmodern cognitivism, between occult similitudes and Peircean semiotics, and between pre- and post-Cartesian conceptions of the human imagination.  

• Wednesday, February 15th
  Joost Keizer, Yale University
  
  "Piero's Realism"
  4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell House
  A cult of realism re-emerged in European art in the fourteenth centuries and fifteenth centuries, at the same time that artworks began to be attributed to individual artists. Paintings produced under the conditions of verisimilitude - literally, resemblance to truth - deny the fact that they are made things in order not to destroy the illusion that they perfectly imitate the real. In this talk, I will argue that painting?s concern with hiding its manufacture prevented the period from formulating a strong model of individual style. Rather than understanding the authorship of painting by looking at how a picture showed, early Renaissance culture looked at what it showed. Using the art of Piero della Francesca as a relevant testcase, my presentation explores the possibility that the artist's contemporaries understood painting as an index of the artist's lifeworld.

• Wednesday, March 7th
  Leah Chang, George Washington University
  "Mother's Blood: The Political Authority of Catherine de Médicis" 
  4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell House
  Focusing on the 1575 Discours merveilleux, an anonymously-authored pamphlet attacking Catherine de Médicis, this talk will explore how the figure of the Queen Mother serves as a focal point of discourses struggling with changing concepts of ethnic, national, and gender difference in the second half of the century.  In particular, I will discuss how the pamphlet deals with the complex problem of blood. On the one hand the text grapples with the authority of maternal blood that has sustained Catherine’s position as regent and counselor to the crown.  On the other, it levels an insidious blood accusation against the Queen Mother: Catherine is accused of defiling the maternal blood bond and perverting the royal bloodline through violence and murder. Inflamed by religious polemic and xenophobia, the Discours’s portrait of Catherine marries a version of blood libel with a deep-seated misogyny that rears its head in the face of violent conflict between differing cultures within France. 

• Tuesday, March 27th
  Denis Nosnitsin, University of Hamburg
  "Preserving the African Archive: Field Research on Early Manuscripts and Monasteries in Northern Ethiopia" 
  4:30 PM, 127 East Pyne
   
• Wednesday, April 25th
  Christiane Frey, Princeton University
  "Sensus Spiritualis: Secularisms from Dante to Spinoza" 
  4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell House
  
  
  Renaissance Studies Convivium
  The Renaissance Studies Convivium provides graduate students with a chance to present a work in progress and receive feedback from colleagues already familiar with a pre-circulated version of the work. Presentations are approximately 30 minutes in length, followed by a 10-minute question-and-answer session. The Convivium is an excellent opportunity to present a paper or article before a friendly audience before delivering it at a conference or submitting it for publication.
  
  If you would like to participate as a presenter in an upcoming meeting of the Convivium, please contact Elizabeth Petcu at epetcu@princeton.edu