"Playing the Machiavellian Prince? Elizabeth I, Machiavelli and Realpolitik"
Paola Baseotto
Insubria University (Como, Italy)
Co-sponsored with the Program in Italian Studies
5:00 PM, 203 Scheide Caldwell

"Impossible Decorum: Humanism and Frottole in the Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Alpha.F.9.9"
Giovanni Zanovello
Indiana University

Although the frottola was undoubtedly popular in Italian Renaissance palazzi, one almost recoils from placing this unsophisticated musical repertory within the set of austere symbols that aristocratic interiors were meant to manifest. By exploring a metaphorical sound within a metaphorical space - the musical pieces in the context of the layout and decoration of a 1496 Paduan frottola manuscript - we discover that the relationship was problematic but unavoidable. The contrast between the highly learned framework and the more vernacular content of this manuscript arguably reflects the tension between the rigorous standards of Humanism and a secular repertory just beginning to adjust to a new role.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Music
4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"Liquid Fortification and the Law in King Lear"
Kathy Eden
Columbia University

This talk will offer a philological argument about Shakespeare's handling of the law in King Lear. The point of departure for the philology is philosophy, especially Stoic philosophy, with its doctrine of natural law, its narrative of the relationship between law and kingship, and its distinction between legal and extra-legal forms of exchange.

4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"'Closer Than the Shirt on Our Body': Lucifer and the Fall of the Rebel Angels"
Meredith Gill
University of Maryland

In 1530, when Luther preached a sermon for Michaelmas, he devoted much of his homily to the fallen angels and to the devil who, he said, was closer to us than our shirt. The study of angels was a formal component of the medieval theological curriculum, and angels are equally a ubiquitous, vibrant and multifaceted presence in Early Modern culture. The subject of Lucifer and his dark consort led writers and artists to meditate not only on the identity of spiritual substance but also on the character of human will, goodness and salvation.

5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"Freedom Delivered: The Glorious Revolution, John Dennis and the Anxiety of Empire"
Oliver Arnold
Department of English
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"The Quest for Purity in Cervantes' World"
Christina Lee
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This presentation explores Cervantes' literary treatment of the men and women who were singled out in authoritative discourses and practices of demarcating, containing and marginalizing the social elements that were perceived as polluting and thus threatening the well-being of the rising Spanish nation-state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically, it investigates how Cervantes' fictional representation of the nominally unclean - that is, New Christians (conversos, Spaniards of Jewish descent, or moriscos, Spaniards of Moorish descent), illegitimate children, and unchaste or dishonored women - reveals the fictitiousness of the very notion of the exemplary or authorized Spaniard as a culturally pure subject.

4:30 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"Pietro Martire in the Levant: Spain and Egypt ca. 1500"
Adam Beaver
Department of History

In August 1502, the Italian-turned-Spanish humanist Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (1457-1526) was summoned to the Alhambra for an audience with his adopted patrons, Fernando and Isabel. There he was given the assignment of a lifetime: effective immediately, he was to depart for Venice, whence he should proceed with haste to Egypt. There, he was to represent the Catholic Monarchs in diplomatic negotiations with the Mamluk Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri. After months filled with fraught negotiations and antiquarian excursions, Martire returned to Spain, where he collected his epistolary reflections on his travels into an elegant narrative in good humanist Latin, published several times from 1511 forward as the Legatio Babylonica. The Legatio and its companion documents are remarkably rich texts, overflowing with observations about everything from classical antiquities to Muslim dress to crocodile hunting on the Nile. For the purpose of this talk, however, the main interest in Martire's embassy lies in what it has to tell us about the impact of the eastern Mediterranean world at a key moment in the development of the Spanish Monarchy.

5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"March 6th, 1581: Montaigne Visits the Vatican Library"
François Rigolot
Department of French and Italian

Montaigne's Journal de voyage en Italie, written between June 1580 and November 1581, raises a number of questions about its authorship. The manuscript was not discovered until 1770, when it was almost immediately co-edited by the chief custodian of the king's papers at the French Royal Library, and an Italian scholar who worked for the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The discovery was enthusiastically heralded by the French philosophes, and no less than three editions were published in 1774. Although the manuscript disappeared during the French Revolution and has never been recovered, an incomplete 18th-century hand-written copy (the "Leydet Copy") was discovered in the 1980's. One of the key episodes of Montaigne's stay in Rome is his visit to the Vatican Library, which he narrates in detail. It sheds light on the manuscripts and printed material he was able to consult there in conjunction with the 1580 edition of the Essais, and the following editions he was to publish after his return from Italy.

5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"Fleisch: The Human Body as a Commodity in Renaissance Europe"
Valentin Groebner
University of Lucerne
4:30 PM, 010 East Pyne

"The 'Silence' of the Indians: Theodore de Bry and Guaman Poma de Ayala"
Walter Mignolo
Duke University
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell