"The Logic of Sovereignty"
Jacques Lezra
New York University
4:45 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
This talk addresses the thesis - familiar from the work of Carl Schmitt and his followers - that a "modern" concept of sovereignty arises in the early modern period in hand with the "secularization" of theological concepts on which pre-modern conceptions of sovereign power had stood. It reconsiders the shape and timing of Schmitt's influential claim, by means of an analysis of two scenes concerned with knitting together sovereignty, theology, history, and a cluster of logical problems just cresting at the turn of the 16th century. How, the talk asks, does the logical problem of future contingents inflect the secularization of theological concepts in the period leading to the rise of Ramus? The scenes the essay treats - one historically documented: the so-called conflict of Louvain regarding future contingents between the rhetorician Pierre de Rivo and the theologican Henri de Zomeren (the conflict stretches roughly from 1465 to 1479); the other perhaps mythological: Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martínez Guijarro's ill-fated 1546 effort to demystify the legend of the so-called Cave of Hercules, as narrated in 1671 by Cristóbal de Lozano - provide a complex picture of the strange logic of sovereignty, and of the logic of historiography that seeks to account for its emergence and "modern" characteristics.

"A Real Page-Turner: Renaissance Poets Reading and (Re)-Writing"
JoAnn DellaNeva
University of Notre Dame
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
This talk will examine reading and writing practices in the Renaissance, looking especially at the example of the French poets Ronsard and Du Bellay and their reading and re-writing of contemporary Italian poets, giving particular attention to the role played by the physical presentation of poems on their pages in the Italian source books.

"Before Italian poets had to reckon with genre: Ariosto, Virgil and the last part of Orlando furioso"
Daniel Javitch
New York University
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell

"Milton's Lycidas: Primitive Art?"
Gordon Teskey
Harvard University
4:30 PM, 010 East Pyne

"Our Friend Venus Performed to a Miracle": Anne Bracegirdle, John Eccles, and Creativity
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Syracuse University
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
"Our friend Venus performed to a miracle." So William Congreve describes Anne Bracegirdle's performance as the goddess of love in John Eccles's setting of his masque The Judgment of Paris. Congreve's description of Bracegirdle's singing and acting as a "miracle" is telling; obviously, Congreve wants to describe Bracegirdle's wondrous abilities adequately, but his use of the term "miracle" also suggests that her abilities are almost supernatural in origin. In creating, the creator assumes God-like (miraculous) powers, putting something into the world that had not previously existed. But can we define Bracegirdle as a creator? After all, she was not an author or a composer. Following a line of argument recently pursued by literary and theater historians, this paper emphatically claims that Bracegirdle was a creator and, moreover, that her contemporaries would have understood her in this way; as a singer and actress she brought unsounded notes and texts to life, and composition and performance were mutually constitutive creative acts. This paper also explores the specific creative relationship between Bracegirdle and Eccles; no systematic investigation has been made of the musical conventions and genres associated with Bracegirdle, and this paper will fill in this lacuna in our understanding, demonstrating how her "miraculous" abilities shaped Eccles's compositional practice.

Becoming a Numismatic Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Naples
John Moore
Smith College
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
Numismatics constituted a fundamental source of knowledge for European aristocrats and budding intellectuals who sought to learn history, whether ancient or contemporary. The science of coins and medals gave rise to scores of luxurious, expensive tomes (thus forming an important subset of the book trade), fostered a potent medium of communication within the international republic of letters, and provided delight to connoisseurs. In May 1742, José Joaquin Guzman de Montealegre (1698-1771), Duke of Salas, secretary of state to Charles VII, King of the Two Sicilies (later Charles III of Spain), decided to expand his collection of papal medals through the good offices of Francesco Dionigi, the agent of the Neapolitan crown who resided in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Analysis of heretofore unstudied correspondence between Montealegre and Dionigi permits a detailed reconstruction of the complex mechanisms involved in assembling a numismatic collection over the course of five months. Their letters also cast light on the activity of acquisition itself as a means of social advancement that could prove briefly embarrassing to a patron who had, by 1745, fallen irredeemably into disgrace.

Monsieur Colbert's Notebooks and the State Culture of Expertise in Europe, 1650-1750
Jacob Soll
Rutgers University
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
How do states acquire information and knowledge? How do they discern good intelligence from bad? Even with the growth of the humanist, pan-European diplomatic corps and the teams of lawyers that inhabited the world of government and the Republic of Letters from Vienna, Madrid and Naples to Paris, Stockholm and London, there was not yet a model of the ideal state expert by the mid-seventeenth century. If anything, the class of humanist government counselors were giving way to more financially-oriented cadres. What was the process of this evolution from the humanist and noble scholar of politics of the early seventeenth century to the internally-trained and secretive expert of the eighteenth century? As chief minister in the largest and most influential state in Europe, Jean-Baptiste Colbert played a key role in transforming political culture, designing a program of traning for state experts and creating a new, secret sphere of government information management. Colbert's notebooks reveal how he built his new administration and information system and how it set the model for the government of expertise in the eighteenth century with both salutary and sinister results.

Late Renaissance Natural Theology: Between Natural History and Apologetics
Brian Ogilvie
University of Massachussetts
5:00 PM, 209 Scheide Caldwell
Renaissance naturalists, whether laymen or clerics, repeatedly emphasized that their studies revealed God's presence in the world. They framed their work as a kind of natural theology. However, professional theologians rarely appealed to natural history when writing apologetics. Even the close connections between natural theology and natural history that were forged in the "physico-theology" of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not have much of an effect on the discipline of theology. Theologians had other concerns. But the religious framework of Renaissance natural history was not merely a rationalization for secular studies. Rather, physico-theology was a kind of cultural auto-immune response; its goal was to convince naturalists themselves that their studies were neither impious nor atheistical.