Events & Conferences

Mediaevalia at the Lilly Library

Lectures and Workshops given by Falk Eisermann, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

Monday, April 26, 2010 at 9:30 A.M. & 2:30 P.M.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 5:00 P.M.
The Lilly Library (1200 East 7th Street)

The speaker for this year's Mediaevalia at the Lilly (April 26–27) will be Dr. Falk Eisermann, director of the Union Catalogue of Incunabula (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke) at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
On Monday, April 26th, Dr. Eisermann will conduct two mini-workshops on how to describe incunables in the Internet Age and on how to work with scholarly research facilities for 15th-century printing available on the internet. The workshops also will present opportunities to work with both original source materials as well as electronic resources. The workshops will be in held in English from 9:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., and in German from 2:30 P.M. to 5:30 P.M. The number of participants is limited. Enroll by sending an e-mail to the organizers: Cherry Williams and Hildegard E. Keller.
On Tuesday, April 27th at 5:00 P.M., Dr. Eisermann will give a public lecture, to be held at the Lilly Library. His topic will be: "Secrets of Success: Printers, Patrons, and Audiences in 15th Century Leipzig." A reception will follow the lecture.
The series Mediaevalia at the Lilly Library (directed by Cherry Williams, curator of manuscripts at the Lilly, and Professor Hildegard E. Keller, Department for Germanic Studies) aims to both better exploit and publicize the collection by bringing in established scholars and experts for a lecture and a workshop with hands-on-approach for students and faculty. The series is sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute and the Lilly Library. In seeking to combine lectures with workshops, our goal is to make abstract ideas, as presented in the classroom, concrete by confronting students with the intractable nature of sources and giving them some sense of just how much can be gleaned from handwriting, type, parchment, paper, watermarks, title pages, musical notation, format, decoration, in short, all material aspects of the book over the course of the period stretching from Late Antiquity to the Reformation, i.e., comprehending at the outset the transition from roll to codex and, at the end, the shift from manuscript to print.
Flyer for the Event

Directions to the Lilly Library

Urban Allegories: Walter Benjamin and Medieval Temporalities

A lecture by Ethan Knapp, Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University

Friday, January 29, 2010 at 4:30 P.M.
State Room East, Indiana Memorial Union (900 East 7th Street)

This talk revisits the often disembodied history of medieval allegory by returning to Walter Benjamin's famous analysis of the particular modernity of Baudelaire's urban lyricism. Rather than privileging Benjamin's late essay, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," which presents a stark sense of the alterity of the modern, we might instead consider his earlier, and richer, treatment in the Arcades project, a treatment that draws on a persistent parallel between Baudelaire and Dante in order to construct a modernity that cannot be read as a simple chron- ological proposition. The talk will then turn to specific examples of late medieval English allegory in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower.
Flyer for the Event

Directions to the Indiana Memorial Union

The Man with the Pale Face, the Relic, and Du Fay's Missa Se la face ay pale

A lecture by Anne Walters Robertson, Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago

Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:15 P.M.
Ford-Crawford Hall (Simon Building, 200 S. Jordan Ave.)

Professor Anne Walters Robertson writes on subjects ranging from the plainchant of the early church to the Latin and vernacular polyphony of the late middle ages. In her work, liturgical and secular music, and often the interactions of the two, mirror theological and courtly ideas and shape the development of medieval spirituality and personal devotion, architecture, institutional identity, and politics. Her research on fourteenth-century polyphony points to the fundamental roles of local musical dialect in understanding Philippe de Vitry's life and music, and of mystical theology in illuminating the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut. More recently, she has studied the symbolic and folkloric aspects of the seminal masses and motets of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Flyer for the Event
Directions to Ford-Crawford Hall

Little Nothings: "The Squire's Tale" and the Ambition of Gadgets

A lecture by Prof. Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University

Monday, September 21, 2009 at 4:00 P.M.
Indiana Memorial Union, State Room West

Despite advancements in architecture, optics, philosophy, literature, music, and mechanics, the Middle Ages remains more often associated with conservation than it is with innovation. This paper, part of a larger book-length study of the meaning and reach of medieval accounts of novelty, analyzes one telling example of the altogether ambivalent discourse of the medieval "newfangled." Geoffrey Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," I argue, cross-cuts a fascination with novel technological gadgetry with the fascinations of impossible love, raising for us the promise and problem prompted by wonder in the new and unusual.
Flyer for the Event
Directions to the Indiana Memorial Union