IN CAMBRIDGE
Embodied Things (CRASSH)
Wednesday, 23 November 2016, 12:30-14:00, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building
‘Knowledge’
Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)
Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE (UCL)
Poetics before Modernity
Thursday, 24 November, 5.15pm, Old Combination Room, Trinity College.
Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania)
“AN EMOTIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF STYLE”
How did medieval teaching identify the “literary” or “literature” as a particular quality to be achieved and imitated? What was the role of style in defining the realm of the “literary”? I will begin by considering a relatively modest “anthology” from the thirteenth century, MS Glasgow, Hunterian, MS V.8.15. This teaching collection expresses its interests in terms rather different from what we associate with better known and prestigious poetic anthologies of the same period. The anthology reveals its motives in metaliterary terms: it signals a moment at which medieval rhetoric recognizes itself as the instrument for theorizing literary style as the engine of emotion. This anthology exemplifies the kind of teaching that was to enable a writer like Petrarch to invest style with the power to move emotions and even to compel ethical judgments. I conclude with a rhetorical reading of Petrarch’s Seniles 17.3 to explore how the “lesson” of style has been incorporated and naturalized in literary production.
Rita Copeland is Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests range across ancient and medieval literatures, history and theory of rhetoric, literary theory and exegetical traditions, and medieval learning. She has pursued these themes in various publications, especially Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages; Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with Ineke Sluiter); and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Peter T. Struck). Most recently she has edited the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558. She is also a founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. Her newest project is on rhetoric and the emotions in the long Middle Ages.
Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar
Wednesday, 23 November, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall
Laura Sangha (Exeter)
‘“Take care that nothing be printed”: the public and private lives of supernatural narratives in later Stuart England’
IN LONDON
Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)
Monday, 21 November, 17:15, Room G35, Ground floor, South block, Senate House
Eilish Gregory (UCL)
‘Networks in mid-seventeenth century England: the navigation of the sequestration and compounding process by the Catholic gentry’
