VizCult
The Art History Department Speaker Series
2022 Spring Semester
presents
The Annual Ferber Lecture
Benjamin Anderson, Associate Professor, Cornell University
“A Byzantine Oracle in Reformation Germany: Ein wunderliche Weissagung von dem Bapstum (1527)”
February 23, 5:00 PM in LN 1106 (IASH Conference Room)
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Bottle, Glass with enamel and gilding, 1725-1750, Gujarat, Height :13.2 cm, Base: 6.2 x 6.2 cm, LACMA, M.88.129.203. Image in the public domain.
Nancy Um will deliver a lecture entitled, “Imam al-Mutawakkil’s Box: Aromatic Gifts around the Late-Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century Indian Ocean,” in the CEMERS Lecture Series. The lecture will be held on September 12, 2018 at 3 pm in LN 1106 (IASH Conference Room).
Bottle, Glass with enamel and gilding, 1725-1750, Gujarat, Height :13.2 cm, Base: 6.2 x 6.2 cm, LACMA, M.88.129.203. Image in the public domain.
Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies
26th Annual Bernardo Lecture
November 10, 2016
5:30 Casadesus Hall (4:30 Reception in Green Room)
Ronald L. Martinez, Professor of Italian at Brown University,
Cleansing the Temple: Dante and the Defense of the Church
Readers of the Commedia are familiar with Dante’s severe judgment of contemporary popes. The attacks are explicable as part of Dante’s strategy of defending the Church itself, which the poet saw as imperiled by papal avarice and political ambition. From the reference to the biblical punishment of Uzzah for touching the Ark of the Covenant in Epistola XI, urging Italian cardinals at the 1314 conclave to elect a Pope favorable to Rome, we know that Dante anticipated accusations of meddling in Church affairs. And meddle he did: the representations in the poem of the Church, in guises both historical and typological (Ark of the Covenant, Temple, Bride of Christ, etc.) comprise an ambitious program by which Dante identifies with the role of protector and purifier of the Church, modelled chiefly on scriptural episodes of Christ cleansing the Temple, a longstanding staple of anti-simoniacal reform within the Church itself. A series of passages in the second half of Paradiso (Cantos 15-16, 18, 22, 27) elaborate Dante’s investment in this role, one that is repeatedly linked to the poet’s condition as an exile.
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will hold its annual bus trip to the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in Manhattan, on Friday,
March 11.
All members of the campus community are welcome. The cost of the trip is $25 for medieval studies majors and minors; $35 for all other undergraduate and graduate students; and $50 for faculty and staff.
Ticket prices include transportation to and from New York City, admission to both museums and tours of both the Cloisters and the Islamic Galleries at the Met. The bus will depart from the Binghamton University Events Center at 8:30 a.m. and will return at approximately 10.30 p.m. that evening. Participants should be ready to board the bus at 8:15 a.m. The bus will not stop on the way to New York, but a catered lunch will be available for an extra fee (and the meal, chips and beverage) will be dropped off at the bus before departure.
Information and signup available at the CEMERS office, LN-1129, by calling 607-777-2730 or by contacting Erin Stanley via e-mail (estanley@binghamton.edu). The deadline to sign up is Friday, Feb. 26.
CEMERS LECTURE:
Wednesday, April 15 at 3:00 PM in the IASH Conference Room (LN1106)
Paul Schleuse, Associate Professor of Musicology, Binghamton University
“Image, Imitation, Imagination: Woodcut Illustrations in Adriano Banchieri’s Music Books”
Illustrations in prints of renaissance music are extremely rare, beyond generic elements like initial letters, decorative borders on title pages, and printer’s marks. When they do appear they can tell us much about a book’s function: as unusual (and expensive) additions they could not have been used haphazardly; as images not visible to a separate audience they strongly suggest that the music was intended for the enjoyment of the singers themselves. A handful of Venetian prints from the years around 1600 use images of theatrical performances in precisely this way, most notably Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso (1597), whose woodcuts were custom-made to portray situations from the commedia dell’arte-style scenario that unifies the book. Vecchi’s imitator Adriano Banchieri composed no fewer than four distinct books of three-voice canzonettas that rewrite L’Amfiparnaso and also use woodcut illustrations, but they do so in a more haphazard manner. As I will show, most of Banchieri’s images were recycled from a set of at least thirty-one generic theatrical woodcuts that first appeared in prints of Venetian comedies in 1591 and 1592. These illustrations will shed new light on Banchieri’s purpose in repeatedly re-inventing his theatrically themed canzonettas, on the recreational function of these books, and on his shifting views of performance practice for these works at a time that also saw the emergence of opera.
This paper considers the late medieval concept of despair as a framework for exploring patterns of emotional response to Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross. My discussion situates Bosch’s painting within a fraught topic of debate between social constructivists and proponents of universal emotions theory, asking whether we can interpret Bosch’s spiritually arduous image through the lens of the emotional communities that cohere around it. Art historians commonly describe protagonists of late medieval religious images as models for compassionate imitation; I nuance this approach by worrying the complex synergy between devotional treatises and emotional expression, as located in and challenged by later medieval material culture.
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) is offering a bus trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters on Friday, March 14. The bus, admission fees to the museums and guided tours at each are included in the price. The cost is $30 for students and $40 for faculty, staff and others. If interested, visit Barbara Knighton at the CEMERS office (LN-1129), call her at 777-2730 or send an email to bknight@binghamton.edu.
CEMERS lecture
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
2:30 pm
LN 1106 (IASH conference room)
Reception to follow
Theresa Coletti, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher
Department of English
University of Maryland
“Sex and the City: Sacred and Social Epistemologies in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocents”
The biblical story of the Slaughter of Innocents recounted in Matthew’s gospel provided late medieval English urban communities the opportunity to gaze upon a symbolic image of social and political relationships in which they might discern their own likeness. Vernacular dramas on the Slaughter appropriate themes and tropes associated with medieval interpretations and celebrations of the Innocents’ feast to critique social and material categories of late medieval urban life. This paper examines the Slaughter of the Innocents in the Chester mystery cycle, the most provocative of the English plays on this subject. In the Chester Slaughter, dramatic reflexivity involves an elaborate comic subplot in which mothers of the Innocents struggle verbally and physically with soldiers of Herod seeking to murder their children. In one such contest, a mulier attempts to thwart the soldier who threatens to attack her child if it has a “pintell” (penis); the woman insists that the child has “two holes under the tayle.” Her challenge puts into play a series of substitutions that focus on questions of social and sexual identity, exposing their intersections with power and knowledge. Analyzing the web of social and symbolic relationships signified by the mulier’s act, this paper contends that the challenge of counting holes under the tail encodes an anxious critique of the major categories of difference on which civic authority and social structure were based.
CEMERS LECTURE, co-sponsored with the Department of History
Wednesday, October 9
2:30 pm
IASH conference room (LN 1106)
Reception to follow
Leah DeVun, Department of History, Rutgers University
“Jews, Hermaphrodites, and Other Animals: On the Boundaries of the Human in the Middle Ages”
This paper examines hermaphroditism in light of questions about the nature of humanity in the late Middle Ages. During this period, scholastic natural philosophers – inspired by newly available classical texts – began to construct taxonomies of organisms in which sexual difference played a central role. Scholastics identified the absence of distinct sex, shifting sex, and monstrous genitalia as key characteristics of nonhuman categories of beings, including plants and animals. The apparent boundaries between male/female and human/nonhuman intersected with other sorts of boundaries: visual art in bestiaries, maps, travel literature, and marginalia indicated that Jews and Muslims too were in some sense hermaphrodites. Sexual difference became a way to distinguish between not only humans and non-humans, but also Christians and non-Christians and Europeans and non-Europeans. If humans were distinct from animals inasmuch as they had only two sexes, then humans who displayed multiple sexes or the attributes of multiple sexes approached the condition of beasts and therefore lost the subjectivity and dignity unique to humanity. I argue that in a range of texts and images hermaphrodites operate as pivotal figures that reinforced not only sexual, but also religious and racial difference.
Binghamton Art History 