2022
Guest lecture: Carlo Caruso (University of Siena), Martial Frown and the Ideal Beauty: The Changing Perception of the ‘Apollo Belvedere’
Time and place: Oct. 20, 2022 4:15 PM – 6:00 PM, PAM Seminarrom 360
Winckelmann’s ravishing description of the statue of Apollo in the Cortile Vaticano del Belvedere features in the Second Part of his History of Ancient Art (1764). By emphasising the coexistence of oppositional elements in the sculpture's dynamic appearance, Winckelmann's approach shows interesting similarities with an ekphrastic tradition that dates back to the end of the fifteenth century, when the statue was excavated from the soil of Latium and literary texts celebrating its recovery began to circulate. Winckelmann's description may thus be more fully appreciated within a broader context, where ancient as well as early modern descriptive formulae concur to illuminate the genesis of his lyrical response to the beauty and charm of ancient art.
Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Literature and Philology at the University of Siena (Italy). He is the author of Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), the editor of The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception (2018), and the co-editor of Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009) and La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento (2018). He has also published critical editions of Paolo Rolli, Libretti per musica (1993); Paolo Giovio, Ritratti (1999); and Diomede Borghese, Orazioni accademiche (2009).
The lecture will be held in English and will be chaired by Paola D'Andrea. Anyone interested is welcome to attend and join for coffee and refreshments at 4 pm. The lecture will start at 16:15.
Organizer
- Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe
- Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages
2019
Guest Lecture: Renaissance Prophetesses and Female Mystics
We are very pleased to announce a guest lecture by Tamar Herzig, Associate Professor of Early Moderne European History at Tel Aviv University. The lecture is open for everyone
Time and place: May 24, 2019 12:15 PM – 2:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus 152
This lecture explores the contribution of female mystics and prophetesses in Renaissance Italy to inspiring and promoting the reform of religious orders, the Church, and society at large. It traces the reception of women’s mystically inspired calls for reform by their male contemporaries in the Italian peninsula and beyond from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
Focusing especially on Italian holy women who were affiliated with reformist currents within the Dominican order, it then charts the ways in which reform-minded mystics who were widely revered as “female Christs” challenged deeply-entrenched gendered presumptions concerning the triune Christian God.
Finally, it addresses the role of leading reformist churchmen in facilitating the hereticization of embodied female mysticism, and examines its impact on the modern historiography of Renaissance mysticism and prophecy.
Respondent: Dr. Eleonora Cappuccilli, Postoctoral fellow, History of Ideas (IFIKK)
About Tamar Herzig
Tamar Herzig is Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the religious history of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy and gender history. She serves as Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies.
Prof. Herzig has published broadly on early modern history and religion. Among her publications are the acclaimed monographs Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013). Her new book A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy is coming out this Fall at Harvard University Press. Prof.
Herzig currently serves as the Renaissance Society of America’s Discipline Representative for the field of Religion and is a member the Advisory Committee of Renaissance Quarterly and of the editorial boards of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance and the Mediterranean Historical Review; of the academic boards of the Medici Archive Project and the research project Observer l'Observance: Diffusion, réseaux et influence des réformes régulières en Europe; and of the Executive Committee of the international research group for Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (EmoDir).
Organizer
- The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden. Women, Politics and Reform in Renaissance Italy
- Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe
Guest lecture: Carlo Caruso (University of Siena), Lettere dal fronte: l'italiano della gente comune
Time and place: Mar. 29, 2019 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus
It is estimated that approximately four billion letters were exchanged between soldiers and their families and friends during the Great War on the North-Eastern Italian front (1915-1918). Part of this correspondence consisted of letters by Italian prisoners of war which had been subjected to Austrian censorship. A significant portion of this corpus, produced by correspondents from all walks of life, was examined by a wartime Austrian censor who was to become a leading scholar in Romance studies – Leo Spitzer (Vienna, 1886 – Forte dei Marmi, 1960). In the works he published on the subject, Spitzer offered a vivid recollection of the circumstances that had led him to analyse that extensive material, where he was able to find evidence of the human being’s inventive approach to language and expression.
Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Literature and Philology at the University of Siena (Italy). He is the author of Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), the editor of The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception (2018), and the co-editor of Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009) and La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento (2018). He has also published critical editions of Paolo Rolli, Libretti per musica (1993); Paolo Giovio, Ritratti (1999); and Diomede Borghese, Orazioni accademiche (2009).
The lecture will be held in Italian and will start at 11 am. It will be followed by a lunch for the students of Italian at ILOS (12:30). Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend the event.
Organizer
The department of literature, area studies and European languages.
Guest lecture: Carlo Caruso (University of Siena), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499): Some New Light from the Earliest Reception?
Time and place: Mar. 28, 2019 4:15 PM, Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups hus
Often dubbed as the most famous book of the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (‘The Strife of Love in a Dream’) is a magnificent folio volume published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1499. It is a work that retains a somewhat mysterious allure. Its author's traits remain in many respects elusive; the allegorical romance narrated in the text is intermixed with encyclopaedic and often abstruse learning; the lavish apparatus of illustrations – 174 woodcuts with inscriptions in various languages, including hieroglyphics – is the superb work of masters whose identity is to this day unknown. Finally, and most importantly, the language – a mixture of Italian vernacular, Latin, and Greek – appears to be a unicum in Renaissance literature. The lecture will examine the work’s earliest reception in an attempt to understand its meaning and significance for contemporary readers.
Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Literature and Philology at the University of Siena (Italy). He is the author of Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), the editor of The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception (2018), and the co-editor of Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009) and La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento (2018). He has also published critical editions of Paolo Rolli, Libretti per musica (1993); Paolo Giovio, Ritratti (1999); and Diomede Borghese, Orazioni accademiche (2009).
The lecture will be held in English and is hosted by the research group Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Anyone interested is welcome to attend and join for coffee and refreshments at 4 pm. The lecture will start at 16:15.
Organizer
Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe
2018
Annalisa Cipollone (Durham University): Exiled Authors, Exiled Texts: Dante's Divine Comedy
The lecture will be delivered in English and is open to anyone who might be interested.
Time and place: Apr. 27, 2018 11:00 AM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus
Exile exercised a perceivable influence over Dante’s intellectual production, with the image of the ‘undeserving exile’ coming afore in patent or subtle ways throughout his oeuvre. Dante’s exile inspired the choice of the subject matter for the Divine Comedy, influenced and shaped his political vision, and offered the imagination of readers a memorable image of the solitary and disdainful poet. Yet did exile exercise any perceivable influence over the transmission and reception of the poem's text as well? This lecture will explore how some assumptions made about the text of Dante's Comedy have recently been put to the test, writing a new and unfinished chapter in the history of textual criticism. The lecture will be delivered in English and is open to anyone who might be interested.
Annalisa Cipollone teaches Italian Literature at Durham University (UK). Her research has mainly focused on medieval poets, Dante and Petrarch. She has recently curated the exhibition and published the book Dante. Hell Heaven and Hope: A Journey through Life and the Afterlife with Dante (2017).