Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2023 by Brian Cummings

On Friday 10 November 2023 Professor Brian Cummings (York) will deliver the 42nd Erasmus Birthday Lecture. The event will take place at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, 4 p.m.

What did the Sibyl say? Queering Erasmus

In spring 1509, Erasmus visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae in southern Italy in the company of Alexander Stewart, illegitimate son of James IV of Scotland. Erasmus acted as Alexander’s tutor and travel guide. Alexander, though only a teenager, was already Archbishop of St Andrew’s: within five years he died along with his father at the Battle of Flodden in September 1513. The episode at Cumae, oblique, transitory, yet emotionally charged with significance, eludes commentary. Johan Huizinga, most distinguished if not always sympathetic among Erasmian interpreters, pronounces “What the Sibyl said to Erasmus, we shall never know”. It is always that way with sibylline oracles: Fata canit foliisque notas et nomina mandat, writes Virgil, “she sings of the fates and commits her notes to leaves of paper, along with the fated names”. The figure of the Sibyl – whether of Cumae, Delphi, or several other ancient sites – transfixed the poetry and the visual arts of the day. Michelangelo began designing frescoes for the Sistine ceiling on this subject just as Erasmus set off from Rome for Naples. Renaissance humanists studied the sibyls for their access to truth, but also for their uninterpretable signs, as a metaphor for ambiguity itself, summed up in the Sibyl’s doubtful age, gender, and sexuality. In asking what the Sibyl said, Huizinga comes as close as possible, without quite saying so directly, not only to Erasmus’ attitudes to prophecy and meaning, but also to his feelings for the doomed teenage youth who accompanied him. Erasmus wrote intense eulogies of Alexander studded across his works for the rest of his life, often hidden in obscure adages about the sayings of classical oracles. In this lecture I will set out, with all the necessary caveats, the surviving grounds for exploring that last unmentionable area of Erasmus’ biography: the luminous, ardent, secretive world of erotic love.

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2022 by Katrin Ettenhuber

On 14 April 2022 the 41th Erasmus Birthday Lecture will be delivered by Dr Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge University). In the morning she will offer a masterclass, entitled ‘Commonplacing as a map to early modern culture’, for 15 MA students and PhD candidates.

Erasmus Among the Dialecticians: Copia and its Discontents

Erasmus’ hostility towards the discipline of dialectic in his early writings is well known. In her Erasmus Birthday Lecture, Katrin Ettenhuber revisits Erasmus’ attitude towards the arts of reasoning, tracing a trajectory from The Praise of Folly and De Copia to his final work, Ecclesiastes. Erasmus’ treatise on preaching develops a new approach to copious speech and writing by combining the resources of rhetoric and dialectic, in dialogue with the textbooks on the arts of discourse that had appeared in the 25 years since the composition of The Praise of Folly.

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2019 by Grantley McDonald

On Friday 6 December 2019 Grantley McDonald (Oxford/Vienna) will deliver the 40th Erasmus Birthday Lecture. The event will take place at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, 4 p.m.

Erasmus and the Beginnings of English Medical Humanism

Amongst the humanists with whom Erasmus associated in England were several involved in the revival and implementation of Greek medical knowledge, notably Thomas Linacre, Thomas More and the young John Clement. Linacre wished to promote knowledge of Greek medical writings, particularly the work of Galen, both in translation and in the original Greek, as the basis of a reformed medical profession which would be better equipped to deal with the public health issues that challenged sixteenth-century London. As a municipal officer, More had to deal with public health on a regular basis, and shared Linacre’s enthusiasm for the potential benefits of ancient medicine. In the 1520s, Francesco d’Asola, the heir of the Venetian scholarly printer Aldus Manutius, published a complete edition of Galen’s extant Greek writings, probably at Linacre’s instigation. Four promising young English Greek scholars assisted with the location of manuscripts and the preparation of the edition. As the Galen edition was going through the press, Erasmus asked d’Asola to prepare a new edition of his Adages, but was rebuffed. Erasmus’ negative reaction to the Aldine Galen edition not simply reflected his injured pride, but also highlighted significant differences in the humanistic projects of Erasmus and his English colleagues.

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2018 by Yasmin Haskell

On Friday 9 November 2018 Professor Yasmin Haskell (Bristol) will deliver the 39th Erasmus Birthday Lecture “Erasmus and the Health of Scholars: Physical, Emotional, Spiritual”. The event will take place at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, 4 p.m.

Prof. Haskell will explore Erasmus’s place in the history of scholarly ‘hygiene’, both with respect to his contemporaries (humanist physicians, scholars and theologians) and in a longer tradition of writing about the health of scholars, melancholy, hypochondria and the passions.

All welcome, please register here.

Before the lecture, Prof. Haskell will give a masterclass, open to graduate students, entitled “Passions for and of Learning in the Early Modern Period”. Students can find more information and apply here.

Call for Papers

Sixth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies

June 18-20, 2018, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri

The Sixth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 18-20, 2018) is a convenient summer venue for scholars from around the world to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and early modern studies.

The plenary speakers for this year will be Geoffrey Parker of The Ohio State University, and Carole Hillenbrand of the University of St Andrews.

The Symposium is held annually on the beautiful midtown campus of Saint Louis University. On-campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments as well as a luxurious boutique hotel. Inexpensive meal plans are available, and there is also a wealth of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues within easy walking distance of campus.

While attending the Symposium participants are free to use the Vatican Film Library, the Rare Book and Manuscripts Collection, and the general collection at Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library.

The Sixth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions.

The deadline for all submissions is December 31. Decisions will be made in January and the final program will be published in February.

For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: http://smrs.slu.edu

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2017

On 17 November 2017 Peter Mack will give the 38th Erasmus Birthday Lecture: “Paraphrase, Paradox and Amplification in Agricola and Erasmus”

The 38th Erasmus Birthday Lecture will concern Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the New Testament (1517-24), and in particular his paraphrases of Romans and Mark. The lecture will consider the ways in which the Paraphrases and their paratexts make use of the rhetorical techniques described in De copia (1512) and De ratione studii (1511).

The lecture will further discuss the various ways in which Erasmus reads the Bible texts and makes them available to his imagined audience, and will compare the Paraphrases with Rudolph Agricola’s Oration on Christ’s Nativity (1484) and Philipp Melanchthon’s Loci Communes (1521). The lecture was conceived as a tribute to Fokke Akkerman (1930-2017), teacher of Latin in Groningen, pioneering Agricola scholar, editor and translator of Spinoza, and long-term collaborator on the Erasmus edition.

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2016

On 4 November 2016 Kathy Eden will give the 37th Erasmus Birthday Lecture: “Erasmus on Dogs and Baths and Other Odious Comparisons.”

Both praised and censured by his contemporaries for his mastery of comparison, Erasmus puts this discursive strategy at the center of his educational reform, his biblical hermeneutics and his call to philosophia Christi. In this lecture, Kathy Eden explores the roots of Erasmus’ master trope in some of his favourite rhetoricians and philosophers, including Quintilian and Plato, and the key role it plays in his own literary production.

Location: VOC room, Oost-Indisch Huis, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam

Time: 16:00-17:15 hrs, drinks afterwards

All welcome!

See here for registration and more information.

Call for Papers ACLA 2017 Utrecht

Seminar: History, Fiction, and Historical Fiction

Georg Lukács initiated a fruitful line of inquiry into the conditions of nineteenth-century realism with his pioneering study The Historical Novel (1937) and Hayden White has spawned an even more capacious literature about the narratological strategies of historical writing with his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). Strangely, though, the connections suggested by these two seminal works between nineteenth-century historiography and literature have yet to be fully explored, and the general questions they raise about the relations between history and literature have been addressed in broad theoretical terms more often than in discussions of concrete examples. This seminar proposes to examine the generic and narratological interplay between literary and historical writing through close readings of particular works.

Beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides in the Western tradition, historians have borrowed large-scale narrative architecture, small episodes, and particular verbal formulations from literary genres high – ode, tragedy, and epic, among others – and low – folk tale, comedy, and novel, among many others. At the same time, literary writers have not only mined historians’ accounts for source material but re-plotted them, lifted anecdotes and exempla, and used them to adjust their notions of literary form in a general evolution towards more complex chronotopes and the more open-ended structures of the novel, if Bakhtin is to be believed. Each paper should address how a particular historical text adapts a generic or narrative strategy from a literary text or corpus, or vice versa.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

– the Greek and Roman historians’ use of epic, lyric, and tragedy, and the use made of them in turn by later literary writers

– the relationship of the Medieval chronicle to the Arthurian romance

– how 16th century writers used the Greek and Roman historians for micro-genres like the anecdote and the exemplum

– questions of verisimilitude relating to history and literature in the Italian Renaissance

– historical drama from Shakespeare to German Romanticism

– Hume, Gibbon, and the eighteenth-century British novel

– the relations between the 19th-century historical novel and the great 19th-century histories

– modernist and post-modernist historical novels, especially attempts to abandon traditional literary form and create radically open-ended structures in line with current theorizing about avoiding the imposition of narrative on history

– emplotment and endings in historical narratives according to White, Ricoeur, Kermode, D. A. Miller, and/or Peter Brooks

– micro-history’s relation to fiction

– thinking about literary form in terms of big history (e.g., Richard McGuire) and non-human agents in contemporary history and literature (e.g., Wendy Doniger)

Abstracts (~250 words) will be accepted through the ACLA website (http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting) from September 1 to September 23, 2016. If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact Chris Chiasson (cchiasso@indiana.edu).

Call for Papers

Interdisciplinary conference “On the Eve of the Reformation: The View from Then and Now”, Victoria College in the University of Toronto, 21-22 October 2016.

As we prepare to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses in October 1517, it may be useful to pause for a moment and consider two important questions: first, how were the historical and cultural events of the late fifteenth and very early sixteenth century defining the European world that would soon break apart along sectarian lines, and, second, how did writers, thinkers, and artists later in the century look back at that earlier world and culture. The years immediately preceding 1517 were richly marked by events/works that were to have a lasting impact on their times. In 1516, for example, the fifteen-year-old Charles von Habsburg was crowned king of Spain, Thomas More published his Utopia, Erasmus his Novum Testamentum and Ariosto his Orlando furioso, and the Venetians established the Ghetto. The previous year, 1515, the twenty-year-old Francis I was crowned king of France, Thomas Wolsey was named cardinal and then Chancellor of England, Martin Luther began to lecture on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Johannes Reuchlin established the first university chair of Greek in Germany, while across the ocean the Spaniard Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded the city of Havana. How did people later in the sixteenth century and early in the next see these events? How, for example, did Shakespeare see and depict pre-Reformation England in some of his historical plays? How did Montaigne, or Cervantes, or Caravaggio, or Monteverdi see the world before the Reformation? This interdisciplinary conference seeks, therefore, to take the pulse of European history and culture in two different ways: from our perspective as early twenty-first-century scholars and from the perspective of late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century writers and artists. In so doing, the conferences seeks to cast its eyes on both the Old World and the New, Europe as well as in its African and Asian extensions, history as well as the arts, society as well as events.

Proposals 

Deadline to submit proposals: Thursday, 31 March 2016.

For further information on the conference, please contact Prof. Elizabeth Cohen (ecohen[at]yorku.ca) or Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler (konrad.eisenbichler[at]utoronto.ca).

Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture 2016: Mark Vessey

Thursday 31 March 2016, Professor Mark Vessey (University of British Columbia) will give the Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture “A More Radical Renaissance: The Novum Instrumentum (1516) in Its Time and Ours.” All welcome.

Time: 19:30-20:30

Location: Annual Meeting Renaissance Society of America, Boston, Hynes, Level Three, Room 302

Erasmus Birthday Lecture 2015: Anita Traninger

Friday 30 October Prof. dr Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) will give the 36th Erasmus Birthday Lecture: “Erasmus’ personae between rhetoric and dialectics.” All welcome. Drinks afterwards.
Date: Friday 30 October 2015
Time: 16:15
Location: Huygens ING (housed in the Royal Library), The Hague, Tesselschadezaal

Erasmus was famous for his ambiguity. This elusive verbal skill even prompted Martin Luther to call him “an eel.” But how does this ambiguity work precisely? This lecture willl explore how Erasmus used techniques of argumentation available to him from the traditions of both rhetoric and dialectics. In connection with the latter it will reveal how Erasmus, who never held back in showing his contempt for the scholastics, engaged with traditional dialectical modes of arguing. Erasmus certainly was the paragon of the new learning, but his engagement with these older methods mirrors his ambition of contributing to the discussion of theological matters.

About the speaker: Prof. Anita Traninger is a Fellow of the Einstein Foundation at Freie Universität Berlin, where she teaches Romance and Comparative Literature with a focus on rhetoric and the history of knowledge. She is the director of two research projects, one on the genealogy of impartiality as a scholarly ideal and one, on the ‘question’ as an epistemic genre. Her books include a study on the debate about universal methods of gaining and feigning knowledge between 1500 and 1720 (Mühelose Wissenschaft, 2001) and two volumes on knowledge and performativity (Macht Wissen Wahrheit, 2005; Dynamiken des Wissens, 2007, both ed. with K. W. Hempfer). Her most recent book publications are on practices of conflict and genres of debate shared by and jointly shaped by scholasticism and humanism (Disputation, Deklamation, Dialog, 2012), on The Emergence of Impartiality (ed. with K. Murphy, 2014) and on Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, (ed. with Karl A.E. Enenkel, 2015).