News in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction

(University of Delaware Press, 2011)

Ellen Welch (Romance Languages) examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century—heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages—her book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.

International Arthurian Society Honors Edward Donald Kennedy

At its triennial meeting in Bristol, England in July the International Arthurian Society sponsored a session of papers and an evening reception in honor of approaching retirement of Edward Donald Kennedy (English and Comparative Literature) and in recognition of his contributions to the scholarship of Arthurian literature. The journal Arthuriana will be publishing a collection of essays in his honor in the near future.

The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, volume I: The Translation of Lucretius

(Oxford University Press, 2012)

Reid Barbour (English and Comparative Literature) and his co-editor David Norbrook have just published the first volume in the four-volume edition of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, the first-ever collected edition of the writings of the pioneering author and translator. Hutchinson (1620–1681) had a remarkable range of her interests, from Latin poetry to Civil War politics and theology. This edition of her translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura offers new biographical material, demonstrating the changes and unexpected continuities in Hutchinson's life between the work's composition in the 1650s and its dedication in 1675. Hers is the first complete surviving English translation of one of the great classical epics, a challenging text at the borderlines of poetry and philosophy.

Watch Carl Ernst's Panels at the Jaipur Literature Festival

Carl Ernst (Religious Studies) participated in two panels at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Videos of his January 24 panels are available at http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/program-2011/24-jan-2012-program/

Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century

(Oxford University Press)

Tania String (Art and History) and Marcus Bull (History) have produced the first in-depth and wide-ranging academic exploration of the reception of the Tudor period in the modern world. It includes studies by many of the leading scholars in their fields, and considers the modern appropriation of the Tudors and their era in art, music, architecture, design, religion, public history, social history, print, film and television, and internet networking sites. The fourteen papers cumulatively map out the ways in which modern society has utilized the sixteenth-century past as a cultural resource, as a repertoire of quotable designs and styles, as a vantage point from which to frame political and social critiques, as a source of identities, and as a refuge from modern-day anxieties. The volume appears in the prestigious Proceedings of the British Academy series, which since 1905 has been the premier vehicle for British scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

MEMS Welcomes a New Faculty Member

Flatt

Emma Jane Flatt, Assistant Professor, will expand the History Department's offerings in pre-modern cultures and politics of South Asia. This semester she is teaching "History and Culture of Hindus and Muslims: South Asia to 1750" and "Gender and South Asia."

Omid Safi to Lead Educational Tour to Turkey, May 26–June 11, 2012

Omid Safi (Religious Studies) invites interested life-long learners to participate in this study tour. The focus is the rich religious heritage of Turkey as well as its multi-layered history, with particular attention to the Turkish experience of Islam and Islamic mysticism. Click here for more information.