Home
NEWs in medieval and early modern studies
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Patricia Simons, “Black Women in Italian Renaissance Art and in Modern Whitewashing,” February 24
Please join us Monday, February 24, at 5pm for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture by Professor Patricia Simons (University of Michigan, emerita). Professor Simons will deliver her lecture in Murphey Hall, Room 104.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Therese Martin, “Crossing Borders: Female Rulers and Luxury Objects in Medieval Iberia,” February 11
Please join us Tuesday, February 11, at 5pm for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture by Therese Martin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid / CAVSA). Professor Martin will deliver her lecture in Hamilton Hall 569 (the History Department Lounge).
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, “Satire or Criminal Offense? Snippets from the Late Medieval Discussion,” April 8th
Please join us Monday, April 8th, at 4pm for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture from Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, Assistant Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His lecture will take place in the Toy Lounge, Dey Hall.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture, February 28th: Prof. Andras Kisery, “Learning to Talk: Early Modern Drama, Language Instruction, and Vernacular Conversation.”
On Thursday, February 28th, at 5pm, Andras Kisery, Associate Professor of English at the City College of New York (City University of New York), will deliver a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture entitled “Learning to Talk: Early Modern Drama, Language Instruction, and Vernacular Conversation.” The lecture will take place in the Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw Hall, second floor.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Brian Copenhaver, “Pico Undignified: His Project in the Oration?”
On Monday, February 4th, at 4pm, Brian Copenhaver, Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, will deliver a Dorothy Ford Wiley lecture in Murphey 115. A brief description of his lecture subject follows:
There’s a reason why Giovanni Pico never said that his Oration is about human dignity: because it isn’t. The speech was a failure: the Pope ruined Pico’s plan to deliver the Oration in Rome to the assembled Curia, and the frustrated orator never published it. Had Innocent VIII and the Cardinals heard the speech, they could not have understood that the whole thing – not just a few paragraphs at the end – is loaded with Kabbalah. Otherwise, as the prince’s co-religionists, they might have noticed Pico’s body-hating, world-fleeing asceticism – incompatible with ‘human dignity’ as people now use that phrase in English. If the human body is a “noose round the soul’s neck,” in Pico’s words, how can embodied humans have any dignity at all?
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture (Co-Sponsored by UNC Romance Studies): Prof. Leah Middlebrook, “Amphion’s Stones: A Theory of Lyric for Times of Change.”
On Tuesday, November 6th, at 4pm, Professor Leah Middlebrook of the University of Oregon will deliver a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture co-sponsored by the UNC Department of Romance Studies. Her lecture will take place in the Toy Lounge, Dey Hall.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture (Co-Sponsored by UNC Art and Art History): Prof. Andrea Pearson, “Rethinking the ‘Medieval Housebook’: A Gendered Intervention and Its Consequences,” November 5th
Please join us Monday, November 5th, at 5:30 for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at UNC. Professor Andrea Pearson of the American University will lecture on “Rethinking the ‘Medieval Housebook’: A Gendered Intervention and Its Consequences” in Hanes Art Center 218.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture: Prof. Katherine Smith, “The Road to Babylon: The First Crusade as Moral Performance,” October 25th
Please join us Thursday, October 25th, at 5:30 for the Fall 2018 Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture with Professor Katherine Smith of the University of Puget Sound. Professor Smith will lecture in Hamilton 569 on “The Road to Babylon: The First Crusade as Moral Performance.”
MEMS Fall Reception – Wednesday, September 26th
Please join us for the MEMS fall reception, Wednesday, September 26th, from 1:30 to 3:15. This is a great opportunity to hear about upcoming events and funding opportunities, to renew scholarly acquaintances and make new ones, and to begin another exciting and productive year for the MEMS Program. A buffet lunch will be served.
Raleigh 400: A Conference on Sir Walter Raleigh 400 Years After His Death, Chapel Hill, NC, September 6-8
Free and open to the public (except for Friday night dinner + talk by Anna Beer). Registration is required.
https://library.unc.edu/raleigh-400/
Please follow the above link for all conference-related information, including how to register. Please feel free to use this link in postings to listservs, emails to colleagues, etc.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Prof. Martin Nesvig, “Indigenous Ritual Meets Catholic Doctrine: Or, How Spanish Colonials in Mexico Learned to Like Pulque,” March 27th
Please join us on Tuesday, March 27th, at 5:00pm, when Professor Martin Nesvig of the University of Miami will present a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture. Prof. Nesvig will lecture in Hamilton Hall 569 on “Indigenous Ritual Meets Catholic Doctrine: Or, How Spanish Colonials in Mexico Learned to Like Pulque.”
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Prof. Zachary Lesser, “Shakespeare’s Ghosts: Rethinking Shakespeare’s ‘False Folio’,” February 8th; Workshop, “Reading What’s Not There,” February 9th
Please join us on Thursday, February 8th, at 6:00pm for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture from Professor Zachary Lesser. Prof. Lesser joins us from the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and will deliver a lecture in the Pleasants Family Room of Wilson Library entitled “Shakespeare’s Ghosts: Rethinking Shakespeare’s ‘False Folio’. This lecture is presented in collaboration with the Rare Book Collection at Wilson Library.
On February 9th from 1:00-3:00, Prof. Lesser will also run a workshop in Room 504 of the Wilson Library. Entitled “Reading What’s Not There,” the workshop will give a hands-on training in reading the invisible, or barely visible, traces of the past histories of texts that are now preserved in our rare books libraries. How can we begin to reconstruct the longue durée of the lives of these books? Paradoxically, the texts that seem most important to us (important literary and historical works) can be the best preserved and hence least informative, since they were often elegantly rebound in the 19th-century as valued relics. We’ll examine some of these books, and some that have been less “preserved” over the years, to see what we can learn about what’s no longer there. Graduate students are particularly welcome.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture: Prof. Martin Foys, “New2 Media Models for Scholarship: Agile Forensics and the Case of the Cotton Vespasian D.xv Manuscript,” November 16th
Please join us on Thursday, November 16th, at 6:00pm for a Fall 2017 Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture from Professor Martin Foys of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, entitled “New2 Media Models for Scholarship: Agile Forensics and the Case of the Cotton Vespasian D.xv Manuscript.” The lecture will be held in Murphey 104.
Professor Foys will also offer a workshop introducing participants to the Digital Mappa, a developing online resource for connecting digital images and texts with linked and annotated data; the workshop will be held on November 17th, 10:00-12:00, in Greenlaw 431.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture: Prof. Rachel Koopmans, “New Eyes, New Genitals, New Miracles: Eilward of Westoning and the Early Expansion of Thomas Becket’s Cult,” November 2nd
Please join us on Thursday, November 2nd, at 6:00 for a Fall 2017 Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture from Professor Rachel Koopmans of York University, Toronto. Professor Koopmans will lecture on “New Eyes, New Genitals, New Miracles: Eilward of Westoning and the Early Expansion of Thomas Becket’s Cult” in Peabody 104.
In Memoriam: John Headley
A Remembrance
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Prof. Marisa Bass, “Dürer’s Shadow: Beyond ‘Art and Science’ in the Northern Renaissance,” September 29
Join us on Friday, September 29, 2017 at 4:00 for a Dorothy Ford Wiley lecture by Professor Marisa Bass of Yale University on “Dürer’s Shadow: Beyond ‘Art and Science’ in the Northern Renaissance,” in Murphey 104.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Dissertation Workshop
Please join us on Wednesday, September 27th, 2017 for the 2017-18 Dorothy Ford Wiley Dissertation Workshop, which features Professor Azfar Moin (University of Texas at Austin, Religious Studies), an expert on medieval Sufism, and Patrick D’Silva, a doctoral student in UNC’s Department of Religious Studies who is writing a dissertation on medieval Islamic spirituality and conceptions of breath therein. The seminar will take place in Carolina Hall 124, from 3:30 to 5:30pm. Below please find a link to excerpts from Mr. D’Silva’s dissertation, which will serve as the starting point for discussion during the seminar.
D’Silva DFW Dissertation Workshop Readings
Dorothy Ford Wiley New Book Colloquium: The Medieval Invention of Travel by Prof. Shayne Legassie, September 22
Join us on Friday, September 22, 2017 at 12:30 for a seminar and discussion featuring Professors Karla Mallette (Michigan) and Shayne Legassie (UNC). Free lunch will be provided for all participants; please RSVP to Peter Raleigh (praleigh@live.unc.edu) by September 9 and indicate any dietary restrictions.
Below please find links to all seminar materials.
Seminar Introduction Legassie Touati
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Prof. Karla Mallette, “Fortune, Hazard, Risk: Accounting for Contingency in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean,” September 21
Join us on Thursday, September 21 at 5:30 for a Dorothy Ford Wiley lecture by Professor Karla Mallette of the University of Michigan, who will present on “Fortune, Hazard, Risk: Accounting for Contingency in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean” in Dey Hall 305.
MEMS Fall Reception, September 20
Please join us on Wednesday, September 20th from 3:30-5:00 for the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies’ annual Fall Reception, in the Anne Queen Room of the Campus Y. Food and drink will be provided, and all are welcome!
Dr. Stephen Hindle: Lecture and Workshop
On Thursday, January 19, Dr. Stephen Hindle (W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Henry E. Huntington Library) will present a lecture on “The Social Topography of the Rural Community in Early Modern England.” On Friday, January 20, he will lead a workshop for faculty and graduate students on applying for archive-specific fellowships.
Blog Post: Ad tempo taci
I would like to offer you, my colleagues, a gift – not of madrigals and motets, but rather of frottole – in the form of a short film I made last year in Mantua, Italy, entitled Ad tempo taci: Songs for Isabella d’Este. My goal in making this film was to associate music, performance, architecture, literature, historical research, and what I think of as “paper culture” – early printing and manuscripts – in a meaningful way that mimics the fluid, conversational style of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Named for the phrase that Isabella d’Este’s secretary, Mario Equicola, ascribed to her musical symbol, the impresa di tempi e pause (“at times, hush”), the film’s release coincides with Mantua being named the Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2016.
In Ad tempo taci, you will find the incomparable musicians Marco Beasley and Franco Pavan discussing music and performing frottole by Marco Cara and Bartolomeo Tromboncino in Isabella d’Este’s apartments in the Corte Vecchia of the Ducal Palace. Professor Molly Bourne, Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Renaissance Art at Syracuse University in Florence, offers a guided tour of the art and architecture of various rooms in the Ducal Palace, and Dr. Daniela Ferrari, former Director of the State Archives in Mantua, introduces the historical figure of Isabella d’Este and takes us to the glorious rare books rooms of the Teresiana Library and into the stacks of the Archive. The interiors where we shot the film are generally unavailable to the public, and this is the first time that music has been recorded in Isabella d’Este’s apartments. I hope you will enjoy this offering, join in its conversation, and share it with your students and friends.
– Professor Anne MacNeil (Music History)
Congratulations to Marsha Collins

Dissertation Workshop: Preternatural Knowledge in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Please join us for a dissertation workshop seminar led by Dr. Garrett Sullivan and featuring the work of Katherine Walker, a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC. Dr. Sullivan is Liberal Arts Professor of Research in the Department of English at Penn State and author of such books as The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage.
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Beth Hasseler at hasseler@live.unc.edu.
Spring 2016 Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture: Renata Holod (Art History, University of Pennsylvania), Lighting the Great Mosque of Cordoba
Join us for the 2016 Spring Dorothy Ford Wiley Crossroads Lecture. Renata Holod will present a talk proposing cognitive recall and the arts of memory as a source for the genesis of Cordoba’s famous intersecting polylobed arcades.
The lecture will begin at 5:30pm on April 18 in Sitterson Hall, Room SN014.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture: Dr. James Palmer, “Climates of Crisis? Apocalypse and Nature in the Early Medieval World”
Join us on Tuesday, March 1 for a Dorothy Ford Wiley Lecture by Dr. James Palmer (History, St Andrews). The lecture will be held in Hamilton 569 at 6pm.
Dorothy Ford Wiley Compact Seminar: Premodern Diplomacy and the Arts
Join us on Friday, February 19 in the Incubator Room of Hyde Hall for the 2016 Dorothy Ford Wiley Compact Seminar. This seminar brings together scholars of history, literature, art, music, and theater to examine how fourteenth- through eighteenth-century diplomatic encounters shaped aesthetic productions, including texts, objects, and performances. The “rise” of diplomacy as a framework for global political relations provided a fertile context for creation and innovation in the arts. In this seminar, we will explore how the performing, visual, and literary arts played an important role in celebrating, commemorating, facilitating, and commenting on diplomatic encounters, furnishing objects for exchange, spaces for sociability and self-fashioning, and emotional content for international negotiations.
The seminar will begin with a public round-table discussion on “Diplomacy and the Arts, Then and Now,” on Thursday, February 18 at 5:00 in the University Room, Hyde Hall.
Please visit http://memsdiplomacyandthearts.web.unc.edu/ for the program and more information.
Second Annual MEMS Book Colloquium
Join us for a discussion of The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities (I.B. Tauris, 2014) by Asa Eger (History, UNC Greensboro) on January 15 at 12pm in the Seminar Room in Hyde Hall. Zayde Antrim (History, Trinity College) will lead the discussion.
Please RSVP to Beth Hasseler at
hasseler@live.unc.edu by January 13.
See More Publications from the MEMS Community