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Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts

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This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences--most prominently emotion--has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

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de Gruyter Publishing House
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Fiona Griffiths
Kathryn Starkey
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Sabine Ladstätter

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Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor (2018-2019)
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Sabine Ladstätter studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory and Ancient History at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, culminating in a Master's degree (University of Graz) in 1992 and a Doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1997. Between 1997-2007 she held the position of Research Assistant at the Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After her Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2007 she moved to the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, the directorship of which she assumed in 2009. At the same time, the directorship of the excavations at Ephesos was assigned to her.

Awards for Scientist of the Year in 2011 in Austria, and for the best popular scientific book in Austria in 2014, are proof of her engagement in the areas of scientific communication and public outreach. She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Archaeological Institute of America, as well as numerous national and international scientific and editorial boards, and is a referee for leading research promotion institutions. Visiting professorships at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Paris (2016) and Stanford University as the 2018-2019 Visiting Austrian Chair Professor,  underscore her engagement in the fields of education and teaching, also attested by her supervision of academic degrees at a variety of European universities.

Professor Ladstätter taught for the Department of Classics the course Classics 359: An Archaeology of Ephesos (Winter Quarter).

Director, Austrian Institute of Archaeology
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Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint Germain D'Anxure, 1730-1895

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Romain Wacziarg is a professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper that he will be presenting is co-authored by Guillaume Blanc, Brown University.

This talk is part of the Economic History Seminar Series, and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, 1730-1895
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Economics Building
Room 351

Romain Wacziarg Professor of Economics Speaker UCLA Anderson School of Management
Seminars

(Dis)figuring War: Literature and the Arts, 1918-2018 (Day 2)

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At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 10, 2018 (Day 2)
SCHEDULE:

  • 9 – 11am - 2nd PANEL
    Chair: Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago, Associate Professor)
     
  • Aubrey Knox (CUNY, PhD Student)
    "The Regulated Body: The Grand Palais as Military Hospital in World War I"
  • Joanna Fiduccia (Reed College, Assistant Professor)
    "A Destructive Character: Alberto Giacometti’s Crisis of the Monument"
  • Hadrien Laroche (INHA, France, Philosopher and Researcher)
    "Duchamp's waste: Trauma, Violence and Aesthetics"
     
  • 11 - 11.30am – COFFEE BREAK
     
  • 11.30am - 12.45pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Jay Winter (Yale University, Emeritus Professor)
"All the Things We Cannot Hear: Silences of the Great War"

  • 12.45am – 2pm – LUNCH BREAK
     
  • 2 - 4.30pm - 3rd PANEL
    Chair: Peter Stansky (Stanford University, Emeritus Professor)
     
  • Martin Löschnigg (University of Graz, Austria, Professor)
    "‘The extreme fury of war self-multiplies’: First World War Literature and the Aesthetics of Loss"
  • Ron Ben-Tovim (Ben Gurion University, Israel, Post-Doc), Boris Shoshitaishvili (Stanford University, PhD Student)
    "Re-Enchanting the World after War: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, and the Revision of Epic"
  • Anna Abramson (MIT, Post-Doc)
    "Atmospheric Myths of The Great War"
  • Isaac Blacksin (UC Santa Cruz, PhD Student)
    Senseless Encounter, Immutable Sense: The Contradictions of Reporting War

 

  • 4.30 – 4.45pm – COFFEE BREAK
     
  • 4.45 – 6pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Professor)
"A Soldier Killed in the First World War"

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.

 

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

Conferences

(Dis)figuring War: Literature and the Arts, 1918-2018 (Day 1)

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At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 9, 2018 (Day 1)
SCHEDULE:

  • 4 – 4.30pm – OPENING REMARKS
  • 4.30 - 7pm - 1st PANEL

Chair: Russell Berman (Stanford University, Professor)

  • Greg Chase (College of the Holy Cross, Lecturer)
  • ‘Death is not an event of life’: How Wittgenstein’s War Experience Re-Shaped His Philosophy
  • Victoria Zurita (Stanford University, PhD Student)
  • Ironic prospects: hope in Jean Giono’s To the Slaughterhouse
  • André Fischer (Auburn University, Assistant Professor)
  • Politics by other means: War photography in the work of Ernst Jünger
  • Nicholas Jenkins (Stanford University, Associate Professor)

 

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.
 

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

Conferences

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds

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When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and 60 granular themes common to Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how emphasis on these topics evolves over time. For Muslim texts, we identify an inflection point in political discourse between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a juncture that historians suggest is an ideational watershed brought about by the Turkic and Mongol invaders. For Christian texts, we identify a decline in the relevance of religious appeals from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Our findings also suggest that Machiavelli’s Prince was less a turn away from religious discourse on statecraft than the culmination of centuries-long developments in European advice literature.

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The Journal of Politics
Authors
Alison McQueen
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Projecting Nature: Agostino Scilla’s Seventeenth-Century Fossil Drawings

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In 1670 the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla (1629–1700) devised an entirely new way of depicting fossils when he wrote and illustrated his Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (1670–1671), which argued that fossils were the remains of once living creatures and not mimetic stones. This essay explores the nature of Scilla’s graphic innovations, comparing his fossils drawings and Pietro Santi Bartoli’s engravings of them to earlier and contemporary images of fossils. Scilla captured the effect of time on nature by infusing his style of drawing with his philosophical understanding of what it means to see and to know. He made his drawing less rich in detail to focus on those which served his purpose. In particular, he made the first use of dotted lines in paleontological illustration to render his images dynamic theoretical interpretations rather than static depictions.

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Journal Publisher
Endeavor
Authors
Paula Findlen
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Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality

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According to most scholars, the Enlightenment was a rational awakening, a radical break from a past dominated by religion and superstition. But in Let There Be Enlightenment, Anton M. Matytsin, Dan Edelstein, and the contributors they have assembled deftly undermine this simplistic narrative. Emphasizing the ways in which religious beliefs and motivations shaped philosophical perspectives, essays in this book highlight figures and topics often overlooked in standard genealogies of the Enlightenment. The volume underscores the prominent role that religious discourses continued to play in major aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought.

The essays probe a wide range of subjects, from reformer Jan Amos Comenius’s quest for universal enlightenment to the changing meanings of the light metaphor, Quaker influences on Baruch Spinoza’s theology, and the unexpected persistence of Aristotle in the Enlightenment. Exploring the emergence of historical consciousness among Enlightenment thinkers while examining their repeated insistence on living in an enlightened age, the collection also investigates the origins and the long-term dynamics of the relationship between faith and reason.

Providing an overview of the rich spectrum of eighteenth-century culture, the authors demonstrate that religion was central to Enlightenment thought. The term "enlightenment" itself had a deeply religious connotation. Rather than revisiting the celebrated breaks between the eighteenth century and the period that preceded it, Let There Be Enlightenment reveals the unacknowledged continuities that connect the Enlightenment to its various antecedents.

Contributors: Philippe Buc, William J. Bulman, Jeffrey D. Burson, Charly Coleman, Dan Edelstein, Matthew T. Gaetano, Howard Hotson, Anton M. Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter.

 

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Books
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Journal Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Authors
Dan Edelstein
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Translating Cultures: Multilingualism and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World -- Stanford CMEMS Primary Source Symposium (Day 2 of 2)

Annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium

 

For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium

 

Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.

Symposiums

Translating Cultures: Multilingualism and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World -- Stanford CMEMS Primary Source Symposium (Day 1 of 2)

Annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium

 

For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium

 

Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.

Symposiums
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