Presenters: Lino Pertile, Kirk Essary, Michael Barbezat
Date: Thursday 20 October 2016
Time: 3–5pm (afternoon tea served in Tea Room 1.13 from 2.45pm)
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33, First Floor, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia (UWA)
Registration: This event is free. Email Katrina Tap (katrina.tap@uwa.edu.au) to register by 19 October 2016.
Reading: A reading will be forwarded to you upon registration.
Abstracts:
Lino Pertile: The masterclass will discuss the Songs of Songs and its exegetical tradition in the Middle Ages and in Dante. This biblical text will be examined as one of the most important sources for lyric poetry in the late Middle Ages. This presupposes a reading of the earliest lyric poetry as a poetry of the emotions, especially love and desire and their sublimation.
Michael Barbezat: '"St Bernard's 'Little Foxes": Heresy and Reading Past Appearance in Song of Songs 2:15'. The exegetical tradition that grew around Song of Songs 2:15, “Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines,” deeply influenced medieval accounts of Christian heresy. St. Bernard in his series of sermons on the Song developed the different threats represented by the foxes, particularly how they harm the “spiritual vineyards” that signified “spiritual men.” The image of the fox helped to convey and to understand the threat of heresy and it likewise suggested what might be done with those human beings interpreted as foxes. Just as the appearance of the letter might differ from its spiritual signification, the heretic, who openly appeared as a Christian, could be identified as a fox if read well.
Kirk Essary: My paper will consider the role of allegoresis and the importance of emotions in a collection of sermons on the first three chapters of the Song of Songs by Theodore Beza (1519-1605), Calvin’s successor in Geneva.
Professor Lino Pertile is Harvard College Professor and Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Pertile is a renowned scholar on Italian literature, with a particular focus on the medieval and Renaissance periods.
He has also been Director of the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2010-15). His extensive list of publications include Dante in Context (CUP, 2015), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (CUP, 1996 and 1999) and The New Italian Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
Dr Michael D. Barbezat is an historian of medieval intellectual and cultural history, and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Meanings Program of CHE at UWA. He received his PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. His current project, ‘Burning Bodies: Community, Eschatology and Identity in the Middle Ages’, interrogates the influence of theology upon ideologies of community and processes of persecution in the Middle Ages.
Dr Kirk Essary is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Meanings Program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) at UWA. He holds an MA in Classics (Texas Tech University, 2008), an MA in Religions of Western Antiquity (Florida State University, 2010), and a PhD in Religion (Florida State University, 2014). His first book, under contract with the University of Toronto Press, examines the role of Pauline folly in conceptions of the 'Christian philosophy' in the works of Erasmus and John Calvin, with an eye to Erasmus’s influence on the sixteenth-century Protestant exegetical tradition.