CRRS

Beaches baroque

Tartini meets Hagen

For the violin virtuoso Giuseppe Tartini, Nature was the source of all truth. He devoted
his career to imitating the natural beauty of the human voice on his instrument. The lute
virtuoso Joachim Bernard Hagen is an unsung hero of the pre-classical era – a determined
musician who was able to propel the delicate lute into the new ‘sensitive style.’

Geneviève Gilardeau, violin
Lucas Harris, lute
Admission is FREE (donations accepted)

For more information, please visit: http://www.beachesbaroque.ca

Anna Makolkin, “The Echo of Babylon : ‘Semiramis’ in Voltaire and Rossini”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Information: 416-585-4468

Steven Stowell, “The Word of God and the Book of the World: Leonardo da Vinci’s Readings of St. Augustine”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

A late list of books written by Leonardo da Vinci, believed to be an inventory of his library, indicates that the artist owned at least two books by the Latin Father, Saint Augustine. Furthermore, other books in Leonardo’s library, including the popular book on morality and spirituality known as Fior di Virtù, are replete with Augustinian ideas, often explicitly attributed to the Saint. With this in mind, this paper shall reconsider several passages of Leonardo’s manuscripts in light of the Christian philosophy of Augustine. This rereading reveals that there are many close similarities between Leonardo’s thoughts on the value of painting and Augustine’s beliefs about spiritual contemplation. Also, by reading Leonardo’s discussions of the painter’s process of study along side the spiritual books in his library, it may be demonstrated that many of his precepts are deeply shaded with spiritual meaning.

Information: 416-585-4468

The Musicians in Ordinary, An Anatomy of Melancholy

Readings from Robert Burton’s great Anatomy of Melancholy with songs by John Dowland portraying suffers of that disease. We have crazy lovers who care not about the weather, ardent shepherds who want nymphs to be their loves as well as sadder sighers. Our special guest Prof. David Klausner will play Robert Burton.

Single tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website or click here for email. Phone 416 535 9956.

George Bernard (University of Southampton)

Location: Alumni Hall 112, Victoria College

“The King’s Painter: Holbein the Erasmian”

Free and open to the general public.

To Have and to Hold: Marriage in Premodern Europe (1200-1700)

Location: Victoria College, University of Toronto

An international and interdisciplinary conference This international conference seeks to advance a more nuanced understanding of marriage in early modern Europe (1200-1700) by examining how marriage was understood and practiced in the various geographical, political, religious, and cultural areas of Europe. This will include discussions of marriage rituals, customs, social expectations, not to mention diverse marriage practices, such as polygamy and concubinage, or clandestine, mystical, and same-sex marriages.

For more information, please see the conference website.

Bert Hall, “The Saiger Process, the Judgment of Jove, and Renaissance Ecology: The Debate over Silver Mining”

Join us for the first meeting of 2009/2010 of the Premodern Discussion Group at the Department of History.

The Premodern Discussion Group meets once a month to hear and discuss presentations related to any aspect of medieval and early modern history. The format is flexible depending on members’ needs; in the past the group gave very constructive feedback to papers and lectures written by members. For more information, contact Janine Rivière, Alexandra Guerson, or Vanessa McCarthy

All are welcome to come along listen, join in the discussion and come with us for a social drink afterwards.

Bert Roest (Radboud U and CRRS), “Appropriating Clare of Assisi’s Regula Prima in the Franciscan world, 15th-17th century”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Clare of Assisi’s Rule or Forma Vitae, which received papal approval in 1253, was for a very long time hidden from view. With the exception of a few monasteries, such as the Santa Chiara monastery in Naples, most Clarissan houses observed the so-called Urbanist Rule from 1263. Other houses followed the Rule approved for the Sorores Minores of Isabella of Longchamp, or even older texts issued by Cardinal Ugolino (first issued in 1219) and Innocent IV (1247). It was with the onset of the Colettine and Observant reforms in the fifteenth century, that Clare of Assisi’s Forma Vitae was rediscovered. Most friars and nuns involved considered it to be a text written by Francis, understood it to be the original rule for Franciscan women (hence the Regula Prima), and therefore saw it as a key text in the creation of an Observant religious identity. However, the men and women involved took on Clare’s Forma Vitae/Regula Prima with different agenda’s. This paper tries to shed some light on the way in which the text was appropriated both by foremen of the Franciscan Observant movement during and after the fifteenth century, in order to shape the religious lifestyle of Poor Clare monasteries under their care, and by Colettine nuns, Observant Poor Clares, and Capuchin nuns eager to create a meaningful religious life not completely on the terms of their spiritual directors.

Bert Roest, currently a lecturer of medieval history at the Radboud University, Nijmegen and a fellow of the CRRS at Toronto, has worked on Franciscan education, Mendicant historiography, Franciscan literature of religious instruction and the religious and intellectual world of the Poor Clares between the 13th and the 18th century. He is currently writing a book on the Poor Clares, in the context of which he tries to make sense of the manifold models of religious life used by the nuns and their spiritual guides, many of whom were Franciscan friars..

Information: 416-585-4468

Holger Schott Syme, “Shakespeare in the 1590s: Inconvenient Untruths”

Location: Victoria College, room 115

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

Dylan Reid (University of Toronto), “Carnival and the law in 16th century Rouen: The relationship between the Abbaye des Conards and the judicial authorities of Rouen”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Information: 416-585-4468

Ad Fontes Latin Workshop

Location: Room 304, Pratt Library, Victoria College

Introductory meeting of the Ad Fontes Latin Workshop.

All are welcome.

Information: email Emma Wilson or see the Ad Fontes home page

Emma Wilson ( University of Western Ontario ), “‘What cause / Moved the creator in his holy rest’?: The Logic of Creation at work in Milton’s Paradise Lost”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Information: 416-585-4468

In this talk Wilson will analyze the description of Creation in Milton’s //Paradise Lost// (VII) in accordance with early modern logical practices in order to see how Milton’s style makes use of the intellectual culture within which he wrote. Logic formed the bedrock of early modern pedagogy, and as such its theories and principles provided the means for understanding and ultimately for expressing one’s understanding of any given subject in that period. The overarching aim of this paper is to suggest the importance of engaging with logic as a tool of modern criticism, employing its tools and techniques to reach a fresh //verstehen//, understanding of early modern texts, their styles,
structures, and indeed profound ideas on the basis of the intellectual milieu which gave rise to them. This work is based upon the first chapter of her forthcoming monograph.

William C. Calin (University of Florida), “The French Tradition and William Dunbar: Mediocrity and Misogyny.”

The Premodern Discussion Group meets once a month to hear and discuss presentations related to any aspect of medieval and early modern history. The format is flexible depending on members’ needs; in the past the group gave very constructive feedback to papers and lectures written by members. For more information, contact Janine Rivière, Alexandra Guerson, or Vanessa McCarthy

All are welcome to come along listen, join in the discussion and come with us for a social drink afterwards.

David Fallis, “Presenting Renaissance Music on the Modern Concert Stage”

Location: Senior Common Room, Burwash Hall

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

Yongjoon Ahn (The Society of Christian Philosophy, Korea), “The Visual Art and the World of Martin Luther”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Information: 416-585-4468

The Musicians in Ordinary

SONATA VARIATA – Violin music of the 17th century

As a special treat, an instrumental concert of Christopher Verrette playing a recital of solo violin music of 17th century Italy and Germany accompanied by John Edwards on the theorbo and Sara Anne Churchill on organ and harpsichord.

Single tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website or click here for email. Phone 416 535 9956.

Renaissance Lecture Series

“The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy”

An illustrated talk by Prof. Nicholas Terpstra, Department of History (Toronto)

Renaissance Italians thought a lot about death, and particularly about helping others have a ‘good death’. This was what they called ‘the Art of Dying Well.” What art do you use when the person you are helping is about to be executed? We will look at Renaissance culture in the shadow of the scaffold, and in particular at some of the poems, paintings, and objects that Italians used in order to ease the last hours of a person facing execution.

Cost: $14 per person. Free for Bata Shoe Museum members and faculty/students at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies.

Philippa Sheppard, ” Lowering the Moral Bar: Wright’s Macbeth and Branagh’s Hamlet ”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright, who directed the notoriously graphic Romper Stomper (1992), has recently adapted Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth for the screen (2007). In an interview on the DVD, he claims that his film is no more violent than Shakespeare’s play, but this is disingenuous. By shifting the setting to present-day Melbourne, and transforming the cast from kings and thanes to drug-smuggling gang-members, he has invited the inclusion of more violence than in the original, while simultaneously excluding the possibility for real moral debate. Wright does this in three ways: one, he strips his protagonists of any redeeming characteristics; two, he shows us violent scenes that in Shakespeare’s play occur off stage, and adds new ones; and three, he cuts almost all the speeches in which Macbeth reflects on his actions and on his gradual loss of humanity.

Philippa Sheppard did her D.Phil at Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar. Her doctoral thesis, Tongues of War, considered military rhetoric in Shakespeare’s English history plays in the light of the martial handbooks published at the time. She is an instructor with the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto. Currently, she is completing a book on recent adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays to the screen. She has chapters in the volumes: Approaches to Teaching Renaissance Drama (MLA 2002), Latin American Shakespeares (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2005) and Renaissance Medievalisms (CRRS, 2009). She has also published articles in Shakespeare Bulleti, Literature/Film Quarterly, Notes & Queries and in the popular press. Her teaching interests are Renaissance and Modern Drama, and Victorian novels.

Information: 416-585-4468

The Musicians in Ordinary

Una Mora en Mi Enamora

Due to unforseen circumstances the Bata Shoe Museum has postponed this Friday’s lecture/concert, featuring Musicians in Ordinary and Professor Josiah Blackmore. A new date will be announced at a later time.

Una Mora en Mi Enamora: Concert and Talk with Musicians In Ordinary and Prof. Josiah Blackmore, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese at U of T. Enjoy an evening of Spanish songs of love for Moorish girls and of great battles against Moorish armies. With a special presentation by Prof. Josiah Blackmore.

$20 per person; $15 for students and seniors; $10 for members of the Bata Shoe Museum and Musicians In Ordinary.  Pre-registration required; call 416-979-7799 x242. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website.

David Lawrence (York University), ” The Great Yarmouth Exercise: Urban Militarism in Early Stuart England. ”

Dr. Lawrence is the author of “The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645″ (Brill 2009), an instructor in History at York University and a Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College.

The Premodern Discussion Group meets once a month to hear and discuss presentations related to any aspect of medieval and early modern history. The format is flexible depending on members’ needs; in the past the group gave very constructive feedback to papers and lectures written by members. Slots for 2010 are still open including March 15th, and April 19th. For more information, please contact Janine Rivière, Alexandra Guerson, or Vanessa McCarthy

All are welcome to come along listen, join in the discussion and come with us for a social drink afterwards.

The Musicians in Ordinary

A New Year’s Day Concert

All new repertoire from 18th century Vienna. Don’t like polkas and waltzes but looking for a concert on New Year’s Day? This is the concert for you. Music of Vivaldi, Conti and others. With guests Christopher Verrette, violin and Sara Anne Churchill, harpsichord.

Single tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website or click here for email. Phone 416 535 9956.

Brendan Cook (University of Toronto), “Erasmus and the Language of Christian Repentance”

Location: Sidney Smith Hall, Rm 2098, 100 St George St

When Erasmus of Rotterdam produced a fresh Latin translation of the New Testament, he challenged received interpretations of the central texts of the Christian tradition.  In  passages where Jesus prepares the world for the Kingdom of Heaven, Erasmus chooses a Latin verb implying that Jesus has called the world to wisdom rather than repentance.

Lecture sponsored by the Renaissance Student Association. Open to the public.

Benjamin Fisher (University of Pennsylvania), ” Christian Bibles and Jewish Readers: the New Testament and Jewish Scholarship in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jewish community was composed almost exclusively of ex-conversos, individuals whose ancestors had converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and who converted to Judaism after immigrating to Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. Within Amsterdam’s community of New Jews, Biblical studies extended beyond engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Even after converting to Judaism, Amsterdam’s ex-conversos continued to see the New Testament as an important text to be read and interpreted. Christian Scriptures were used by ex-conversos in polemical writings, to reflect upon their experiences as former Christians, and to articulate their new relationship to Judaism. Among Amsterdam’s Jewish readers of Christian Scriptures, none was more assiduous than Saul Levi Morteira, one of Amsterdam’s leading rabbis. This presentation traces Morteira’s changing attitudes toward the Christian Scriptures over a period of forty years, and argues that Morteira’s immersion in Dutch Protestant society, his encounter with the representatives of numerous Protestant movements, and his gradual mastery of key Protestant texts led him to rethink his attitudes toward Christianity and the New Testament. Morteira became aware of the degree to which certain Christians in the Netherlands had distanced themselves from Catholicism, became convinced that they were on the verge of accepting Jewish beliefs and practices, and sought to encourage them further down this Judaic road. Morteira intended his writings to be read thoughtfully by an audience of Jews and Christians alike. This required a sophisticated, meticulous reading of Christian Scripture that was unlike any previous Jewish work of biblical scholarship.

Information: 416-585-4468

Mario Biagioli ( History of Science, Harvard), “Witnessing in Science and Law: Kepler, Galileo, and the Telescope ”

Location: Private Dining Room at Burwash Hall (Victoria University)

Co-sponsored by the CRRS, the Faculty of Law, and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science.

The role of witnessing in science and natural philosophy has been a prominent research question in science studies and history of science in the last two decades. Analyses of modern scenarios have focused primarily on the role of scientists and scientific evidence in court proceedings, while historians of early modern science have mostly looked at the borrowing of legal witnessing practices and standards of evidence into natural philosophy. In this paper I use the starkly different roles of eyewitnessing in Kepler’s and Galileo’s work on observational and telescopic astronomy as a tool to revisit discussions about the place of witnessing in sociological narratives about knowledge making and, more generally, about the relation between law and early modern science.

Antonio Ricci (York University), “Making a Classic: Printers and Editors of Orlando Furioso in Renaissance Venice”

Location: Senior Common Room, Burwash Hall

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

Patricia Demers (University of Alberta), “Found in Translation”

Location: Old Victoria College, Alumni Hall

Proof of the ultimate alchemy of language, translation is an ideal means of apprehending the amplitude, fineness, and subtleties of early modern religious discourse. By investigating the tantalizing borderland between translation and creation, fidelity and experimentation, this talk views sixteenth-century women’s translations as vehicles of self-expression. It considers how this work, so perilous and so strictly monitored, enabled them to be part of public religious life.

The CRRS’s 2009 Distinguished Visiting Scholar. A Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Patricia Demers is the author or editor of eleven books and over fifty articles. Her research interests range widely – from early modern women’s writing, Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, feminist hermeneutics, and children’s literature to contemporary Canadian women’s writing. She is the recipient of a Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a McCalla Research Professorship. In September 2005 she was awarded the University Cup, the University of Alberta’s highest recognition for outstanding teaching and research. In 2006, she was appointed University Professor. She has also served as the first female president of the Royal Society of Canada.

Patricia Demers (University of Alberta)

Location: Old Victoria College, Alumni Hall

“Renaissance Firsts”

Despite the availability of digitized texts, the explosion of interest in early modern women writers, and our own preoccupation with celebrity, many early modern women who were real path-breakers remain relatively unknown. This talk explores women’s innovative contributions to biblical pastiche, dream vision writing, book and page design, devotional poetry, and cross-Channel family networks.

The CRRS’s 2009 Distinguished Visiting Scholar. A Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Patricia Demers is the author or editor of eleven books and over fifty articles. Her research interests range widely – from early modern women’s writing, Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, feminist hermeneutics, and children’s literature to contemporary Canadian women’s writing. She is the recipient of a Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a McCalla Research Professorship. In September 2005 she was awarded the University Cup, the University of Alberta’s highest recognition for outstanding teaching and research. In 2006, she was appointed University Professor. She has also served as the first female president of the Royal Society of Canada.

Renaissance Lecture & Music Series

Carnival in Renaissance Venice: Party Music of the 16th century.

Concert by the Toronto Consort.

Renaissance Italy celebrated Carnival in style, with elaborate processions, masquerades, songs and parties being a feature of life particularly in Florence and Venice in the days leading up to Mardi gras. The Toronto Consort, Canada’s leading ensemble specializing in Renaissance music, performs a delectable selection of carnival songs and dances from the early 16th century, with voices, lute, recorder, hurdy-gurdy, harpsichord and viola da gamba.

8-9 PM; DOORS OPEN AT 7:30 PM

$25 per person; $20 for students and seniors; $10 for members of the Bata Shoe Museum Pre-registration required; call 416-979-7799 x242

See the full program.

Susan Rosa (Northeastern Illinois University), “The Conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden (1654) and the Rhetoric of Catholic Universalism”

Location: Victoria College, room 115

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

The Conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden is an event that can be examined in many contexts. In this presentation, Susan Rosa construes it as a crucial episode – even as a high point – in the shifting fortunes of Catholic universalism in the seventeenth century. Through close readings of hitherto neglected sources, she traces the queen’s interest in reunion of the Christian churches, and show how and why, like many other converts of high social status , Queen Christina rejected ecumenical conceptions of Christian unity in favor of the Catholic one. Rosa shows that questions of authority and certainty in epistemology, politics, and religion, and widely-shared conceptions of the nature of truth led potential converts of the mid-century toward the Catholic option, and suggest reasons why that choice became less attractive for the next generation. Finally, she follows the discursive trajectory of Catholic universalism into the eighteenth century, when its component principles experienced a revival as secularized cultural ideals.

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

The Toronto Chamber Choir

Location: Vic Chapel

Concert in Honour of William R. Bowen

Conductor: Mark Vuorinen.

Annual concert of Renaissance music in honour of former director William R. Bowen, under whose directorship the CRRS expanded in many new directions.

Admission Free (Donations to the Bowen Fund welcome)

Madeline Bassnett

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

“Cultivating the nation: Protestant husbandry and the Sidney-Pembroke Psalms”

As part of a larger project that examines Elizabethan representations of the environmental effects of war, this paper will focus particularly on sixteenth-century relationships to the land as depicted in husbandry manuals and the psalm translations by Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Husbandry manuals, while providing practical instruction, also offer moral and ethical guidelines to landowners and agricultural workers-while also identifying the latter as the “valyauntest and woorthyest Souldiers” (Conrad Heresbach, Foure Bookes of Husbandry, 5v). The rich agricultural metaphors of the psalms correspondingly depict the rewards of godly behaviour as nutritious bounty springing from the vital and responsive body of the land. Underpinned by a militant English Protestantism, the Sidney-Pembroke psalms, both a literary translation and a re-imagining of a central book of Protestant liturgy, elucidate this agricultural plenty as a reflection of God’s favour to the nation. As this paper will argue, the psalms establish good stewardship as an act that confirms God’s sanction of England’s political and religious policies, ultimately justifying military campaigns through the rhetoric of regeneration.

Madeline Bassnett is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her current research interests include early modern instructional manuals, women’s writing, and Elizabethan prose fiction.

Information: 416-585-4468

The Musicians in Ordinary

O Dolce Nocte

Hallie and John are joined by Bud Roach and Kevin Skelton, tenors, for a for a sweet night of Italian madrigals from the 1500′s.

Single tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website or click here for email. Phone 416 535 9956.

Renaissance Lecture & Music Series

Illustrated Talk by Wendy Sepponen, Department of Fine Arts, University of Toronto.

Footwear serves as a valuable entry point into reconsidering and broadening perceptions of Western-focused fashion dialogues. Such reexaminations can be applied equally to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This lecture examines footwear from Renaissance, Baroque, and contemporary Europe in order to better understand the global avenues of infl uence and exchange that has resulted in truly remarkable footwear.

2-3 PM

$14 per person Free for Bata Shoe Museum members and faculty/students at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, UofT Pre-registration recommended: call 416.979.7799 x242

See full program for Renaissance Lecture & Music Series.

Jennifer Roberts-Smith (University of Waterloo)

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

” Staging the Chester Cycle in 2010: the problematics of Protestants, protagonists, and
playing-places ”

Jennifer Roberts-Smith works both as a theatre artist and as a theatre scholar, and often both at once. Most of her current research is connected to the Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre (CPSET/PLS), a multi-university project based at the University of Toronto. For Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men, CPSET’s inaugural research-performance experiment, Jennifer directed The True Tragedy of Richard the Third. During her current tenure as a Fellow of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, she is editing TTR3 for Queen’s Men Editions (Internet Shakespeare Editions). For CPSET’s next major experiment, a production of the entire Chester Cycle in May 2010, Jennifer will direct the Herod Play and conduct a historiographical study of the methodologies and theoretical approaches of more than 300 contributing researchers and students. In addition to her work on early English theatre, Jennifer is developing a digital system for visualizing theatrical text and continues to write about early modern English metrics. She has published on Elizabethan metrical vocabularies (/CHWP/ 2003) and on inn-playing in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England (/Early Theatre/ 2007).

Information: 416-585-4468

Katie Larson (University of Toronto)

Location: Senior Common Room, Burwash Hall

“‘Can thes fond pleasures move?’: Mary Wroth and the Rhetoric of  Song”

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

Mary Wroth’s writings reveal a fascination with the affective power of song and its relationship to gendered spaces of textual circulation and musical performance. Songs figure prominently among the narrative practices associated with Wroth’s female protagonists as they struggle to articulate their passions within Urania’s gardens and chambers. The songs scattered throughout Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, meanwhile, play a crucial rhetorical role in shaping our interpretation of the two very different versions of Wroth’s sonnet sequence. Wroth, herself a skilled lutenist and singer, was certainly aware of music’s capacity to move audiences. If, as writers like Henry Peacham suggest, music functioned as the most potent form of rhetoric, then music that incorporated or relied on text became doubly powerful. Wroth’s songs further complicate this relationship between music and text by foregrounding the extent to which space and setting shape a song’s affective impact. Focusing on the interplay between the songs that pervade Wroth’s romance and sonnet sequence and the textual and social spaces in which these songs are positioned and performed, this paper will argue that song emerges as a situated and often gendered rhetorical practice that assumes particular discursive significance for Wroth’s female protagonists.

Katherine R. Larson is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests centre on early modern literature and culture, women’s writing, language and gender, and the function of music in literature.

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

Eleonora Canepari, “Local power and urban space in Renaissance Rome”

Location: Room 205, Northrop Frye Hall

TBA

Daniele Maira (Yale University

Location: Senior Common Room, Burwash Hall

” La dixième muse: pétrarquisme éditorial et transferts culturels ”

A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).

Information: e-mail Dr. Stephanie Treloar
Tea & coffee will be served at 4:00 p.m.; the talk will begin at 4:15 p.m

31 March, 4-6 PM and 1 April, 4-6 pm

2010 McLaughlin Lecture in Medieval Law

The Musicians in Ordinary

Song of the Americas

Hallie and John perform songs and guitar solos from 18th and early 19th centuries from Brazil, Mexico and the young United States of America.

Single tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. For more information check the Musicians in Ordinary’s website or click here for email. Phone 416 535 9956.

Renaissance Lecture & Music Series

Illustrated talk by Professor Jacqueline Murray, Department of History, University of Guelph.

The notion of a “Renaissance Man” is commonly thought to embody the breadth of interests and excellence embodied by da Vinci or Michelangelo, men who excelled in artistic achievement, science, poetry or philosophy. These “great men” of the Renaissance were the exception. The majority of men lived according to more mundane standards, but how they expressed their masculinity and male identity was of critical importance. This talk will explore how masculinity was defi ned and expressed among different groups of men: rich and poor, young and old, the most exulted of men and those on society’s margins.

2-3 PM

$14 per person. Free for Bata Shoe Museum members and faculty/students at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, U of T.

Pre-registration recommended: call 416.979.7799 x242

See full program for Renaissance Lecture & Music Series.

Canada Milton Seminar

Location: Victoria College, University of Toronto

The Sixth Annual Canada Milton Seminar.
With keynote speakers David Quint (Yale University), Nicholas McDowell (University of Exeter),and Maggie Kilgour (McGill University).

Other speakers include Katie Larson (Toronto), Thomas Roebuck (Oxford), Chris Warren (Chicago), and Maria Zytaruk (Calgary)

See the flyer or download the registration form.

‘Making Publics’ Research Project

Communicating Culture in Early Modern Europe

chaired by Dr. Brian Cowan, Canada Research Chair in British History, McGill University, and Dr. Robert Tittler, ‘Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus’, Concordia University

This seminar will explore the issues of cultural networks and the translation of styles, conventions, and tastes across geographic and temporal boundaries. We seek to observe both intra-regional and trans-regional experiences of cultural communication: how such patterns developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their influence thereafter, and the tensions between traditional (folkloric and/or ‘vernacular’), local, and regional forms of cultural expression on the one hand and the more formal, or ‘polite’, and widespread forms on the other.

Applicants will come from any field relevant to the subject and will be at the thesis stage of a doctoral programme or hold recent PhDs. All travel and living expenses will be defrayed by the Project. Applications will include a description of the applicants’ work relative to the project, a current C.V., and two letters of recommendation. All should be sent to Dr. Marlene Eberhart, project Co-ordinator, Making Publics no later than 15 December, 2009. Results will be announced in January, 2010.

22-24 May, Non-CRRS Evenet

Renaissance Lecture & Music Series

Illustrated talk by Professor Nicholas Terpstra, Department of History, University of Toronto.

What was killing the girls in the Florentine orphanage known as the House of Compassion? Dozens of Florentine women pooled their resources to open the Home in 1554. It soon grew to become the largest girls’ shelter in Florence and the most innovative orphanage in Renaissance Italy. Yet this safe house was also a dangerous place. Within weeks of opening, girls were dying there by the dozens. Was it forced labour that killed them? Prostitution or sexual abuse? Or possibly even syphilis? Where were the authorities?

2-3 PM

$14 per person. Free for Bata Shoe Museum members and faculty/students at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, U of T.

Pre-registration recommended: call 416.979.7799 x242

See full program for Renaissance Lecture & Music Series.