Abstract: The newness of the recently discovered Americas caused problems for sixteenth-century thinkers and writers. It gave rise to hopes for reform and renovation of the Roman church and to millennial expectations. In the face of Protestant Reformation and schism, however, the newness of the New World and of its native inhabitants needed to be explained away: there was to be nothing new under the sun. But America could also prove to be too old, too, and challenge Biblical authority. In this lecture, Professor David Quint will focus primarily on Italy: Columbus himself, Egidio da Viterbo, Francesco Guicciardini, Girolamo Fracastoro, Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno, thinking himself a new Columbus of outer space, proposed a sweeping reform of both the heavens and earth.
Bio: David Quint is Sterling Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has studied literature written in Italian, English, French, Latin, Spanish, and, every so often, literature in Portuguese and German. Dr. Quint taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University for a decade and half before taking up teaching at Yale in both the Comparative Literature and English departments. At the graduate level, he has offered courses on The European Epic Tradition, Ariosto and Cervantes, Milton, Montaigne, Aristocracy and Literature, Non-Shakespearean Drama, English Renaissance Lyric Poetry, Spenser. Dr. Quint has regularly taught the core course of the interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies program, The Renaissance in Italy. He is primarily interested in poetry, but has also taught and written about the novel, the essay, and drama. Dr. Quint’s work emphasizes how literary form and the internal history of genres can be related to historical change and evolving social formations. His books include: Epic and Empire (1993), Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy (1998), Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote(2003), Inside Paradise Lost (2014).
Tea will be served at 4:00pm, and the lecture will begin at 4:15pm.
