In this talk, Nicola Suthor will discuss the long-standing literary tradition of a controversial artistic performance first demonstrated in ancient Greece and consisting of drawing a form or figure by means of a single continuous line.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Exuberant lines: On so-called ‘calligraphic’ drawings in 17th-century Italy”

From the moment of his marriage to his new consort Maria de’ Medici in 1600, Henri IV began to sanction imagery that promoted her value to the French monarchy.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: “The Paradoxical Queen in the Garden: Maria de’ Medici at Fontainebleau”

“Writing, Mobility and Distance in the Making of the Society of Jesus (1540-1573)” / "La Biblioteca Hernandina: Hernando Colón’s New Cartography of Knowledge"

... Read more about Thursday Seminar: Paul Nelles / José María Pérez Fernández

“Gothic and Anti-Gothic in Ruskin’s Renaissance” / “The Secret Lives of Books: Toward a Biography of Dante’s Divine Comedy” 

... Read more about Thursday Seminar: Jeremy Melius / Joseph Luzzi

L'argomento del intervento è la presentazione di una serie di oggetti realizzati in materiali poveri (cera, paglia, stucco ) cercando di ripercorrerne la storia e la provenienza.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: “Artigianato virtuosistico: opere d’arte nascoste create nei conventi italiani e francesi.”

In 1616, Monteverdi told Alessandro Striggio that he couldn’t imitate winds because they are not human. “Ariadne moved us because she was a woman and similarly Orpheus because he was a man.” But what if Orpheus was not a man driven by his own internal passions and creative instincts but instead was an automaton—an inanimate machine with spontaneous motion and sound creation.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: What if Orfeo was an Automaton?

A model of ‘Civic religion’, understood as municipal attempts to develop legitimacy through sacred language and devotional activities, is now widely used by historians of late medieval and renaissance Europe. In this seminar Andrews will...

Lucrezia Marinella developed an interpretation of Aristotle's claims concerning sexual difference and body temperature, and also elaborated a set of criticisms of those claims.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: The Reception of Aristotle in Lucrezia Marinella's "La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne co'diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini" (Venice, 1601)

The contention that before the late eighteenth century learned opinion held that there was only one sex, famously proposed by Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex (1990), has achieved near-canonical status in the eyes of many historians and literary scholars.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: "Translating Sex: The Long History of the 'One-Sex' Body"

This seminar is an exercise in micro-philology and global history. Through the analysis of a very short manuscript, Pier Mattia Tommasino aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European Orientalists, Italian...

In our last Thursday seminar of 2016, Justin Steinberg will explore the influence of the inquisitorial trial - the most important development in legal procedure in Western Europe - on the most important development in Western literary style:...

The seminar discusses Melchiorre Cafà’s sculpture of St Rose of Lima of 1665 in the context of the iconography of the beatification and sanctification of Rose of St Mary, 1668 and 1671. One the hand, the construction and propagation of the first...

This seminar will explore Western interaction with various cultures and communities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Spanning the period from the late 13th to the 18th century, the short presentations will focus on commercial, artistic, and religious encounters and exchanges.... Read more about Thursday Seminar "Transcultural Encounters in the Eastern Mediterranean: Commerce, Art, and Religion between East and West during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods"

During this seminar Nevra Necipoğlu will aim to reconstruct the social topography and urban development of Constantinople during the 14th and 15th centuries, based on evidence from Byzantine, Western, and Ottoman sources. Data pertaining to...