CMRS Lecture Series Podcast
1) Jane Burns - Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from Medieval France
Mélusine, a fourteenth-century snake-tailed woman who can fly, derives in part from medieval narrative traditions of fairies and mermaids. It is her excessive wealth, however, that strikes “wonder” an...Show More
Jane Burns - Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from Medieval France
1:04:29 | Nov 30th, 2016
2) Sam Barrett, The Sites and Sounds of Early Medieval Latin Song
The music of early medieval Latin song has hitherto been known to only a handful of specialists. Notations survive in manuscripts from ecclesiastical centres across the Frankish kingdoms from the nint...Show More
3) Frances Dolan, "Compost / Compositions"
As part of an explosion of agricultural experimentation and innovation in seventeenth-century England, many “improvers” turned to composting as both an “ancient practice” and “newly born.” The compost...Show More
4) Kathleen Donegan, Things That Seemed Incredible: The Starving Time at Jamestown
In the desperate winter of 1610, mass starvation reduced the settler population of colonial Jamestown from 500 to 60. This paper uses the specter of starvation at Jamestown to explore a larger and ong...Show More
Kathleen Donegan, Things That Seemed Incredible: The Starving Time at Jamestown
1:11:44 | Mar 28th, 2016
5) Renee Trilling, "Potions and Prayers: The Subject of Healing in Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts"
In texts like the Lacnunga and the Leechbooks, Anglo-Saxon healers struggle to merge two extremely powerful and largely incommensurate ideologies, with the result that detailed herbal remedies, charms...Show More
Renee Trilling, "Potions and Prayers: The Subject of Healing in Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts"
1:03:06 | Mar 28th, 2016
6) Karma Lochrie, “Utopia Un-Mored: Reading across Historical Divides”
It is standard to read Thomas More’s “Utopia” in terms of its classical roots in Plato’s Republic, and at the same time, to treat it as an inaugural text, that is, as the text that marks the beginning...Show More
7) Joan Fitzpatrick, The Hungry Courtier: Gourmets and Ascetics in Early Modern Drama
This paper will trace attitudes to excessive consumption and fasting in the early modern period. By considering the church line on gluttony and fasting and how such excesses were regarded in sixteenth...Show More
Joan Fitzpatrick, The Hungry Courtier: Gourmets and Ascetics in Early Modern Drama
1:21:40 | Mar 28th, 2016
8) The Confused Greenies of Player's Patchwork Theater Company, "Buckets of Ducats"
A one-act commedia dell'arte performance
The Confused Greenies of Player's Patchwork Theater Company, "Buckets of Ducats"
28:24 | Mar 28th, 2016
9) Timothy McGee, Ceremonies and the Arts in Late 15th Century Florence
The arrival of Girolomo Savonarola in 1490 had serious implications for the traditional public ceremonies in Florence as well as the practices of music and art. The elaborate public ceremonial events ...Show More
10) Robert Henke, "Shakespeare and the Commedia dell' Arte"
Especially if one views the “commedia dell’arte” in its relationship to Italian scripted comedy of the day, Shakespeare thoroughly absorbed the Italian system of masks. Despite the fact that Italian p...Show More