Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

02/20/2024

Join the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World on February 22 for a lecture on "The End of History? Michael Murrin, The Gunpowder Revolution and the Fate of Epic in the 16th and 17th Centuries" by Keith Sidwell (U. Calgary, CA). 5:30pm EST in RI Hall, 108.

Did epic poetry really suffer a demise after Milton, as David Quint and others have suggested? This question points to a rift between Latin and vernacular in the study of early modern literary culture, which can lead to distortions and sometimes even downright falsification. A case in point is Michael Murrin’s contention that heroic narrative moved away from the subject of war in the sixteenth century – and that this change was due to the “Gunpowder Revolution”, the introduction of cannon and muskets into an arena dominated before by hand-to-hand fighting. This lecture will test that claim by focusing largely on the Latin epic of the period, which Murrin neglects.

Keith Sidwell’s publications on early modern literature include Making Ireland Roman: Early Modern Latin Writing in Ireland (Cork University Press, 2009) and The Tipperary Hero: Dermot o’Meara’s Ormonius (1615) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols 2011). He is also the author of Reading Medieval Latin (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Lucian: Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches (Penguin Classics, 2004), Aristophanes the Democrat (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and much more…

10/12/2023

On Oct. 20, 2023, at 2:30 PM you are invited to attend the Early Modern World Colloquium "European Colonialism in the Americas: Consequences and Contemporary Responses."

While the view that knowledge is shaped by certain points of view or ways of thinking has long won acceptance in the humanities and social sciences, many early modernists continue to see themselves as detached from the circumscribed texts, peoples, or periods they study. Specialists in the cultures and histories of the Americas, however, are increasingly expressing awareness of colonialism’s ongoing and omnipresent inequities – in verbal ‘land acknowledgments’, or in other discourses or activities tangential to, or remote from, teaching and publication.

This colloquium will consider whether responses to the salient injustices arising from colonialism can or should transform traditional scholarly methods and content, and in what ways. The invited speakers are Gustavo Verdesio (University of Michigan), who has written extensively on indigenous studies and co-edited the seminal collection Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Latin America Today, and Kim Borchard (Randolph Macon College), author of Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic 1528–1715, whose work now focuses directly on contemporary concerns of tribal sovereignty.

Preliminary schedule

2.30 Introduction

3.00 Kim Borchard: Apalache? Appalachia? The Talimali Band of Apalachee Indians, Twenty-First Century Colonialism, and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty

3.40: Gustavo Verdesio: Colonial Studies with a Subalternist Inflection: How to Avoid Colonial Practices and Contribute to Present-day Indigenous Struggles

4.30 Final discussion

5.00 Reception

04/12/2023

Please join us for an Early Modern World lecture on April 26 at 5:30 PM in RI Hall, 108. Dr. Syrithe Pugh will give a talk on Human Resources: Class and Cannibalism in ‘The Hock-Cart’. Herrick's "The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home: To the Right Honourable Mildmay, Earle of Westmorland" was composed at a time when the upropertied rural laborers it depicts were facing unprecedented economic hardship—years which one historian has described as "probably the most terrible...through which the country has ever passed". It is often noted that the final lines of the poem give an unusually frank glimpse of their disempowered state, but this is normally seen as no more than a jarring note in a poem which otherwise reaffirms and celebrates the harmony of their relations with a benevolent landlord. On a closer reading, however, the unsettling close appears as merely the culmination of disturbing undercurrents running throughout the poem. Beneath the surface celebration, with its deeply conservative implications, runs a sombre critique of socioeconomic injustice and oppression, which draws on traditions of political protest stretching from the Old Testament to contemporary pamphleteers. As well as revealing the artistry with which Herrick’s deeply ambivalent poem sustains its two incompatible perspectives, the reading prompts further reflection on Herrick’s sense of his own socioeconomic position, of his relationship with his wealthy patron, and of the constraints on and purposes of his lyric composition.

02/24/2022

Please join us for the lecture by Jinah Kim (Harvard University) on "Color Coding Knowledge/Five Colors of Indian Esoteric Buddhism" at 5:30pm - 7:30pm EDT
Pembroke Hall 305
https://events.brown.edu/pembroke/event/228692

11/11/2020

Please join us today (Nov 11, 2020) at 5:30 PM for a virtual Early Modern Colloquium: Felipe Rojas and Andrew Laird • “Babel in Post-Conquest Mexico.”

While Juan Luis Vives and others contributed to debates in Europe about the identity of the original Adamic language, missionaries in sixteenth-century Mexico used the biblical story of Babel to account for, or just to convey, the daunting number of native tongues in the Americas. Interpretation of the Babel episode also influenced the Franciscans’ linguistic theory and practice as they compiled the first grammars and dictionaries of Amerindian languages.

The ruins of local pyramids and other physical traces of the remote past in post-conquest Mexico attracted the attention of European missionaries as well. Preachers used the myths of the Tower of Babel and that of the existence of primordial giants before the confusion of tongues to explain pre-Aztec material remains. Those Biblical myths were not deployed in a void, but among indigenous narratives that already accounted for those remains.

Using both textual sources and archaeological remains, Andrew Laird and Felipe Rojas will discuss the interactions between Old and New World traditions of antiquarianism.

And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech.
And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it.
And each one said to his neighbor: Come let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar:
And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. 5. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of Adam were building.
And he said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue: and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed.
Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.
And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.
Genesis 11: 1-8

Please register for this event at:
https://brown.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYocOmorz0vGdyFyF59_6Lo6C1hARzgUprd.

10/20/2020

10/20/2020

Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies here at Brown. He specializes in the economic, social, and cultural history of the Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. He was a member of the core academic team that created the exhibit at the prize-winning POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently a member of the museum’s Academic Council. He is also the author of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates (Stanford University Press, 2016), and Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Please register at https://brown.zoom.us/j/93453141525

A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Adam Teller’s new book Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) is the first study to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day.

Francesca Trivellato, Hal Cook, and Adam Teller will discuss the book and its implications not just for the history of the Jews but for how we understand the history of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire more generally.

Francesca Trivellato is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. She previously taught at Yale University and, briefly, at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari. Her publications include The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019) and The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (Yale University Press, 2009). She is a co-founder and editor of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.

Harold J. (Hal) Cook, Ph.D. University of Michigan 1981, is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age(Yale University Press, 2007) and The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), and editor of several others, most recently Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Brill, 2020). His chief research interests are in the emergence of the new medicines and sciences of early modern Europe; the co-production of science and commerce; global knowledge exchanges; and processes of translation.

Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies here at Brown. He specializes in the economic, social, and cultural history of the Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. He was a member of the core academic team that created the exhibit at the prize-winning POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently a member of the museum’s Academic Council. He is also the author of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates (Stanford University Press, 2016), and Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Upcoming Events: Wednesday, November 11
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Colloquium: Felipe Rojas and Andrew Laird
"Babel in Post-Conquest Mexico."

To register: https://brown.zoom.us/j/92570016538

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Early Modern Colloquium - Felipe Rojas and Andrew Laird. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

03/10/2020

We regret to inform you that the first Annual Lecture is postponed until further notice.

03/10/2020

Dear Friends,

We regret to inform you that the First Annual Lecture by Serge Gruzinski is postponed until further notice.

02/26/2020

On March 4, 2020 Andrés Eichmann Oehrli (UMSA in La Paz, Bolivia) will give a talk in Spanish on “La literatura perdida de Charcas colonial: el rescate de una herencia olvidada de Bolivia” [The Lost Literature of Colonial Charcas: Recovering Bolivia’s Forgotten Legacy]. Annmary Brown Memorial (21 Brown St.), 6:00 PM.

Hoy en día se sabe muy poco de la rica historia intelectual y cultural de Charcas colonial, que formó parte del Virreinato del Perú y cuyo territorio corresponde aproximadamente a la moderna Bolivia. Desde hace mucho tiempo, Andrés Eichmann está desenterrando e interpretando la literatura en español (además de algunas obras en latín) de la región, producida en los siglos XVI y XVII. En esta charla proporcionará una visión general informada de sus hallazgos y explicará el estado actual de la investigación de este campo.

Very little is known of the rich intellectual and cultural history of colonial Charcas, a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru now roughly constituting the area of modern Bolivia. For several years Andrés Eichmann has been unearthing and interpreting Spanish literature and some works in Latin from the region, which were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this talk he will provide a uniquely informed overview of his findings and explain the current state of investigation in this field.

This lecture will be given in Spanish.

Andrés Eichmann Oerhli, Professor (Catedrático) of Latin American Literature in UMSA in La Paz, Bolivia, has had visiting lectureships at the universities of Versailles in France and Navarra in Spain and is founding editor of the journal Classics Boliviana. His book publications include De Boliviana latinitate: Pensamiento y latín en Bolivia (2002); Letras humanas y divinas en la muy noble ciudad de La Plata (2005), Cancionero mariano de Charcas (2009), and a volume co-authored with Ignacio Arellano, Entremeses, loas y coloquios de Potosí (2005).

01/28/2020

Dear colleagues and friends,

Happy New 2020!

Our first lecture will be presented next week, Feb. 5 at 6:00 pm by Gary Cestaro (DePaul University in Chicago) on “Early Modern Q***r: Sons and Lovers From Virgil to Dante and Beyond.”
What did Dante know about classical pederasty? Was he concerned that the great masters he emulated—father figures—were often also unabashed lovers of young men? Most urgently, did he think of Virgil in this context? This talk will first set out some broad historical and theoretical considerations around intergenerational male-male desire from antiquity through the Renaissance with help from Freud and post-Freudian q***r theory. The subsequent focus will then be on the remarkable celebration of Virgil’s warrior-lovers Nisus and Euryalus in the first canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Gary Cestaro is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and the LGBTQ Studies Program at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and editor of the collection Q***r Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2004). He is currently working on a book entitled Dante’s Q***r Genealogies.