The Group for Early Modern Studies

Membership	Graduate Certificate	Lecture Series	Awards & Travel Grants	Research & Affiliations

2008-2009 Lecture Series 

Gordon Kipling, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles

The Queen, the Reformation, and the Bible Test: Reforming the Royal Entry in England and Scotland

Date: Friday, November 7, 2008 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

In the late sixteenth century, newly-established Reformers in both London and Edinburgh were faced with the task of staging royal entry pageants for the inauguration of three queens: Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, and Anne of Denmark. The traditional royal entry ceremonial, which welcomed the queen as a type of the Virgin Mary ascending to her coronation in heaven, was abhorrent to most Reformers. How might such a ceremonial be so reformed as to suit religious tastes formed in Geneva? The solution to this problem featured, as its centerpiece, a closely-scrutinized "bible test."

Gordon Kipling is Professor of English Literature at UCLA. His most recent book, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) won both the Gründler Prize (Medieval Institute) for the best new book in Medieval Studies and the David Bevington Prize (Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society) for the best new book on medieval drama. His most recent publication, "Le Regisseur Toujours sur les planches: Gustave Cohen and the Modern Construction of the Medieval Meneur de Jeu" (Medieval English Theatre 2006), examines the curious history of the meneur de jeu, supposedly an "always onstage director." He is presently working on what he calls "a large book on a small painting," a study of Jean Fouquet's illustration of the Martyrdom of St Apollonia as a work that is properly central to understanding the fifteenth-century painter's miniatures but often improperly used as "evidence" for understanding the French medieval theatre.

Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and Director, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University

The Gender Politics of Plants in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Time: 7:30pm Location: Center for Creative Photography

Maria Sibylla Merian, one of the few women to travel in pursuit of her science in all of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, recorded how the African slave and Indian populations in Surinam, then a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the "peacock flower," as an abortifacient: "The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are . . . . They told me this themselves."

This talk investigates European bioprospecting in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century and explores on how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices among naturalists. While much literature on colonial science has focused on how knowledge is made and moved between continents and heterodox traditions, I explore here instances of the nontransfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World into Europe. In doing so, I develop a new methodological tool, “agnotology,” or the study of culturally-induced ignorances. Agnotology refocuses questions about “how we know” to include questions about what we do not know, and why not.

Professor Londa Schiebinger is winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and author of these selected publications:
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Has Feminism Changed Science? (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon Press, 1993)
The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Harvard University Press, 1989)
For more information on Professor Schiebinger, please go to www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/schiebinger

Pia Cuneo, Professor of Art History, University of Arizona

'Declaratio' and 'Delectatio': The Functions of Altarpieces in Renaissance Europe

and Therese Martin, Professor of Art History, University of Arizona

Style and Influence: Queen Isabel's Taste and Late Fifteenth-Century Spanish Art

Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

Pia F. Cuneo, Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, specializes in the art of the Northern Renaissance. Her publications include: Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany (1998); Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (edited; 2002); and "(Un)Stable Identities: Hippology and the Professionalization of Horsemanship and Scholarship in Early Modern Germany" in Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (2007). Her lecture will address the forms and functions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European altarpieces, and will thus provide a comparative context for Gallego's Retablo.

Therese Martin, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, specializes in the art and architecture of medieval Spain. Her publications include Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain (2006); Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams (edited, 2005); and "The Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain," Speculum (2005). Her lecture will address the role Isabel of Castile (died 1504) played as arbiter of taste; the queen's patronage of Hispano-Flemish works contributed to the dominance of this style in fifteenth-century Castilian paintings, among others the Retablo of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Sherry Velasco, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Gender Studies, University of Southern California

Rethinking the History of Male Pregnancy in the Age of Transgenderism and Thomas Beatie

Date: April 17, Spring 2009 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

In light of the recent news coverage of Thomas Beatie’s pregnancy and delivery, it is significant to discover that some of the recurrent strategies employed to present his story share many of the approaches to male pregnancy during the early modern period in news pamphlets and popular theater. As transgenderism has challenged the way we view reproductive technologies, the politics of masculinity and identity, and the fluid nature of sex assignment and desire, it is telling that the early modern period explored and discussed similar issues involving men’s ability to give birth in both news stories and entertainment.

Sherry Velasco researches and teaches in early modern Spanish prose and theater, early modern women’s narratives, gender studies, queer theory, and visual cultural studies. She is the author of three books: Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (University of Texas Press, 2000), and Demons, Nausea, and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús 1611-1682 (University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

2007-2008 Lecture Series 

Guido Ruggiero, Professor and Department Chair, History, University of Miami

Machiavelli in Love: Narratives of Self and Sexual Identity in the Renaissance

Date: Friday, November 9, 2007 Time: 4:00-5:30 Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

Professor Ruggiero has published on the history of gender, sex, crime, magic, science and everyday culture, primarily in Renaissance and early modern Italy. Early in his career he focused on social science history, but more recently he has taken a more interdisciplinary approach, one that melds literature, literary criticism, narrative history, microhistory and archival history. His latest publication, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (2007), provides the basis for his lecture, which will examine Machiavelli’s self-presentation as an aging lover in his letters and poems to his friends and acquaintances. At once playful and funny, passionate and passive, this self-presentation calls into question much of what we think we know about Machiavelli and at the same time presents an interesting opportunity to understand the way sexual identity was constructed, negotiated and understood in the Renaissance.

Stephen Guy-Bray, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia

Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Poems Come From

Date: Friday, November 30, 2007 Time: 4:00-5:30 Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

Professor Guy-Bray specializes in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and literary history. He is the author of Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto 2006) and Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto 2002), as well as numerous articles and book chapters, chiefly on Renaissance poetry, but also on Renaissance prose and drama. He is currently at work on a study of textual production in the Renaissance, tentatively entitled Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Poems Come From, and his lecture will examine the extent to which texts were sexualized in the Renaissance. That is, if books were paper bodies, to borrow the Duchess of Newcastle’s description of her manuscripts, did they have paper sex? What is the connection between the mechanical reproducibility of books (still new in the Renaissance) and human reproduction? And to what extent are beliefs about the purpose of sexual activity related to textual interrogations of the purpose of linguistic activity? This lecture is sponsored by contributions from the Group for Early Modern Studies, the Department of Women’s Studies and the Institute for LGBT Studies.

FRAN DOLAN, Professor, Department of English, University of California, Davis

True and Perfect Relations: Or Identifying Henry Garnet and Leticia Wigington by Their Confessions

Date: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Time: 4:00-5:30 Location: UA Museum of Art, Retablo Room

Professor Frances E. Dolan is the author of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), Whores of Babylon: Gender, Catholicism, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Cornell, 1999; paperback edition with new preface from University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Cornell, 1994). She has published numerous articles in collections and journals including differences, English Literary Renaissance, Feminist Studies, The Huntington Library Quarterly, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Modern Philology, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. She is also the editor of The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Bedford, 1996), and of five plays for the new Pelican Shakespeare. She has served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America. Professor Dolan's lecture will focus on evidentiary issues raised in and by the printed account of Garnet's trial and has a post-script on how, just after the popish plot, Leticia Wigington's proclamation of her innocence was received (and rejected) in terms of her gendered identity and the confessional identity (erroneously) ascribed to her.

GEMS Science Panel

Chris Impey, Distinguished Professor, Department of Astronomy

The History of Cosmology

George V. Coyne, S.J., Director Emeritus of the Vatican Observatory, Adjunct Professor, Department of Astronomy

Science Meets Religion: Evolution and Intelligent Design

Philip Pinto, Professor, Department of Astronomy

The History of Science from medieval times to early eighteenth-century

Jarita C. Holbrook, Assistant Research Scientist, Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology

Women in Astronomy

Date: Wednesday, April 2 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

2006-2007 Lecture Series 

Benjamin Irvin, Assistant Professor, Department of History

'Freaks,' 'Sneaks,' and Other Gendered Critiques: The Continental Congress Unmanned

Date: Tuesday, October 17 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

Professor Irvin is a specialist in U.S. History, with a particular interest in the Continental Congress and Revolutionary era. Before joining the University of Arizona, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Dr. Irvin has extensively researched the history of riots and popular violence in Revolutionary America, and is the author of "Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American LIberties, 1768-1776," which appeared in the New England Quarterly in 2003. His current project is "Crafting a Revolutionary Republic: The Continental Congress and the Origins of U.S. Civic Culture."

David Nirenberg, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

Shakespeare's Jewish Problem: The Merchant of Venice

Date: Thursday, November 2 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

Professor Nirenberg's published work focuses on social and cultural relations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. His first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princetom Univ. Press, 1996), explored some of the ways in which violence both facilitated and disrupted the co-existence of Muslim and Jewish minorities with the Christian majority in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon. Dr. Nirenberg is currently working on two research projects: the first is a study of the collapse of religious pluralism in Spain from the massacres of 1391 up to the establishment of the Inquisition; the second examines changes in medieval ideas about communication, exchange, and social relations through a cultural history of poison from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. This lecture is supported by contributions from the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, the Group for Early Modern Studies and the University of Arizona Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee.

Leslie Peirce, Silver Professor, History & Middle East and Islamic Studies, New York University

Much ado about matrimony: Women's desires, family controls, and state scrutiny in the early modern Ottoman empire

Date: Friday, March 2 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

How was it that, in an allegedly well-run polity, contracting and living a valid marriage could be such a problem? Broken engagements, unlivable marriages, and unintended bigamy were not infrequent occurrences, and even the line between "single" and "married" could sometimes seem blurred. Was it merely an interest in social stability that prompted Ottoman authorities in the sixteenth-century to tighten legal and social controls on matrimony, or was more at stake? In an attempt to answer this question, the lecture explores the nexus of women's desires, family interests, and state interventions.

2005-2006 Lecture Series

Retha Warnicke, History, Arizona State University

The Marriages of Royal Women in Early Modern England and Scotland

Date: Thursday, September 29 Time: 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

Retha Warnicke holds degrees from Indiana and Harvard Universities. Her most recent book, a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots (Routledge, 2006), will join her other major publications, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII and The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England, both published by Cambridge University Press. In her lecture for GEMS, Prof. Warnicke will discuss British queens (Mary Tudor, Elizaberth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots) and the problems of rule for a woman monarch.

Ray Herández-Durán, Art and Art History, University of New Mexico

An American Encounter: Identity Politics and History Painting in Eighteenth-Century New Spain

Date: Friday, November 4 Time: 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Retablo Room, University of Arizona Museum of Art

Ray Herández-Durán specializes in Colonial Latin America, primarily New Spain. He holds degrees in psychology, art history, and studio art from the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin, and Chicago. In addition to teaching at the University of New Mexico, he has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois (Chicago), Depaul University, and Columbia College. He will speak on marriage, gender, race, and nationalism in colonial Mexico City as represented in an anonymous eighteenth-century painting depicting the encounter between Moctezum and Cortes.

E. Philip Krider, Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

Benjamin Franklin's Science

Date: Thursday, February 16, 2006 Time: 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Retablo Room, University of Arizona Museum of Art

Philip Krider is known for his work on lightning and thunderstorm electricity. He led the group that developed the first gated, wideband magnetic direction-finders, now the basis of the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network. Prof. Krider is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meterological Society; a former editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences; and past president of the International Commission on Atmospheric Electricity. He teaches physical meteorology and atmospheric electricity here at the University of Arizona. He will lecture on the work of Benjamin Franklin in celebration of the tercentenary of his birth (January 17, 1706).

Pamela Voekel, History, University of Georgia

Holy Warriors: Rethinking Secularization in Mexico, 1750-1865

Date: Friday, April 7, 2006 Time: 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Retablo Room, University of Arizona Museum of Art

Pamela Voekel is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia where she teaches classes on the cutural, religiou, and political history of modern and colonial Latin America, particularly Mexico. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational Study of the Americas. Prof. Voekel's first book is Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Duke, 2002). She is now writing a book on piety, liberalism, and rural rebellion in nineteenth-century Mexico. Prof. Voekel will speak on religion in colonial Mexico.

2004-2005 Lecture Series

Diane Wolfthal, Associate Professor, Herberger College of Fine Arts, ASU

The Woman in the Window: Gender and Spatial Topography in Images of Brothels

Date: Tuesday, October 19 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Retablo Room, Museum of Art

Diane Wolfthal is a specialist in late medieval and early modern European Art, especially feminist and gender research and Jewish art. She has been awarded both teaching and research grants, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2002-2003), National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends (1993, 2001), an American Association of University Women Educational Foundation American Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship (1997-1998), and a Leona Beckmann Fellowship (1991-1992). This lecture is supported by contributions from the University of Arizona Art History Department, the Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee (UAMARRC), and the Women's Studies Department.

James R. Fleming, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Colby College

Critical Reflections on Climate Change and Culture: The Enlightenment Nexus

Date: Wednesday, January 19 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Deconcini Building 253

In 2003, Prof. Fleming was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for pioneering studies on the history of meteorology and climate change and for the advancement of historical work within meteorological societies." He also was awarded the Ritter Memorial Fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceonography. In 2005-2006 Professor Fleming will hold the Charles A. Lindberg Chair in Aerospace History by the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He has been a visiting scholar at MIT, Harvard, and Penn State. This lecture is co-sponsored with the University of Arizona Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

Paul Hartle, Senior Tutor and Fellow, St. Catharine's College, Cambridge

"Look with thine ears": Hearing Shakespeare's Voices in a Visual World

Date: Monday, February 14 Time: 4:30-6:00pm Location: UA Library Special Collections

Paul Hartle took his doctorate in Medieval English Literature from Cambridge, writing on Formulaicism and Alliterative Poetery (published as Hunting the Letter). As Director of Studies in English, he has taught at St. Catharine's College in Cambridge for more than twenty-five years, covering Medieval and Renaissance writing, including Shakespeare. Presently he is completing a Clarendon Press edition for Oxford University Press of the complete poetry of Charles Cotton (1630-1687). This lecture is supported by contributions from the Department of English and the Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee (UAMARRC).

John Schofield, Curator of Architecture, Museum of London

The Buildings of London Before and After the Great Fire of 1666

Date: Tuesday, March 22 Time: 4:00-5:30pm Location: Theatre Arts

John Schofield is an architectural historian and archaeologist specializing in towns, especially London in the Tudor and Renaissance periods, who has been with the Museum of London since 1974. He is the author of two comprehensive and highly-acclaimed works on London architecture: The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (1984, 3rd. ed. 1999) and Medieval London Houses (Yale 1995, rpt. 2003). This lecture is co-sponsored by the University of Arizona Department of English, the Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee (UAMARRC), and Theatre Arts.