CMRS Center for Early Global Studies

Register to attend in person in Royce 306. Register to attend online with Zoom. Challenges to inferiorizing conceptions of women’s nature that grew in prominence in the 16th and 17th centuries should be seen not just as applications of changing philosophical conceptions of nature under the rise of mechanical philosophy, but as helping to shape those reconceptualizations. Through their polemical writings in defence of women, their rejection of histories written by men that excluded or skewed the contributions of women, in their own philosophical treatises and correspondence with male philosophers, feminists, including some feminist men, helped to shape a conception of human nature and...

This lecture, "Religious dissent and violence in Late Antiquity," is by Professor Maijastina Kahlos (Helsinki/Lisbon), part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar graduate course for Spring 2023, Persecution and Defiance: Religious Minorities in the Roman World 200-700 CE (History201B). Violence was part of the late antique life. How considerable role did violent conflicts play in Late Antiquity? At least on the level of imagery, religious violence had a considerable role. Violence occupies a great deal of space in the Christian narratives on the demise of “paganism” and in the polemics against Jews and “heretics”. I will discuss violence in words and...

CMRS-CEGS Conference Organized by Chet Van Duzer (Lazarus Project, University of Rochester) and Stephen P. McCormick (Romance Languages, Washington & Lee University). See the complete schedule at the conference website. Register to attend in person in Royce 314. Register to attend online with Zoom. Image: Naples BN MS IVE9, f. 24r Virgil Georgics zonal mappamundi

“Silver: Mutability and Materiality across Seventeenth-Century Networks of Trade and Plunder in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans” Nancy Um (Associate Director, Research and Knowledge Creation, Getty Research Institute) This talk delves into the circulation of silver in the late seventeenth century, a time when the silver streams of Potosi fueled the global maritime trade. It explores farflung oceanic networks of value, by tracing material connections between distant yet intertwined monetary systems on the Arabian Peninsula and colonial North America and by highlighting dispersed legacies of metalwork and numismatics. Register to attend in person in Royce 314. Register to attend online with Zoom.. Featured...

This lecture, “The Acts of the Christian Martyrs and Court Protocols,” is by Professor Éric Rebillard (Cornell), part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar graduate course for Spring 2023, Persecution and Defiance: Religious Minorities in the Roman World 200-700 CE (History201B). It has long been assumed that acts of martyrs derived from court protocols of their trials. Not only no such official document has ever been discovered but a good case can be made that the adoption of the protocol format by acts of martyrs is a development that is posterior to the Great Persecution. Instead of assessing the authenticity of the acts upon their...

In most of the older studies of the Renaissance, Eastern Central Europe was a “dark area” about which very little was said. We have since come a long way in understanding 15th-century culture in Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia. A thriving Renaissance movement was spreading, and its focal point was Bishop John Vitez, a generous patron of the arts and a scholar himself. This native of Slavonia and son of Croatian-speaking petty nobles brought together an international circle of artists and scholars, who would meet at his court in Oradea in today’s Romania and, later, in Esztergom in today’s Hungary. His...

Johanna Drucker (School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA) discusses her book Inventing the Alphabet (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) with Helen Deutsch (English, UCLA). Register to attend in person Royce 306. Register to attend online with Zoom.