California Medieval History Seminar, Spring 2023

Royce 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

The California Medieval History Seminar fosters intercampus networking and intellectual exchange by  acquainting participants with historical research in medieval studies currently underway in California. The seminar meets quarterly to discuss pre-distributed research papers (two by faculty members, two by graduate students). During AY 2022-23, the seminar will meet on October 29, February 11, and May 20. Presentations are organized by the seminar’s director, Professor Piotr Górecki (History, UC Riverside). The following papers will be discussed at the seminar: “The Paranoid Style in Frankish Crusading” Jay Rubenstein (University of Southern California) “Oath-Taking and the Performance of Urban Customary Law” Esther Liberman...

Fall 2023 Research Seminar Public Lecture – Professor Wolfgang Mueller (Fordham University)

UCLA Department of English, Kaplan Hall 193 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

As part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar graduate course for Fall 2023, Money Matters: Between Antiquity and the Enlightenment (ca. 600-1600), guest lecturer, Wolfgang Mueller (Fordham University) will share about his research that focuses on written norms and laws of the European West between 500 and 1500 CE.  He is author of several scholarly monographs, including The Criminalization of Abortion. Its Origins in Medieval Law (Cornell, 2012) and Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517 (Cambridge UP, 2021). “Money” is a Fall 2023 graduate course designated as a CMRS Center for Early Global Studies Research Seminar which provides funding for...

The Western Mediterranean and the Global Middle Ages

Royce 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, United States

CMRS-CEGS/AARHMS Symposium As part of its thematic series of co-sponsored sessions this academic year on “Iberian History as Global History” at major international conferences, the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS) has partnered with UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CEGS) to host this symposium on The Western Mediterranean and the Global Middle Ages. This symposium explores the possibilities and complexities of conceptualizing the early history of the Western Mediterranean in a global framework, an endeavor that resonates deeply with the mission and research axes of CMRS CEGS and is fundamental to the research, teaching, and...

Fall 2023 Research Seminar Public Lecture – Professor Craig Muldrew (Cambridge, UK)

UCLA Department of English, Kaplan Hall 193 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

As part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar graduate course for Fall 2023, Money Matters: Between Antiquity and the Enlightenment (ca. 600-1600), guest lecturer, Professor Craig Muldrew (Cambridge, UK) will share about his expertise in British Social and Economic History from 1500 to 1800. Craig Muldrew's research mainly focuses on the investigation of the economic and social role of trust in the development of the market economy in England between 1500-1700, and the living standards and work of agricultural laborer's in the early modern English economy. He has written articles in the field of legal history concerning debt litigation and its...

The Mediterranean Seminar Winter Workshop 2024, Intermediaries, Middle Grounds, Middle Sea

Royce 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, United States

As the theater of engagement and integration of communities originating on the shores or from the hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean region served as a dynamic center of interaction and exchange from Antiquity through early modernity. Even as it began to lose political and economic centrality, it has remained a zone of engagement of diverse peoples and cultures into the Modern era. This engagement is both the product and the catalyst of continuous dialectical processes of translation, transculturation, colonization, and syncretism across the gamut of human experience and expression: in art, literature, language, music, religion, media, material...

Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture, Guest Speaker: Ilse Sturkenboom

"On the Introduction of Chinese Decorated Paper to Iran and How it Revolutionized Manuscript Production in the Islamic World" Guest speaker: Ilse Sturkenboom (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) The fifteenth-century introduction of long sheets of brightly colored and gold-embellished paper from Ming China to Iran provided book artists with a range of new possibilities in the production of luxurious and often royally commissioned manuscripts. Colored on both sides and boasting extensive gold decoration in the form of flecks, sprinkles and whole compositions of landscape designs, various plants and flower-and-bird motives, these papers allowed for texts to be written on a completely decorated carrier...

California Medieval Seminar (Winter 2024)

Royce 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and substantive, feedback. Calls for presenters are circulated via e-mail from the Center approximately two months prior to each meeting and papers are accepted on a first-come basis. We encourage prospective presenters to attend the seminar prior to proposing a paper for discussion.  Funding may be...

Will and Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture

Copy of Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (Complete map of the world), 1674, Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. held at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Image stitched together from individual images of each frame of the map screen. Guest Speaker: S.E. Kile (University of Michigan) "Was the World Early Modern?: Telescopes, Surgery, and Print Media in China, ca. 1658" In the middle of the seventeenth century, the transition from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing quickly made news around the globe, and its drama played out on stages from Japan to the Netherlands. Just a few decades earlier, Matteo Ricci had produced...

Hammer Art History Lecture

Royce Hall 314 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, United States

“Patterns of Anomaly in African Ivories” Abstract:  This lecture takes up questions in African Medieval to Early Modern ivory imagery and sources framed in part around a set of seemingly anomalous motifs that address how power and ivory have mutually shaped each other both in Africa (particularly Nigeria) and in European contexts. Among the works taken up are images of elephants in Nigerian Nok and Ife art, the prominence of sirens on Benin and Owo Yoruba ivories, the cultural primacy of ivory spoons, the “missing” Durer saltcellar (now possibly found?), and the legacies of colonial era impact of pianos and ivory...

In Distant Places Among Alien People: Slavery, Friendship, and Tatar-Venetian Relations in the 15th Century

Dodd Hall 275 390 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Guest Speaker: Hannah Barker (Arizona State University) In 1455, the Venetian patrician Giosafat Barbaro encountered an old friend in surprising circumstances. As a young merchant in the Black Sea port of Tana, Barbaro had met and befriended a local Tatar notable named Chebechzi. At the end of his time in Tana, Barbaro returned home expecting never to see Chebechzi again. He certainly did not expect to find him enslaved in a Venetian wine shop ten years later. At the moment, Barbaro acted immediately to assert Chebechzi’s freedom and help him return home. Later in life, Barbaro also wrote a memoir...