The Medieval Studies Program’s visiting speaker series for 2024-25 is “‘Authenticity’ and the Middle Ages.” In a moment when the rapid spread of A.I. into virtually every domain—political, social, economic, creative—has fostered not only excitement but serious concern about how to define as well as preserve the “real” and “true,” it is worth remembering that anxieties about the “authentic” (Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” for 2023) from its opposite are centuries old, for the medieval era was as invested in drawing, policing, and creatively traversing the fraught borders of the bona fide as we are today. At the same time, ever since the Middle Ages came to a close, what is and is not authentically medieval has been a perennial issue for scholars of the period. The visiting speakers who will join us on campus this year will help us to consider the apparently perpetual quest for the “authentic” as both a stumbling block and an opportunity to discover what we value most in our study of the Middle Ages, and, in turn, to think about how those values resemble, but also depart from, those held by our medieval counterparts. Events in this series, generously co-sponsored by multiple campus partners, are marked with an asterisk.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5: Medieval Studies Welcome Back Happy Hour
5 pm, Memorial Union Terrace (for faculty, staff, and graduate students)
*FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6: Professor Jennifer Feltman (Art History, University of Alabama)
2 pm, Elvehjem 120: Workshop for graduate students and faculty/staff. This workshop will consist of a virtual reality (VR) demo alongside Professor Feltman’s introduction to her co-edited volume The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture (2019). For a copy of the reading, please contact Tania Kolarik (tkolarik@wisc.edu).
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture: “Is the Restoration of Notre Dame ‘Authentic’? Historicity, Technologies, Expectations”
On April 15, 2019, a terrible fire destroyed the spire and roof of Notre-Dame de Paris. Over the last five years, it has been restored thanks to a unique combination of cutting-edge technology and historical knowledge, including the expertise of artisans working in traditional trades. The new spire and roof largely replicate was lost. Does this add to or detract from the authenticity of the monument? This will no-doubt be the subject of debate once the cathedral reopens this coming December. This talk will examine how historicity, modern technologies, and public/political expectations have shaped the authenticity of the current Notre-Dame restoration.
Jennifer M. Feltman is associate professor of Medieval Art and Architecture at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on French Gothic architecture and sculpture. She is a member of the Chantier scientifique de Notre-Dame, a team of scientists and historians authorized by the French Ministry of Culture to study the fire-ravaged cathedral as it is being restored. As part of her contribution to new research on Notre-Dame, she is directing, “Notre-Dame in Color,” a project to investigate, document, and virtually recreate the vibrantly painted sculptures of the Gothic Cathedral of Paris. This work is supported by the FACE Foundation – Transatlantic Research Partnership, a program of the French Embassy in the United States, a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and the UA Collaborative Arts Initiative. She publishes widely on Gothic architecture and sculpture. Her books include the volume of essays The North Transept of Reims Cathedral: Design, Construction, and Visual Programs (Routledge, 2016), The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Sarah Thompson, and Moral Theology and the Cathedral: Sculptural Programs of the Last Judgment in France, c.1200-1240, which is forthcoming from Brepols.
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Center for European Studies, the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, the Religious Studies Program, the Digital Studies Program, and the Departments of Art, Art History, and History.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27: IRH/Medieval Studies Mashup: Professors Daniel Davies (English, University of Houston; Solmsen Fellow) Thomas Leek (World Languages and Literatures, UW–Stevens Point) and Sarah Schaefer (Art History, UW-Milwaukee, UW System Fellow)
4 pm, University Club 212: Research Presentations
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: Professor Margaret Graves (History of Art and Architecture, Brown University)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty/staff. This workshop will consist of a discussion of Professor Graves’s recent article on the conceptualization of images in the medieval Islamic world. For a copy, please contact Professor Jennifer Pruitt (jpruitt@wisc.edu).
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture: “Islamic Ceramics and Other Fictions of Capital: Fabricating the Middle East for Modern Markets”
Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the late 19th-/early 20th-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, when craft skills in the Middle East were redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project’s fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters the fabrication of physical history in the Middle East, especially ceramics, as a local form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism. The fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting suture together multiple temporalities with skill and ingenuity, creating new objects of delight for elite collectors and asking us to think again about what we value most in the artifacts of the medieval past.
Margaret Graves is the Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a primary research focus on the plastic arts of ceramic, metalwork, and stonecarving in the medieval era and the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Indiana University from 2012 before joining Brown University in 2023. She publishes on the art of the Islamic world and beyond, most recently the co-authored Ceramic Art (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, the African Cultural Studies Program, the Middle East Studies Program, and the Departments of Art, Art History, and History.
*Professor Holly A. Crocker (English, University of South Carolina) [Rescheduled Date TBD]
Workshop for graduate students and faculty/staff. For the reading, which will consist of the introduction to Professor Crocker’s award-winning monograph The Matter of Virtue, please contact Professor Lisa Cooper (lhcooper@wisc.edu).
“Eleanor Cobham’s Literary Downfalls, and the Problems of Women’s Authenticity in Premodern England”
Depicted by the 15th-century poet John Lydgate as a witch more than a decade before she was convicted of witchcraft, Eleanor Cobham, wife of the powerful Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (uncle and heir to Henry VI), reveals the challenges of women’s authenticity in late medieval and Tudor England. Every fifteenth-century English chronicle includes the story of her downfall, and fifteenth-century ballads present the vaunted Duchess as a figure whose demise confirms the dangers of Fortune. In Tudor writings, her story becomes tragic, and she remains sympathetic, even if, in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, she conjures a spirit to bring about the king’s death. By recounting Eleanor Cobham’s destruction (she was convicted of witchcraft and exiled for the remainder of her life), writers of what I argue is a unified literary/historical era grapple with the unchecked ambitions of a powerful woman. By questioning her authenticity even before she was accused or convicted of wrongdoing, literary and historical sources show how women’s ambition becomes associated with witchcraft, then treason. Her storied downfalls are a warning to other women, but they also show why women are excluded from the model of selfhood still used to authenticate modernity.
Holly A. Crocker, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and Carolina Distinguished Professor of the University of Carolina System, is a specialist in the literature and culture of medieval and early modern England, with particular expertise in the representation of gender and the role of affect in premodern literary and social constructions. She is the author of the award-winning monograph The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Penn, 2019). With Glenn Burger, she is the co-editor of the ground-breaking collection Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge, 2019), and she is also the author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (Palgrave, 2007), co-editor of Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2014), and editor of Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave, 2006). Her articles have appeared in The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Medieval Feminist Forum, New Medieval Literatures, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, and in numerous edited collections.
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Departments of English, Gender & Women’s Studies, and History.