Events
Conferences
Plenary lectures — Seminars — Plays — Films
Greek Texts and the Early Modern Stage
This seminar will take place on Thursday, 28 March 2013, in the context of the Shakespeare Association of America’s 41st Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, and will explore the impact of Greek texts on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Although recent criticism has revitalized discussions of early modern engagement with Latin literature, there has been little attention to the way English playwrights responded to Greek writers in the period. Yet a number of Greek texts circulated in early modern England, in the original language as well as in translations and adaptations, and critics are beginning to explore their consequences for the period's literary production. Greek provoked strong responses in the period for a number of reasons: its controversial associations with Erasmus, Melanchthon, Protestantism, and heresy; the spectre of democratic governance; the rebirth of interest in Galenic medicine; Greek influence on Latin literature, and last but not least, the widespread identification of Greece with the origin of tragedy and comedy. The distinctive complications surrounding the transmission of Greek texts also raise challenges for bibliographic scholarship, while the texts’ simultaneous availability in original and mediated versions calls for new approaches to transmission, reception, and intertextuality. These are some of the issues we hope to address in our discussion, but our points of departure will be short pre-circulated papers on topics including Shakespeare’s Plutarch, Homer from Heywood to Milton’s Comus, the Theban Amazons, Euripides on the early modern stage, Galenic humours, Aristotelian friendship, Plato on language, early modern emotion and the Greeks, Diogenes the Cynic, Herodotus and the Scythians.
Participants:
Jean-François Bernard (Montreal), Marie Blackman (University of Massachussets), Charlotte Coffin (Paris Est-Créteil Val de Marne), Hannah Crawforth (King’s College London), Penelope Geng (University of Southern California), Patrick Gray (Cornell), Susan Harlan (Wake Forest University), David Hershinow (Johns Hopkins), Marion Hollings (Middle Tennessee State University), Linda L. Jacobs (Francis Marion), Niamh O’Leary (Xavier), Yves Peyré (Montpellier 3), Sarah van der Laan (Indiana), Leah Whittington (Harvard).
The seminar will open for auditing by all participants in the SAA Meeting.
For further information please contact the organisers, Tania Demetriou (University of York, tania.demetriou@york.ac.uk) and Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College CUNY and the Graduate Center, tpollard@brooklyn.cuny.edu).
The Afterlife of Ovid
7 - 8 March 2013
This conference will investigate the Medieval and Renaissance reading of Ovid and his influence on poetry and painting.
Hosted by: The Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies
Organised by: Philip Hardie (Cambridge), Peter Mack (Warburg Institute) and John North (Institute of Classical Studies)
Speakers: Alessandro Barchiesi (Stanford), Hélène Casanova-Robin (Sorbonne Paris IV), Frank Coulson (Ohio State), Fátima Díez-Platas (Santiago e Compostela), Ingo Gildenhard (Durham), Philip Hardie (Cambridge), Maggie Kilgour (McGill), Gesine Manuwald (UCL), Elizabeth McGrath (Warburg), John Miller (Virginia), Victoria Moul (King’s College), Caroline Stark (Ohio Wesleyan) and Hérica Valladares (John Hopkins)
Programme and registration details on the website of the Warburg Institute
Event
Sleeping Eros at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 29–June 23, 2013
The exhibition is organised around the Metropolitan’s bronze statue Sleeping Eros, which seems to have been among the most popular ever produced in Roman Imperial times. It was also among the earliest of the ancient statues rediscovered during the Renaissance, when artists revisited the theme.
More information at netmuseum.org
Metamorphosis: Titian - 2012
A major celebration, organised by the National Gallery, of Titian’s mythological works, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
This year-long celebration will be in two stages:
1/ “Diana and Actaeon” on Tour in the UK from the National Gallery
Titian’s celebrated painting, “Diana and Actaeon” (1556-1559), which tells the story from Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, goes on tour to:
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (13 January – 26 February 2012)
• Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery (3 March – 15 April 2012)
• National Museum Cardiff (19 April – 17 June 2012)
More about the touring exhibition
More about Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon”
2/ Metamorphosis: Titian (11 July - 23 September 2012)
The painting returns to the National Gallery in time for the exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012.
The exhibition will focus on three of Titian’s Ovidian paintings: “Diana and Actaeon”, “The Death of Actaeon” (1559-1575) and “Diana and Callisto” (1556-1559), which depicts another episode involving Diana from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book II).
The idea behind the event is a creative celebration of Ovid’s poetry and Titian’s art. Leading British choreographers, dancers, poets, composers and artists have been invited to respond both to Ovid’s text and Titian’s paintings. Events include readings, showcasing set designs for three new ballets and a special performance at the Royal Opera House on 16 July 2012 that will relayed on a large screen on Trafalgar Square.
New Books
Vincenzo Cartari’s Images of the Gods of the Ancients: The First Italian Mythography. Translated and edited by John Mulryan. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-86698-444-7. 442 + xxxvi pp. 22 ills. $90, £65.
An annotated edition of the original Italian text of Cartari’s Le Imagini de i dei de gli antichi (1556) was published in 1996 by Ginetta Auzzas, Federica Martignano, Manlio Pastore Stocchi and Paola Rigo (Neri Pozza Editore). Mulryan’s edition provides the first complete English translation of this influential work, written in Italian and illustrated with images, that circulated throughout Renaissance Europe. Mulryan’s translation is illustrated with images from the Padua 1608 edition which, the title page proclaimed, was “an extremely useful work for historians, poets, painters, sculptors, and professors of polite literature”.
More on the website of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Sarah Carter. Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN: 9780230244238. 224p. £50.00.
Sarah Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by creative writers such as Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe, Lyly and Marston. She analyses the strong cultural presence of particular myths and mythic characters involving potentially ideologically deviant sexual behaviour, including sexual violence, homosexuality, hermaphroditism and incest, in the myths of Philomela, Lucrece, Ganymede, Hermaphroditus, Pygmalion, Myrrha and Adonis. Contents
Jane Kingsley-Smith. Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.
More information on the website of CUP.
Danièle Auger and Charles Delattre, eds. Mythe et fiction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010. ISBN 9782840160441. 410 p. €23. Contents.
Michelle Szkilnik, Laurence Harf-Lancner and Laurence Mathey-Maille (ed.). Ovide métamorphosé, Les lecteurs médiévaux d’Ovide. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009. Contents.