Event
On April 16-17, 2018, the Center for Italian Studies and the Italian Studies Section of the Romance Languages Department will host "Strategies of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Europe."
See full program.
The conference aims to investigate, from trans-national and interdisciplinary perspectives, different uses and applications of the principle of authority in Europe, from Dante to Galileo. The principle of authority is usually considered by scholars as a stumbling block in intellectual history, the target against which trailblazing writers, scientists, artists and philosophers needed to address their efforts. In reality, as this conference aims to demonstrate, in the early modern period the principle of authority was often re-shaped in order to provide support precisely to those who opposed it; it could intertwine with another crucial issue, authorship. Finally, the principle of authority could also help to empower narratives both for cultural and political purposes, e.g. through forgeries or their denunciation. Over the centuries under consideration in our conference, the principle of authority was continously revised, also because the humanistic turn dramatically enlarged the number of authorities to make appeal to, extending a pantheon until then limited to very few names (namely Aristotle and Cicero).
Some of the key questions our conference asks are: Which forms could the principle of authority take in different time and contexts? How does the principle of authority serve to shape our understanding both of the past and of readings of the present? When does the appeal to the principle of authority became a mere rhetorical game? How does the principle of authority interact with the notion of authorship?
Speakers:
Teodolinda Barolini (Columbia University), Archeology of the donna gentile: Dante's Authorial Complexity
Kevin Brownlee (University of Pennsylvania), Music and the Act of Song in Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso
Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Princeton University), Authority and Authorship in Heliodorus and Cervantes
Christopher Celenza (Georgetown University), Valla, Constantine, and Authority
Roger Chartier (University of Pennsylvania), Who Is the Author? Translating Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century France and Spain: From Voltaire to Moratín
Eva Del Soldato (University of Pennsylvania), Telescopes, Sunspots, and Faith: Resuscitating Aristotle with Galileo and the Jesuits
Valeria Finucci (Duke University), At the King’s Bedside: Medical Authority at the Valois Court
Scott M. Francis (University of Pennsylvania), Advertising Authorship and Authority in Jean Lemaire de Belges
Ronald Martinez (Brown University), Epic Authority and Culture Wars: Petrarch’s Africa and the Poetics of Envy
Meredith Ray (University of Delaware), The Pious Polemicist: Authority, Authorship, and Devotion in the Works of Arcangela Tarabotti
Eileen Reeves (Princeton University), Nothing to See Here: Galileo and the Aniconic Gesture
Andrea Robiglio (KU Leuven - University of Leuven), Implications of Reverence in the Quattrocento: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Dante
Ellen Rosand (Yale University), The Authority of Authorship: Monteverdi's Incoronazione
Jane Tylus (NYU), Saying Goodbye to the Work of Art: Renaissance Leavetakings
