Programme of Institute Events 2009-2010

Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most significant figures of the twelfth-century Renaissance; founder of several monasteries, author, composer, and mystic.  She was one of the great image-makers of the Latin tradition, working through poetry and melody as well as through the illustrations for her writings.
Our celebration of her work will give an introduction to the wide range of her achievements, with presentations on her poetry, her music and her place in the monastic traditions of memory.
The talks have been designed for a general audience, not for specialists, and will be followed by a performance of some of Hildegard's songs by the University's Schola Cantorum, accompanied by images from her manuscripts.

Programme

4.00 pm  Stephen D'Evelyn (Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition),'Hildegard's Poetry and Literary Images from the Classical Tradition'

4.30 pm  Carolyn Muessig (Theology and Religious Studies),'Remembrance of Things Past and Present in Medieval Nunneries'

5.00 pm  Emma Hornby (Music) 'Inside Hildegard's musical world.'

5.30 pm Performance by the Schola Cantorum

Followed by a wine reception

11, 12, 18, 19 May: Blackwell Bristol Lecture Series: Erika Fischer-Lichte

The prestigious annual lecture series will this year (2010) be given by Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte (F. U. Berlin) on 'Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides' "Bacchae" in a Globalizing World':

1. 11th May: 'Performing a Text or a Cultural Revolution? Richard Schechner's Dionysus in 69'

2. 12th May: 'Redefining Cultural Identities: The Bacchae of Klaus Michael Grueber and Theodoros Terzopoulos'

3. 18th May: 'Celebrating Freedom - Festivals of Liberation: The Bacchae in Warsaw, Sao Paulo and Lagos'

4. 19th May: 'Westernization, Asiatisation or Universalism? The Bacchae in  Tokyo, New Delhi, and Beijing'

Each lecture will begin at 5.15 pm, and will be followed by a drinks reception.

The Blackwell Bristol lectures are generously sponsored by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, and the lectures will be published by them in due course.

8-9 July: 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' Conference, Link Rooms, 3-5 Woodland Rd

Reception has become an important and influential approach to researching and teaching Classical literature, and it has wider implications. By emphasizing the text as object in process, a dialogue between those working on reception theory and gift-theory could help move the discussion on. Research on Classical literature and gift-giving has tended to focus less on texts than on their contexts, but investigating the composition of text as gift as it both gives meanings to and receives meanings from social contexts, artistic and religious practices, and interpretive approaches helps us understand how these texts are composed and received. The aesthetic turn in gift theory is focused by the phrase 'the gift of beauty'.
This conference is being called to explore the claim that the concept and experience of beauty are essential to understanding and creating texts. It will consider how research into texts as gifts of beauty complements the answers drawn from theological, historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches.
In Cicero’s skeptical consideration of divination, the perception and reception of natural beauty involves the compulsion to respond which is characteristic of gift-exchange: “…the order of celestial things and the beauty of the universe compel me to confess that there is some excellent and eternal Being which deserves the respect and homage of the human race.”
As well as the compulsion to reciprocate, gift-theory offers other ideas important to the perception and creation of beauty: difference and delay in reciprocity and the image as gift and return-gift, the sublime and/ or beauty as ‘saturated phenomenon’, gift as object and subject and the ambiguity of beauty, etc.

10 July: 'Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception' Conference, Link Rooms, 3-5 Woodland Rd

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw (NYU)

"In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me." (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)
Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterised by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.
This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects.

Bristol, 23-26 September 2010 

Seduction and Power (Imagines II) is the second in a series of major international and interdisciplinary conferences focusing on the reception of antiquity in the performing and visual arts.

It explores the tensions and relations of gender, sexuality, and power in reception, associated with concepts such as domination, magnetism and attraction. Such themes dominated the plots and characters of myth and drama, but also served to portray historical personages. The focus of our attention will be the stereotyping of empowered women as violent, over-sexed and dangerous (e.g. Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra) or the vilifying of "weak" men for falling prey to the seducers (e.g. Marc Anthony). Alongside these stand the typecasting of “strong” men as heroes (e.g. Spartacus) and of the weakening influence of love on them (e.g. Antinous on Hadrian) as well as the tantalising in-between, the hermaphrodite.

Seduction and Power will deconstruct these traditions and show how arts interlink to form and transmit these images.