Month: January 2023
MONDAY, January 23rd, Sarah-Gray Lesley, “Spenser’s ‘Monsterous Dyeats’: Allegorical Bodies and Borders in The Legend of Justice”
Please join the Renaissance Workshop
Monday, January 23rd, when
Sarah-Gray Lesley
PhD Student, University of Chicago
presents the paper
MONDAY, January 23rd
5:00-6:30pm
Rosenwald 301 (Note the room change)
The paper, to be read in advance, has been distributed to the Renaissance Workshop mailing list and is available on our website here under the password “invidia.” Light refreshments will be served.
If you would like to join our mailing list, please click here. We are committed to making our workshop accessible to all persons. Questions, requests, and concerns should be directed to Andrés Irigoyen (airigoyen@uchicago.edu) or Sarah-Gray Lesley (sglesley@uchicago.edu).
Image: Jacques Callot. Invidia (1619), etching/engraving. Providence, RI: RISD Museum.
Renaissance Workshop Winter 2023 Schedule
Dear Colleagues,
Happy New Year! We are happy to announce the Renaissance Workshop’s Winter 2023 schedule, which can be found in full below. The workshop will be held on Mondays from 5:00-6:30pm, BUT PLEASE NOTE that our meeting room is Rosenwald 301. Our usual room, Rosenwald 405, is booked for a class during our workshop time this Winter. Should you like to join a meeting via Zoom, please email either Sarah-Gray Lesley (sglesley@uchicago.edu) or Andrés Irigoyen (airigoyen@uchicago.edu) for accommodation. In the event that the meeting switches to a virtual setting, we will notify you in the announcement a week in advance of the event.
Materials for the workshop, as well as the schedule and any updates, are available on our website. The Renaissance Workshop is free and open to the public, and we encourage those new to the workshop to attend.
We look forward to seeing you on Monday, January 9th when Timothy Harrison (Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago) and Jane Mikkelson (Lecturer & Associate Research Scholar of Classical Persian at Yale University) will present the paper “‘Worlds Together Shined’: Bidel, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison.”
Best,
Sarah-Gray and Andrés
WINTER 2023
January 9th | Jane Mikkelson
Lecturer & Associate Research Scholar of Classical Persian at Yale University
and Timothy Harrison
Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago
present the paper
“‘Worlds Together Shined’: Bidel, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison”
*This event is co-sponsored with the Early Modern and Mediterranean Worlds Workshop*
January 23rd | Sarah-Gray Lesley
PhD Student, University of Chicago
“Spenser’s ‘Monsterous Dyeats’: Allegorical Bodies and Borders in The Legend of Justice”
February 13th | Alexa Herlands
PhD Student, University of Chicago
Title TBD
February 27th | Alyssa Mule
PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
“Rewriting Humanism and Proto-Feminism in the Middle English Translation of De mulieribus claris”
*This event is co-sponsored with the Medieval Workshop*
Protected: Materials for Mikkelson and Harrison Workshop
MONDAY, January 9th, Jane Mikkelson and Timothy Harrison, “‘Worlds Together Shined’: Bidel, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison”
If you would like to join our mailing list, please click here. We are committed to making our workshop accessible to all persons. Questions, requests, and concerns should be directed to Andrés Irigoyen (airigoyen@uchicago.edu) or Sarah-Gray Lesley (sglesley@uchicago.edu).
Abstract from the Authors
At the same moment in two distant parts of the globe, two poets who did not know of each
other’s existence both confronted an ancient philosophical question—how does human
knowledge begin?—by imaginatively reconstructing their own originary experiences. In poetry
and autobiographical prose, Thomas Traherne (in England) and Bidel Dehlavi (in India) describe
being in the womb, birth, nursing, first thoughts. Deeply original in their own contexts yet
strikingly similar to each other, these accounts demand comparison. But what kind of
comparison? In this essay, we rehearse several possible methodologies, and argue that Bidel and
Traherne belong to a shared intellectual world shaped by the philosophy of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna),
whose influential ideas about self-awareness refracted throughout premodern Afro-Eurasia. By
assembling texts from non-proximate traditions and comparing them collaboratively, we attempt
to dislodge the siloed ways of thinking that have come to structure the study of early modern
literatures.