David Wallace, "Writing after Catastrophe": Friday @ 4

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute invites you to a lecture by David Wallace, "Writing after Catastrophe: Conceptualizing Literary History and the Boundaries of Europe, 1348-1400." Professor Wallace will be introduced by Jonathan Hsy.

The event begins at 4 PM in the Marvin Center Ampitheatre located on the third floor of GWU's Marvin Center (800 21st St NW). More information about our distinguished speaker can be found here. The event is free and welcomes all who would like to attend.

Anton de Montoro Online Article

One of our members, Jeffrey Gorsky, recently has published an article online about the fifteenth-century Castilian converso poet Anton de Montoro. Read the full article about Montoro, a figure who has escaped scholarly work in English.

Lytton Smith on 4/3

The April 3 presentation by Lytton Smith "The Unending Medieval and the Edges of Poetry" will be held in GWU Rome Hall 771 (801 22^nd St. NW) at 4PM.

To whet your appetite, here is an early review of The All-Purpose Magical Tent, his forthcoming book of poetry.

Publishers Weekly, 1/19/09

Starred Review:
The All-Purpose Magical Tent Lytton Smith. Nightboat (SPD, dist.), $14.95 paper (80p) 978-0-9767185-0-5
Smith's debut shows imaginative ambition and rare internal variety, along with a tropism towards allegory. The title refers to the dazzling sequence— - with prose poems, single-line stanzas, couplets and other unrhymed forms— - in which an eternal circus represents all of humanity. One poem pursues “"The Tightrope Walker's Childhood”"; in another, “"there's nothing magical/ About the magical.”" Other poems are set in Neolithic villages, where the beginnings of civilization - —the first fire, the first art, the first conquests - —take place in lines of elegance and suppressed horror: “"We temper copper on the back/ of toppled menhirs, stone// columns with small brunt/ for the harrying blow.”" Still other lyric efforts pursue ecological consciousness, albeit in dream-like fashion: “"The hybrid wildlife of irises visible// in the foliage. Language, we are moving on again.”" The New York City-–based Smith does well with the language that signals his U.K. upbringing: “"in the centre/ of the sheep-field lemurs somehow” appear “at the lilt of the road This Roman road."” Yet such scenes seem anything but antiquarian: —they are fantastic and earthy, strange and inherited, classical and idiosyncratic, at once. Smith's sequences have themes and forms rather than gimmicks, relying on imagination rather than on any biographical facts. His powers ought to help this book, and its author, last. (Mar.)

Michael Wenthe @ AU

Please join us for

"The Yiddish King Arthur and Other Tales from Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Literature"


lecture by American University Professor

Michael Wenthe


Monday, January 26, 2009
9:55-11:10 a.m.
Watkins G2

rsvp to judaic@american.edu, 202-885-2423

David Wallace on 1/30

Join us on Friday, January 30th as we welcome David Wallace, the first speaker in our series of talks planned for this semester. David Wallace is Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A former president of the New Chaucer Society, amongst other notable appointments, his previous book publications as author and editor include Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Medieval Crime and Social Control (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, England: D.S. Brewer, 1985).

He is currently conceptualizing a literary history of Europe from 1348-1400. His talk on the 30th will certainly reflect his latest project's aspirations: "Writing after Catastrophe: Conceptualizing Literary History and the Boundaries of Europe, 1348-1400." The event begins at 4 PM in the Marvin Center Ampitheatre located on the third floor of GWU's Marvin Center (800 21st St NW). More information about our distinguished speaker can be found here.

Transnation History

Readers of this blog may be interested in this article from Inside Higher Ed on transnational history.

[h/t Jonathan Hsy]

GW MEMSI receives its charter

Good news!

President Steven Knapp has written to inform us that the GW Medieval and Early Modern Institute has been chartered from December 2008 to December 2012, contingent upon continued adequate funding.

Thank you, everyone, for your support ... and we look forward to the years ahead with you.