WONDERS, MARVELS, AND MONSTERS: THE FIFTEENTH BARNARD CONFERENCE ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES

Barnard College Campus
New York City
Saturday, December 7, 1996

To register or for more information please contact Peter Platt (pplatt@SMTPLink.Barnar d.Columbia.edu) (Tel: 212-854-2112)

Wonder and the marvelous were important if unstable concepts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As idea and as figure, they appeared widely and variously in philosophy and literary criticism, visual art and debates on religious imagery, fiction and travel narratives, magical treatises and scientific writing, secular ritual and the drama. The Fifteenth Barnard Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies--Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters--will explore not only the variety of discursive practices and cultural forms that included the marvelous but also the variety of purposes for which the wonderful and the monstrous were invoked.

This conference seeks to complicate the way we look at medieval and early modern views of the marvelous and the monstrous by revealing the complexity of the attitudes toward la maraviglia. In recent years, scholarship has begun to account for the workings of the fantastic and abnormal in the discourses and visual art of these periods. It has become clear that wonder could originate from more than just horror, ignorance, and epistemological confusion. Indeed, one Italian Renaissance philosopher and critic, Francesco Patrizi, compiled a vast list of sources of the marvelous. The very multiplicity of his catalog points out the difficulty of determining any unified definition of what the marvelous was and what its effects were. Partly, of course, there was no unified vision: the marvelous was a concept full of inconsistency and variety. What links the work presented in this conference, however, is the sense that the marvelous and the monstrous can challenge, alter, and often enhance ways of knowing and perceiving the world.

REGISTRATION AND MORNING COFFEE (9:00-9:30 A.M.)

PLENARY SESSION (9:30 A.M.-12:30 A.M.)

• Richard Kieckhefer, Northwestern University, "The Necromancer as Seeker of Forbidden Knowledge."
• Walter Stephens, Dartmouth College, "Wonders of the Invisible World: Witches, Demons, and Belief, 1400-1700."
• David Summers, University of Virginia, "Pandora's Crown: On Wonder, Imitation, and Mechanism in Western Art."

LUNCH (12:30-2:00 P.M.)

FIRST AFTERNOON SESSION (2:15-3:30 P.M.)

1. MONSTROSITY CONTAINED IN LATER MEDIEVAL THOUGHT

• Joel Kaye, Barnard College, "Uninteresting Monsters: A View from the Medieval University."
• Nicholas Watson, University of Western Ontario, "The Enemy Within: Clerics, Lollards, and Other Monsters."
• Richard McCoy, City University of New York, "Within Church Bounds: John Skelton and Schism."

2. WILD THINGS: THE EDGE OF NATURE

• Anne Savage, McMaster University, "Nature against Nature as Nature in Beowulf."
• Lorraine Kochanske Stock, University of Houston, "Medieval and Modern Constructions of the 'Wild People': Monstrous, Marginal, or Mainstream?"
• Jennifer Carrell, Harvard University, "Wild Things: Monsters, Wonder, and Fiction."

3. POLITICAL AND POETIC USES OF ASTONISHMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

• Thomas Bishop, Case Western Reserve University, "Monstrous Trifles: Macbeth and the Marvelous."
• Dennis Kay, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, "A Very Wonderful Story, If It Be True: King James and the Management of Marvels."
• James Biester, Loyola University-Chicago, "Fancy's Images: Wit, the Sublime, and the Rise of Aestheticism."

SECOND AFTERNOON SESSION (4:00-5:15 P.M.)

4. WONDER AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE: RECONFIGURING THE KNOWN

• Mary Campbell, Brandeis University, "The Nude Cyclops and the Costume Book."
• Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University, "Sexual Dissonance: Early Modern Scientific Accounts of Hermaphrodites."
• Margaret Spires, Duke University, "Quand je suis all le plus avant que je puis": The Limits of Wisdom and the Constitution of the (Super) Natural in Montaigne's Essays."

5. LOOKING AT OTHERS' PLACES: MARVELS ALIEN AND DOMESTIC

• Scott Westrem, City University of New York, "Against Gog and Magog."
• Roy Mottahedeh, Harvard University, "The Marvelous in the Medieval Middle East."
• Hassan Melehy, University of Vermont, "Marveling at Rome: Du Bellay and the Space of Culture."

RECEPTION (5:30 P.M.)