Events in Italian Studies
Past events
Dante in Manchester
Prof. Stephen J. Milner
Inaugural Lecture, Serena Chair of Italian, University of Manchester
Thursday 24 March, 5:15pm: Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library, Deansgate.
This lecture will examine aspects of how the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states acted as a paradigm for the self-imagination of the industrial city of Manchester and its merchant princes in the Nineteenth century. The commixture of industry, education, public works and philanthropic activity found in late medieval and Renaissance Florence an illustrious cultural model that crystallized around the late nineteenth-century cult of Dante and the fascination with Italy's Renaissance cultural heritage. This fascination lay behind Enriqueta Rylands' extensive purchasing of Dante incunables and editions for the Rylands Library and the foundation in 1906 of the Manchester Dante Society, an organization whose first meeting in the Whitworth Hall was attended by over 450 individuals. Drawing on the recently discovered archive of this society, attention will be paid to its activities from the early twentieth century through to the 1980s and the manner in which its membership represented religious, lay, and educational groups and engaged with the city at large through public events from dramatic performances to public exhibitions as well as its continued dialogue with Italy through its correspondence with librarians and cultural figures who continued to donate books and manuscripts to the John Rylands Library. As government funding for teaching and research in the humanities is currently being slashed, the lecture will meditate on Manchester's civic heritage and the importance of sustaining the vital relation between cities and learning which places the humanities at the centre of our understanding of the cultures which shape and surround us.
Can the Lower Classes Be Wise? (For the Answer, See Your Translation of the Decameron)
Professor Marilyn Migiel (Cornell)
Professor Migiel is Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell, and is currently President of the American Boccaccio Association. Her best-known work, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (University of Toronto Press, 2003) was awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize for outstanding scholarship in Italian, and has since become a classic of the gender studies approach to Boccaccio studies.
Her current research interests include exploring issues of Decameron translation and interpretation, and her seminar in Manchester will be centred on these themes. Her seminar will focus on Decameron, III, 2, and is entitled 'Can the Lower Classes Be Wise? (For the Answer, See Your Translation of the Decameron)'. Dr Guyda Armstrong and Professor Stephen Milner of the Italian department will be respondents.
Suggested advance reading
Decameron, III, 2
Marilyn Migiel, 'Wanted: Translators of the Decameron's Moral and Ethical Complexities', Heliotropia 6: 1-2 (2009).