Ethics and the Sacred in Renaissance Epics

Giuseppe Mazzotta

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of Italian Language and Literature at Yale University. He has written numerous essays on every century of Itaian literary history. His books include Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy; The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron; Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge; The Worlds of Petrarch; Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment. In 2008, he published the Norton edition of Dante's Inferno.

In his lecture, Professor Mazzotta will focus on the two epics by Ariosto and Tasso, respectively, and will explore their rethinking of the most fundamental values the Renaissance produced: freedom and a new idea of the sacred. The two complex poetic visions of Ariosto and Tasso will be framed by the reconstruction of some largely neglected events of their historical period: the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1536), the Council of Trent (1545-63), the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the battle of Lepanto (1576), in order for us to reach the depths of those visions.

Sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and the department of Classics.

Mending Broken Lives: Child Soldiers and the St. Monica's Girls Tailoring Center

Sr. Rosemary Nyirumbe, Project Coordinator, St. Monica's Girls Tailoring Center

What is the impact of psychological and physical trauma to young girls abducted into slavery as child soldiers? Sr. Rosemary Nyirumbe has received international recognition for her extensive and courageous work with young girls victimized by violence and civil war in Uganda. Guerillas from the Lord's Resistance Army abducted many young girls and forced them to be soldiers and sex slaves. These young women found themselves largely outcast from society, many with young babies, and with very few practical skills to provide for themselves and their children. Sr. Monica's Tailoring Center offers the young women a refuge, in addition to counseling, education and vocational skills to help reubild their lives and work toward self-sufficiency.

Part of the Research working Group Series, The Subaltern and the Poetics of War in Africa, led by Gilbert Doho.

Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru's South Sea Metropolis

Alejandra B. Osorio

"Inventing Lima" traces the process by which a ramshackle village on the Pacific coast of South America established in the 1530s became by the seventeenth century a global metropolis of fabulous wealth and vast hinterlands, a "modern melting pot" of Europeans, Andeans, Asians, and Africans. The lecture concludes with reflections on an alternative interpretation of the early modern Spanish Empire as a polity of interdependent, competing urban centers, in place of the commonly accepted notion of empire of centers and peripheries.

Alejandra B. Osorio is Assistant Professor of History at Wellesley College. She offers courses in modern and colonial Latin America. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics and urban culture in colonial Latin America. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship, the W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship, among others. Her current work includes a collaborative project on cities in the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic Worlds.

Sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the department of History, the Ethnic Studies Program, and the Presidential Advisory Council on Minorities.