Robert Mills @ Medieval Club

MEDIEVAL CLUB OF NEW YORK

Twentieth Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture

April 9, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. (followed by reception)

Room 4406 (English Program Lounge)

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue

Robert Mills

Department of English

King’s College London

Respondent: Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University

“Vézelay, Counterpleasure, and the Sex lives of Monks: Experiences in Translation”

ABSTRACT:  Loosely inspired by Virginia Burrus’s analysis of the erotics of ancient hagiography, this excursion into twelfth-century religious sculpture engages with what might be termed the ‘counterpleasures’ of monastic enclosure. What looks on the surface to be a site of repression and regulation also potentially facilitates the displacement of pleasure into the spiritual realm – a substitution or translatio that contributes not so much to desire’s elimination as to its intensification. Using the church of Vézelay as a case study, the paper confronts this countererotic impulse as it shapes the famous sequence of nave capitals (several of which explicitly address sexual themes)

Rutgers Events

Rutgers’ Program in Medieval Studies is pleased to announce two medieval
talks next Monday, March 29:

Kristin Bliksrud Aavitsland
University of Oslo
“Visual Orders? A discussion on ornament and iconography in Romanesque art”
4:30 p.m.
Voorhees Hall Graduate Student Lounge (basement)
College Avenue Campus
(co-sponsored by the Department of Art History)

AND

Seeta Chaganti
University of California at Davis
“Figure and Ground: Elene’s Nails, Cynewulf’s Runes, and Hrabanus Maurus’s
Painted Poems”
6:00 p.m.
Murray Hall room 302
College Avenue Campus
(co-sponsored by the Department of English and Anglo-Saxon Studies)

All are welcome to both. For directions or parking information, please
contact Samantha Kelly at Samantha.kelly@rutgers.edu