Patricia
Clare Ingham (Dept of English, University of Indiana)
The Rossell Hope
Robbins Memorial Lecture: “New Worlds—Tracking an Enchanted History”
March 27, 2015
7.30 p.m.
English
Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)
The year 1492 stands first
among the markers of historical rupture, as the harbinger of a New Humanist
Age, one enthusiastic about novelty (Grafton). According to this view, data
mined from a “New World” revolutionized a bookish commitment to old
geographies, and a medieval culture enamored with the power of tradition. This
talk, drawn from the culminating chapter of my forthcoming book, The
Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation, argues instead that the
apparent opposition between “tradition” and “novelty” needs to be rethought,
and that the case of Columbus can sharpen this rethinking. Early editions of
the Letters of Columbus (such as those held at IU’s Lilly Library) demonstrate
what it means that Columbus’s “New World” claims depended on a diverse set of
recursions and repetitions, some imaginative, some editorial, some technical,
and some desirous. I conclude by assessing the implications of this rethinking
for the state of the question of “innovation” in the contemporary University.
