Upcoming Speakers


 

A poster from Dr. Anthony D'Elia's talk

'Veros et priscis digniores triumphos Romae ducendos': 
Ancient Spectacles in Renaissance Rome

This paper explores the reception of ancient spectacles and blood sports in early fifteenth-century Rome. Two humanists at the papal curia, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Flavio Biondo (1392-1463), studied Roman topography and correctly identified the ancient ruins that still dominated medieval Rome. Chief among these ruins was the Coliseum. Its original purpose as an amphitheater for the games had been forgotten for close to a thousand years. Poggio and Biondo compared physical remains to discussions in ancient sources, copied inscriptions, and complained of the neglect and wholesale destruction of ancient monuments by contemporary Romans. They also saw classical continuity in the festive games and papal ceremonies of Renaissance Rome. Less melancholic than Poggio, Biondo saw ancient Rome, and the imperial triumph in particular, as a model for the struggling papacy and Christian rulers: “Would that one or more Christians followed the example of the emperor, who entered on a two-wheeled chariot, shining in gold, silver, and gems.” 


Friday, March 4th from 2:30-4:00 p.m. - Craig Harvey  -  CANCELLED
Craig received a B.A. (Hons.) in Classical Studies and in Latin from Queen’s University in 2011 and a M.A. with a focus on Roman Archaeology from the University of Victoria in 2013. His M.A. thesis focused on ceramic heating pipes, called tubuli, and their use in Roman Arabia. Craig has dug in both Spain and Greece, but most of his field work has been in Jordan, where for five seasons, he has excavated at the sites of ‘Ayn Gharandal and Humayma. In 2012 he became assistant director of Humayma. Craig’s main research interests are in bathhouses, bathhouse technology, and building materials. His other areas of interest include numismatics, the Roman Near East, and the application of technology in the field.


 

A poster from Dr. Luke Roman's talk

Humanist topographies: poetry and place in Renaissance Florence and Naples

This paper explores the reception of the classical poetics of place and space by humanist authors within the context of the broader renewal of classical spatiality that was being carried out in literary and architectural media in the cities of Renaissance Italy. Specifically, it examines the Silvae of Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), and the Lepidina and Garden of the Hesperides of Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503). Poliziano, who alludes in his poetry to the Medici villas at Fiesole and Poggio a Caiano, combines intertextual density with richly erudite topological memory in his collection entitled Silvae. The culminating poem in this sequence, the Nutricia, at once confers extraordinary privilege on Florence as the “mother of poets” and reflects more broadly on the contingency and mobility of literary locations. Giovanni Pontano pursued his career in Aragonese Naples and owned villas in the region that feature prominently throughout his poetry. His epithalamial eclogue entitled Lepidina draws on a range of classical models in tracing a neo-mythological map of contemporary Naples. Garden of the Hesperides, a Virgilian didactic poem on the cultivation of orange and citrus trees, employs spatial figures to challenge the supremacy of classical poetry. In both Poliziano and Pontano, the humanist rhetoric of restoration (instauratio) accompanies the boldly irreverent ambition of replacing the revered sites of antiquity with contemporary poetic places.


 

Recollection in the "Timaeus"

This paper argues that Plato's Timaeus provides neglected support for what
has come to be called (usually by its critics) the ‘mouthpiece theory’.
Many theses defended or assumed by the principal speakers in his other dialogues
​ are in the Timaeus owned by Plato himself as parts of a global system.
One such case turns out to be anamnesis. Its presence in the Timaeus,
once noticed, promises to enhance our understanding of this celebrated theory."

A poster from Dr. David Sedley's talk