Comparative literature scholar Catherine Brown of the University of Michigan will be on campus to deliver the tenth annual Riggsby Lecture on medieval Mediterranean history and culture.
The event will be held at 6:00 p.m. Thursday, November 7, at the Lindsay Young Auditorium in Hodges Library. It is free and open to the public.
Brown’s lecture is titled “Traveling Hands: Mobile Manuscript in the Early Medieval Mediterranean,” and is presented by UT’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Brown will talk about the various activities of the scribes—the “hands” of the talk’s title—who were responsible for producing the lushly illustrated manuscripts that emerged from the Mozarabic communities of Christians who lived in the Iberian peninsula during the period of Arab Islamic rule. Brown also will explain how the work of the scribes figured into reading, writing, and intellectual life in the Middle Ages.
“We are delighted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the lecture with such an exciting speaker as Professor Brown,” said Heather Hirschfeld, Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute. “Her work on the history and theory of medieval manuscript culture is cutting-edge, and it complements the interests of many of our own faculty.”
Brown is an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and comparative literature. Her work focuses on the early Middle Ages in Iberian and Carolingian cultures, specifically in manuscript bookmaking and theory and practice of embodied language. Her publications include the recently published articles “Manuscript Thinking,” “Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain” and “Love Letters from Beatus of Liébana to Modern Philologists.”
The Marco Institute’s annual Riggsby Lecture is made possible by a gift from Stuart and Kate Riggsby. Stuart Riggsby was formerly dean of UT’s College of Arts and Sciences.
For more information on the Marco Institute, visit the website.
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C O N T A C T :
Vera Pantanizopoulos-Broux (865-974-1859, vpantani@utk.edu)
Charles Primm (865-974-5180, primmc@utk.edu)