Hungarian scholar David Falvay (ELTE Budapest) will speak about the late medieval lives of Christ and evaluate them as reflections of the medieval Christian piety.
The lecture is a part of the cycle Life and Biography in the Middle Ages.
Annotation:
The course aims to depict the forms and shapes of the genre of biography in the Middle Ages. It attempts to cover a broad spectrum of cultures and languages – Latin, Hebrew, Middle High German, Occitan, Old Norse or Balkan – and a full range of figures whose life medieval biography could depict: heathen and Christian kings, heroes, saints, Jesus as well as adventurers and dark heroes.
However, the course plans to offer more than an analysis and classification of biography subgenres and picturesque personalities. All the lectures should address the question of what was substantial in a human life for the medieval man, what gave it value and endowed it with meaning.
All the lectures and discussions will be in English, the lectures will be held by guest professors from foreign universities.
Young Czech Hebraist Milan Žonca (Charles University, Prague) will speak about spectacular, scurrile and blasphemous Jewish medieval narratives about the life of Jesus Christ
The lecture is a part of the cycle Life and Biography in the Middle Ages.
Annotation:
The course aims to depict the forms and shapes of the genre of biography in the Middle Ages. It attempts to cover a broad spectrum of cultures and languages – Latin, Hebrew, Middle High German, Occitan, Old Norse or Balkan – and a full range of figures whose life medieval biography could depict: heathen and Christian kings, heroes, saints, Jesus as well as adventurers and dark heroes.
However, the course plans to offer more than an analysis and classification of biography subgenres and picturesque personalities. All the lectures should address the question of what was substantial in a human life for the medieval man, what gave it value and endowed it with meaning.
All the lectures and discussions will be in English, the lectures will be held by guest professors from foreign universities.
Young German scholar Florian Deichl (Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universität München) will speak about the sinister figure of Hagen in the German medieval Song of the Nibelungs and try to uncover the origins of the human fascinations by so called “dark heroes”
The lecture is a part of the cycle Life and Biography in the Middle Ages.
Annotation:
The course aims to depict the forms and shapes of the genre of biography in the Middle Ages. It attempts to cover a broad spectrum of cultures and languages – Latin, Hebrew, Middle High German, Occitan, Old Norse or Balkan – and a full range of figures whose life medieval biography could depict: heathen and Christian kings, heroes, saints, Jesus as well as adventurers and dark heroes.
However, the course plans to offer more than an analysis and classification of biography subgenres and picturesque personalities. All the lectures should address the question of what was substantial in a human life for the medieval man, what gave it value and endowed it with meaning.
All the lectures and discussions will be in English, the lectures will be held by guest professors from foreign universities.
Fakulta humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy srdečně zve na přednášku Narrativizing a Saint: St Olav and the Development of Literary Genres in the Medieval North, kterou pronese Lena Rohrbach (University of Zurich).
Odkud se berou svatí? Ujasněme si to na příkladu největšího norského světce, svatého Olafa. Prof. Lena Rohrbach v přednášce při té příležitosti objasní také zrození žánru ság z diachronní perspektivy s ohledem na skaldskou tradici a obrazový materiál.
Lecturer: Klára Soukupová (Prague).
Annotation:
The genre of autobiography is often situated on borderline between fiction and non-fiction; autobiography refers to real characters and events, but at the same time it is a literary work of art, a verbal construct. The lecture concentrates on major problems of the genre of autobiography (truth, memory, subjectivity) as well as on history of autobiography (canonical texts) and it goes through development of theory of autobiography in 20th century.
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
The Faculty of Humanities, Charles University cordially invites you to the lecture Memory – Medium – Myth: The Mnemonic Character of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature- The lecture will be delivered by Jürg Glauser (University of Zurich and University of Basel).
For further information contact: marie_nov@ seznam.cz.
Lecturer: Jürg Glauser (Zürich).
Annotation:
Icelandic literary culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still bears many traces of the medieval tradition. This is also the case when it comes to representations of self-conceptions as expressed in early modern autobiographies. The present paper deals primarily with two representative examples of the genre,
1) the priest Jón Magnússon’s (1610-96) Píslarsaga (1658-59, ‘Story of Sufferings’(English translation by Michael Fell as And Though This World with Devils filled. A Story of Sufferings, 2007)
2) Sjálfsævisaga (1750ff., ‘Autobiography’) by the priest síra Þorsteinn Pétursson á Staðarbakka (1710-85) Beyond being quite remarkable representations of autobiographies in general, the two texts display a number of features that are specific for this genre in the pre-modern era, such as the creations of individual selves in relation to God and society, the importance of Christian faith, belief, religion and theology, the vital role mental and physical health plays in the narratives. In Píslarsaga, an additional element that defines the text in a very specific manner are the descriptions of the prosecution of putative sorcerers in seventeenth century Iceland.
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Lecturer: Carolyne Larrington (Oxford).
Annotation:
This lecture will talk about some of the ways in which the poetic form of ‚ævidrápur‘ (deeds of a life) functions within the fornaldarsaga genre in Old Norse. These autobiographically styled poems look back over and reflect a little on the lives of the Viking ancestors of medieval Scandinavians. Some may indeed draw on ancient traditions, others be antiquarian re-imaginings, but their focus on violence, loss, regret – and even love – allows us draw parallels with other kinds of autobiographical composition.
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
