ROBERT DURLING
Tuesday, March 27th at 4:00 pm in CL 501
Professor Durling is the author of The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance
Epic (Harvard UP 1965); Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime
Petrose (UCalP 1990); translator of Petrarch's Lyric Poems: the Rime
Sparse and Other Lyrics (Harvard UP 1976)
This event is Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and
co-sponsored by the University Honors College and the Program in Medieval
& Renaissance Studies.
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BART EHRMAN (UNC Chapel Hill)
"Misquoting Jesus:
Scribes Who Altered Scripture and Readers Who May Never Know"
Thursday, March 29th at 4 pm in FFA auditorium
We do not have the original copies of any of the books of the New
Testament. The surviving manuscripts were for the most part produced
centuries after the originals, by medieval scribes who were copying texts
that had already been changed - sometimes significantly - from the
originals. Most of these changes were accidental, but some were evidently
made in order to make the text say what it was already thought to mean.
This lecture will consider the kinds of changes made in the manuscripts
over the centuries, both to see if it is possible to reconstruct an
"original" text and to consider the reasons behind the alterations of the
text.
Ehrman is James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He
has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early
Christianity, including a college-level textbook on the New Testament, two
anthologies of early Christian writings, and a Greek-English Edition of
the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. Two of his many
recent books are Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code (2004) and
Misquoting Jesus (2005).
This talk is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies and Pitt's Program in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies. It is generously co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's
European Studies Center and Department of Religious Studies.
***And don't forget the special program with Professor Ehrman for Religious Studies majors and minors at noon on Friday in Dining Room A, William Pitt Union.***
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SARAH BECKWITH (Duke University)
Friday, March 30th at 4 pm in CL 501
"Forgiving in Shakespeare's Plays"
In Shakespeare's theater there are almost countless instances of the word
"confession" and its cognates, yet only three instances in the entire
corpus of the word "absolution." This talk examines some of the late plays
as explorations of the grammar of forgiveness in a society that has
fundamentally transformed the sacrament of penance, a sacrament which was
not only a major resource for thinking about "interiority" but also
reconciliation.
Beckwith is Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University, where
she is also Professor of Religion, Religious Studies, and Theater Studies.
Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing and has published on
Margery Kempe, the literature of anchoritism, and medieval theatre. Her
publications include Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in
Medieval English Writing (Routledge, 1993), and Signifying God: Social
Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago,
2001). She is currently working on a book on medieval and Renaissance
drama centering on Shakespeare and the transformation of sacramental
culture.
This talk is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies and Pitt's Program in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies. It is generously co-sponsored by Pitt's Departments of English
and Religious Studies.
For more information, please contact Jen Waldron, Director of MRST
(jwaldron@pitt.edu).
