Organized by: Elisabeth Trischler and Leon Jacobowitz Efron
Sponsor: Italians and ltalianists at Kalamazoo
From the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium to Pietro da Ravenna’s Phoenix, the vibrant intellectual climate of the Italian peninsula was the core of many important contributions to Europe’s mnemonic traditions, bridging not only Eastern and Western cultures but also adapting the classical tradition to its own epoch. This panel aims to explore the variety of memory techniques developed and practiced in Italy during the medieval period. Medieval memory has become a key topic of discussion amongst contemporary scholars from many disciplines, our panel will therefore accept papers from a variety of fields, including but not limited to: art, history, literature, philosophy, and theology.
Potential paper topics include but are not limited to:
- the use of ars memoriae in Italian literature
- the differences between theory and praxis
- the influence or rejection of classical authors illustrations as pedagogical tools and/or their absence
- Ars memoriae and the sermo modernus
- the practice in relation to different audiences
- real and imagined architectural spaces and ars memorae
- the roles of affect and sensorial play
- art and mnemonics: from manuscript decoration to cloister frescoes
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers on (but not limited to) the above-mentioned topics. In order to submit an abstract please find the paper session here, by 15 September 2020.
