Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
This symposium is free and open to the public; please register in advance (see below).
9:30 a.m. Coffee and continental breakfast
10:00 a.m.
Chair: Sandra Sufian, University of Illinois at Chicago
Children are central to understanding disability in the Middle Ages. Much of this focus stems both from inherent features of children and from medical interpretations of those features. The inchoate medicalization of disability and the social responses thereto emerge as a valuable contribution to disability history's truly longue durée.
In the Middle Ages Christian teaching remained ambivalent about whether disability resulted from sin. Although the New Testament generally suggested that it did not, some medieval political and religious practices created different perceptions. Rather than attempting to reconcile these ideas, this paper will examine the tensions between them and how they affected the lives of people with disabilities.
11:15–11:30 a.m. Break
11:30 a.m. Roundtable discussion with morning speakers
~
Lunch break
~
2:30–3:45 p.m.
Chair: Wendy Wall, Northwestern University
Seventeenth-century European travelers to India understood the often debilitating illnesses they contracted there in astonishingly diverse and even contradictory ways: as divine punishment for sin and as the consequence of exposure to torrid climate; as a marker of European difference from India and as a physical transformation into Indianness. The latter suggests a mode of becoming-other that informs the European colonial projects of later centuries yet nonetheless unsettles the certainties of racial identity those projects helped foster.
Disease in Shakespeare is frequently thought to arise from some ethical failure of the sufferer. This paper explores Shakespeare’s profound ambivalence about strong passion, demonstrating how passion becomes at once the occasion of redemption and the source of disease.
Scott Stevens, D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian Studies, The Newberry Library
The visual records of the period of contact and conquest represented the catastrophic onslaught of Old World pathogens in various modes. This paper considers the cultural and political ramifications of this legacy across a number of contemporary discourses, which often confer exculpatory significance on the epidemics that decimated the Americas.
3:45–4:00 p.m. Break
4:00 p.m. Roundtable discussion with afternoon speakers
~
In conjunction with the symposium, the Newberry Consort early music chamber ensemble will present:
Music Hath Charms: Disease and Disability in Music7:00 p.m.
Director David Douglass, along with soprano Ellen Hargis, harpsichordist David Schrader, and viola da gambist Craig Trompeter, will present a special program on how early modern people coped with illness through the power of music, from the depths of melancholy to a comic depiction of a gall bladder operation.
Everyone who registers in advance for the conference will receive a voucher for one free admission to the concert.
A reception will follow the concert.
This conference will include a continental breakfast, as well as a reception after the afternoon session. While there is no fee to attend this event, participants must register in advance by calling the Center for Renaissance Studies at 312.255.3514 or e-mailing renaissance [at] newberry.org.
Funds may be available for graduate students and faculty of Consortium institutions to travel to the Newberry Library to attend this program. Contact your Representative Council member or the Center for Renaissance Studies.
Announcements of individual Center for Renaissance Studies programs are made by e-mail only. To ensure that we have your most current information, please join our mailing list.
Renaissance Home | Contact the Center | Join or Update Our Mailing List