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2013 Lent Term Seminars

Thursday 31 January at 5.30pm at Trinity College, Wolfson Seminar Room (North) 
For directions to this venue please see http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=290&subid=19

WILLIAM BARTON (King's College London), 'A Changing Mountain Mentality - Geographia, Prospectus, Pictura'.

The paper will address the shift in attitude towards the mountain and mountain landscape, which took place throughout the Renaissance and Early Modern Period. It will begin from the position that Neo-Latin literature played a crucial and as yet overlooked role in the story of the changing mentality towards mountains. This can be demonstrated by examining just one part of the broad and complicated history of the mountain attitude change and focusing on the how the mountain's aesthetic character developed during the period, from being considered an ugly place and barren to one of fertility and beauty. The paper will show how developments in the closely bound disciplines of geography and painting the natural world developed a concept of 'landscape', and then how this concept began to effect a change in the way the mountain was considered as an aesthetic object. In particular, the dual forces of a sharp uptake in interest in geography and mapmaking in German-speaking countries during the sixteenth century and developments in art theory during the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century will provide a background to the appearance of a 'landscape idea'. This 'idea' will then be used to approach and interpret a collection of Swiss mountain texts in Latin, centered around the Zurich humanist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), whose aesthetic appreciation of the mountain environment represents a radical change from what had gone before.

Thursday 14 February at 5.30pm in the Latimer Room, Old Court, Clare College
MICHIEL VERWEIJ (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique), 'Erasmus stuck between Catholics and Lutherans. His correspondence with Pope Adrian VI'.

If anything, Erasmus was taken by surprise at the moment Luther started the series of events which would become known as the Reformation. As other tensions clustered around the religious topics, soon a movement had sprung up that nobody could control. Erasmus hesitated what to do. In fact, he could not choose sides in this climate of polarisation and radicalisation. Moreover, he was attacked by orthodox Catholics and Lutherans alike. Vital for our understanding of Erasmus in this situation is the fact that he needed papal support already before the commotion had begun in order to silence ardent theologians. At the same time, he hoped to be able to reconcile the various positions. All these aspects come to life in the correspondence he kept with Pope Adrian VI, successor to Leo X. Adrian had been an important theologian and university man in Leuven and they had met in the 'Cambridge on the Dijle'. Adrian had his own agenda in trying to keep Erasmus on the Catholic side. The result was a tragic one. 'Between readiness and deeds stand practical difficulties' as a Flemish author once said.

TUESDAY 26 February at 5.30pm in the Godwin Room, D Staircase, Old Court, Clare College
PAUL BOTLEY (Warwick) and RICHARD SERJEANTSON (Trinity College, Cambridge), Two presentations on the editing of neo-Latin texts.

PAUL BOTLEY will talk about some of the difficulties he encountered, and the decisions he made, in the course of editing the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). As he contemplates embarking on a comparable project to edit the letters of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), he would like to think about whether any of these decisions could or should have been made differently. To this end, the group will look at some solutions he and other editors have found to a range of editorial problems.

RICHARD SERJEANTSON
The discovery of a new scribal manuscript of an early draft of René Descartes's first philosophical work, the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, raises a number of rather unusual, problematic, but potentially rewarding questions about the editing of a neo-Latin philosophical treatise. How should one present the texts in order to show as clearly as possible the differences - differences that are sometimes striking and philosophically revealing - between the two versions? More far-reachingly, given that none of the witnesses of this unfinished treatise have direct authorial authority, what principles should guide the adjudication of variant readings? How, in short, may one decide whether variants arise from scribal corruption or from authorial revision?