Wednesday, April 29, 5:15 p.m.

Katherine H. Tachau

"Light and Color, Optics and Alchemy in Thirteenth-Century Paris"

Of all the sciences that developed in medieval European universities, that of optics (perspectiva, or "seeing through") has had the most long-lived effects, both for the history of art and for physics today. The efforts to explain light and its workings, the geometry of its transmission, the nature of colors, and vision, gained contributors and audience in part because of the intellectual context within which the science was interwoven. Some of this context was theological, some experimental—a realm where alchemists and such artisans as those who produced the illuminated books of Paris, the Bibles moralisées, could meet. Among those who studied optics in the thirteenth-century universities was one of the most intriguing characters of the entire Middle Ages, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, known to his contemporaries as the doctor mirabilis. Revered by some modern scholars as a founder of the experimental method and a significant influence on later scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Bacon skirted controversy in his own time and was suspected of sorcery and practice of the black arts. His contributions to optics are especially revealing of the underlying assumptions and inner dynamic of medieval science.

Wednesday, April 29, 7:15 p.m.

Christopher Kleinhenz

"Dante's Vision of the Afterlife"

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy has justly been termed the supreme masterpiece of medieval civilization. Offering a panoramic perspective on human life on earth as well as on the afterlife in its three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the Comedy abounds in poetic insights that dazzle the imagination. In this lecture, Christopher Kleinhenz will first discuss the various sorts of "visions" and "ways of seeing" present in the medieval world in general before looking specifically at the ways in which Dante represented the afterlife in the Comedy. He will examine the afterlife both as a real and traversable place/space and as a moral and spiritual construct. He will also consider the meaning and functionality of the afterlife in the Comedy, examining in particular how the poem represents the operation of Divine Justine through the nature of the punishments in the Inferno, the purgation process in Purgatory, and the concept of beatitude in Paradise. The lecture will incorporate discussion of the artistic sources of Dante's rich poetic language and imagery, and of the lively illustrative tradition that his poem generated in manuscript illuminations and book illustrations. The lecture will be accompanied by many fine visual images.

Christopher Kleinhenz is the Carol Mason Kirk Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, and one of North America's most distinguished experts on medieval Italian literature and culture. A former President of the American Association of Teachers of Italian and of the American Boccaccio Association, he has received the City of Genoa Medal for the Promotion of Italian in North America (1998), the Leonard Covello Educator of the Year Award (2005), the Medieval Academy of America's Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies (2008), and the WisItalia Lifetime Achievement Award. His numerous publications include The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (1986) and Movement and Meaning in the "Divine Comedy": Toward an Understanding of Dante's Processional Poetics (2005). He is editor of The Dante Encyclopedia (2000) and of Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia (2004). Professor Kleinhenz is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.