The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, celebrating 50 years as an organized research center, will host the 25th Annual Bernardo Lecture at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 3, in AM-189, the Admissions Center.
Mary Carruthers, Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature Emerita, New York University, will speak on “Terror, Horror, and the Fear of God.”
In the 12th-century monastic revivals of desert spirituality, ‘the cell’ comes to subsume the notion of ‘desert.’ It does so because of the meditation practices that each place, though physically so different, was thought to enable. Solitude, silence, literary study, confined space, night-time — that is the 12th-century European ‘desert.’ Focusing on Peter of Celle’s teachings concerning monastic reading, as well as the dramatic circumstances of Augustine’s conversion (Confessions 8), this essay argues that well-known practices conventional in Latin rhetoric during the procedures of invention are of great importance in understanding the mystagogy of sacra pagina in the west.
All are welcome. A reception precedes the lecture at 4 p.m. in AM-177.