LECTURE: Other Latins and Other Cultures

Background: The lecture will explore two of the many facets of Latin and Alterity to be discussed at the conference. First, it will seek to explain the issues involved in the clash between the two Latin speech communities that coexisted very uneasily for varying lengths of time in Western Europe in the later years of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. On the one hand, there were the users of late medieval Latin and, on the other, the humanists, who promoted aggressively a return to the classical Latin usage from which late medieval Latin had by that date departed in many significant ways. It will be argued that the opposition between the two idioms of Latin was a major factor in the cultural change that characterises the period called the Renaissance. The lecture will then go on to look at the intellectual horizons of one or two French vernacular writers (Montaigne and/or Joachim Du Bellay) who were very much the product the humanists Latin teaching. They were bilingual writers for whom Latin was an other intimately bound to their deepest self. The lecture will attempt to explore their bilingual situation, and, in the case, of Montaigne, demonstrate how it may have shaped his reception of news from a radically alien Other World, America.

Profile: ANN MOSS

Professor of French at the University of Durham (UK) until retirement in September 2003. Specialist in the intellectual history and literature of the early modern period in Western Europe, with special reference to texts written in French and Latin. Her research covers rhetoric, dialectic, pedagogy, commentary on classical texts, mythography, hymnology, poetry and more discursive texts, such as the Essays of Montaigne. Main publications include: Ovid in Renaissance France (London: The Warburg Insitute, 1982); Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), which was translated into French as Les Recueils des lieux communs: apprendre à penser à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2002); and, most recently, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

The lecture is free. All welcome and no reservation is required.

The nearest carpark is 18 and 19 via Fairway Entrance 1. Please refer to map on http://maps.uwa.edu.au/crawley/display/6