The early childhood educational approach known as the Montessori method is a revolutionary depart... more The early childhood educational approach known as the Montessori method is a revolutionary departure from rigid Victorian models of instruction that makes an objectoriented defense of the child's protean capacity for learning and a quasi-Husserlian "return to things." It seems to us that Maria Montessori's emphasis on the refinement of the young child's senses for discovery in a world of wondrous complexity constitutes a significant political-ecological intervention, cultivating habits of thought and practice which respect the affordances of matter and mind at multiple scales-what she called "cosmic education." Focusing on the composition of the first Casa dei Bambini with sensorial materials and practical life activities, this essay explores Montessori's handbook and other writings as well as recent Montessori classroom experience in the hopes of defamiliarizing a well-known but often misunderstood approach to early childhood education.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the ... more Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the contours of late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century non-Wycliffite English heterodoxy (on a continuum spanning from "official" heresy to "left-wing orthodoxy") to redress what the author sees as the long-standing overemphasis in literary scholarship on Lollardy's cultural legacy. Dilated in scope far beyond what the author considers a narrowly insular vision, Books focuses on the single yet capacious genre of "revelatory writing, " which for Kerby-Fulton includes "visionary experience, mystical theology, and apocalyptic theology" (9) as well as "speculative academic thought" (8). The intellectual freedom that safeguards the latter (and constitutes the topic for the book's valuable preface) was matched, the author controversially contends, by "a surprising degree of tolerance" in the late-medieval English reception of revelatory texts, a claim she supports by attending variously to taxonomies of visionary experience (from Joachim's intellectus spiritualis to Uthred's visio clara), the versatility of literary technique (Annabel Patterson's "functional ambiguity"), codicology (especially compilation and provenance), and official articulations of inquisitional procedures for determining the validity of revelatory experience (discretio and probatio), pre-and post-Arundel. In the process she discloses a new frontier of unedited and mostly anonymous Latin texts that respond to or revise Continental heresy, persuasively suggesting
Neomedievalism is a school of International Relations theory that sees in the versatile structure... more Neomedievalism is a school of International Relations theory that sees in the versatile structures of trans-national and sub-national polities - from the IMF to al-Qaeda - evidence for what the Strategic Studies Institute has called “the decline of the state.” Distinct from philosophers like Giorgio Agamben who (via Schmitt) interpret the concept of sovereignty as a residually absolutist medievalism, IR neomedievalists emphasize the relevance of premodern civic space as “a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty” for understanding governance and commerce in the twenty-first century.
The “absent presence” of the Middle Ages in modern social and political forms is manifold; Bruce Holsinger traces the roots of both French critical theory and Bush’s “war on terror” to the Middle Ages, showing how even Hardt & Negri’s Empire finds inspiration in St. Francis. In part as a discussion of Holsinger’s exploration of the use of “medieval” as a rhetorical strategy for connoting both inimical alterity and positive futurity, and in part as a reflection on Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” in this colloquium I will attempt to pose the question of the relevance of the medieval for contemporary social, cultural and political thought.
Personification allegory is a poetic figure of speech that went into decline at the beginning of ... more Personification allegory is a poetic figure of speech that went into decline at the beginning of the Romantic era (early 19th c.) and has never regained popularity, such that we moderns are left to wonder: why was it ever popular? In the Christian Middle Ages, personification allegory functioned as an apparatus for thinking through difficult intellectual problems. This lecture will explore some creative examples of how, in the 14th c. Middle English poem Piers Plowman, personification allegory illuminates sophisticated theological doctrines, such as the Trinity and the commandment to love one’s neighbor.
The early childhood educational approach known as the Montessori method is a revolutionary depart... more The early childhood educational approach known as the Montessori method is a revolutionary departure from rigid Victorian models of instruction that makes an objectoriented defense of the child's protean capacity for learning and a quasi-Husserlian "return to things." It seems to us that Maria Montessori's emphasis on the refinement of the young child's senses for discovery in a world of wondrous complexity constitutes a significant political-ecological intervention, cultivating habits of thought and practice which respect the affordances of matter and mind at multiple scales-what she called "cosmic education." Focusing on the composition of the first Casa dei Bambini with sensorial materials and practical life activities, this essay explores Montessori's handbook and other writings as well as recent Montessori classroom experience in the hopes of defamiliarizing a well-known but often misunderstood approach to early childhood education.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the ... more Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the contours of late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century non-Wycliffite English heterodoxy (on a continuum spanning from "official" heresy to "left-wing orthodoxy") to redress what the author sees as the long-standing overemphasis in literary scholarship on Lollardy's cultural legacy. Dilated in scope far beyond what the author considers a narrowly insular vision, Books focuses on the single yet capacious genre of "revelatory writing, " which for Kerby-Fulton includes "visionary experience, mystical theology, and apocalyptic theology" (9) as well as "speculative academic thought" (8). The intellectual freedom that safeguards the latter (and constitutes the topic for the book's valuable preface) was matched, the author controversially contends, by "a surprising degree of tolerance" in the late-medieval English reception of revelatory texts, a claim she supports by attending variously to taxonomies of visionary experience (from Joachim's intellectus spiritualis to Uthred's visio clara), the versatility of literary technique (Annabel Patterson's "functional ambiguity"), codicology (especially compilation and provenance), and official articulations of inquisitional procedures for determining the validity of revelatory experience (discretio and probatio), pre-and post-Arundel. In the process she discloses a new frontier of unedited and mostly anonymous Latin texts that respond to or revise Continental heresy, persuasively suggesting
Neomedievalism is a school of International Relations theory that sees in the versatile structure... more Neomedievalism is a school of International Relations theory that sees in the versatile structures of trans-national and sub-national polities - from the IMF to al-Qaeda - evidence for what the Strategic Studies Institute has called “the decline of the state.” Distinct from philosophers like Giorgio Agamben who (via Schmitt) interpret the concept of sovereignty as a residually absolutist medievalism, IR neomedievalists emphasize the relevance of premodern civic space as “a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty” for understanding governance and commerce in the twenty-first century.
The “absent presence” of the Middle Ages in modern social and political forms is manifold; Bruce Holsinger traces the roots of both French critical theory and Bush’s “war on terror” to the Middle Ages, showing how even Hardt & Negri’s Empire finds inspiration in St. Francis. In part as a discussion of Holsinger’s exploration of the use of “medieval” as a rhetorical strategy for connoting both inimical alterity and positive futurity, and in part as a reflection on Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” in this colloquium I will attempt to pose the question of the relevance of the medieval for contemporary social, cultural and political thought.
Personification allegory is a poetic figure of speech that went into decline at the beginning of ... more Personification allegory is a poetic figure of speech that went into decline at the beginning of the Romantic era (early 19th c.) and has never regained popularity, such that we moderns are left to wonder: why was it ever popular? In the Christian Middle Ages, personification allegory functioned as an apparatus for thinking through difficult intellectual problems. This lecture will explore some creative examples of how, in the 14th c. Middle English poem Piers Plowman, personification allegory illuminates sophisticated theological doctrines, such as the Trinity and the commandment to love one’s neighbor.
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The “absent presence” of the Middle Ages in modern social and political forms is manifold; Bruce Holsinger traces the roots of both French critical theory and Bush’s “war on terror” to the Middle Ages, showing how even Hardt & Negri’s Empire finds inspiration in St. Francis. In part as a discussion of Holsinger’s exploration of the use of “medieval” as a rhetorical strategy for connoting both inimical alterity and positive futurity, and in part as a reflection on Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” in this colloquium I will attempt to pose the question of the relevance of the medieval for contemporary social, cultural and political thought.
The “absent presence” of the Middle Ages in modern social and political forms is manifold; Bruce Holsinger traces the roots of both French critical theory and Bush’s “war on terror” to the Middle Ages, showing how even Hardt & Negri’s Empire finds inspiration in St. Francis. In part as a discussion of Holsinger’s exploration of the use of “medieval” as a rhetorical strategy for connoting both inimical alterity and positive futurity, and in part as a reflection on Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” in this colloquium I will attempt to pose the question of the relevance of the medieval for contemporary social, cultural and political thought.