Oct 18
Race and Racism,lunch and talk,William Chester Jordan, PBK,Princeton
You are invited to attend one or both of the following events this coming Thursday, October 18th, to be presented by Carleton's Fall term Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar
Professor William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University, specializes in the institutional, religious, cultural, and environmental history of northern Europe in the Middle Ages. He has also served at the President of the Medieval Academy of America.
Both events take place this THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18th:
LUNCH EVENT: 12:00-1:00 pm, Leighton 236: Race and Racism in Recent Historical Writing (and Blogging) on the Middle Ages
Initiated by a reaction a little more than a year ago to a not very funny joke at a session at one of the several large international conferences on medieval studies held annually, a soul-searching (absurdist in some understandings, deeply empathetic in other assessments) took place among medievalists. This soul-searching coincided with the publication of a number of important books on race and racism among medieval European peoples and a great deal of blogging about historic and present-day medieval studies as a racist enterprise and, of course, rebuttals to that view. You are invited to join Princeton Professor of Medieval History William C. Jordan for this lunch-time presentation and discussion of these debates and their broader implications. Free box lunches for the first 24 guests.
Sponsored by Medieval & Renaissance Studies. Contact: William North, x4202
AND you are also invited to attend Professor Jordan's evening talk!
EVENING EVENT: 7:00-8:00 pm, Gould Library Athenaeum: The Lorn Land: A Winter's Tale: An Exploration of the Peasant Experience of Winter in the Middle Ages. Peasant life in northern Europe has been either demonized or romanticized in popular descriptions of the Middle Ages. This lecture aims to extract some sense of the genuine experience of peasant life in the north in the harsh winters of this climatic zone. What did the tillers of the land do in the frigid months from November to March? How did they cope with the inhospitable weather—blanketing snows, bitter cold, biting winds, and recurrent frosts that delayed the spring thaw, conditions that transformed the north country into a ‘lorn land’, a land lost, forsaken, wretched? Sponsored by Medieval & Renaissance Studies. Contact: William North, x4202. Refreshments will be served.
Both events are free and open to the public - everyone is welcome!