Date/Time
Date(s) - 6 Apr 2016
6:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Bettman Lecture Hall, 612 Schermerhorn, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Sonja Drimmer (UMass Amherst) will give a talk entitled “A City Full of Walls You Can Post Complaints at” as part of Columbia University’s 2015-2016 Robert Branner Forum for Medieval Art.
Professor Drimmer’s abstract is as follows:
“What did political campaigning look like in the era before elected heads of state? How was mass persuasion achieved before the advent of mass production? This presentation focuses on the single most important and contested medium of public political expression in fifteenth-century England: the wall. The site of pictorially elaborate parchment rolls, the dismembered corpses of rebels and officials, and partisan verses that spoke on behalf of commoners and gentry alike, the walls of England’s cities were electric with incendiary intent. Turning away from the properties and structure of the wall, I examine in this paper the strategies of persuasive diction that made its inert material speak.”
This event is free and followed by a reception.