Date/Time
Date(s) - 26 Mar 2012
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
University of Pennsylvania McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Category(ies) No Categories
2012 Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series
Sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania Press
LECTURE ONE: “Frejus: The Borders of Nature”
Monday, March 26, 5:00 PM
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3355 Woodland Walk
Fréjus is a small town in the south of France, approximately halfway between the coastal towns of Cannes and St. Tropez. This Mediterranean outpost is familiar to historians of antiquity and the expansion of Christianity during the waning centuries of the Roman Empire. Its notable Roman remains include a fifth-century baptistery. The cloister has become famous for a series of approximately 200 paintings on wooden panels on its ceiling. Probably commissioned by the bishop and executed between 1353 and 1368, these images depict creatures of the natural world as well as demons and monsters. No obvious logic rules the mix and sequence of images in the cloister. Bearers of local history insist that the bishop and his canons required congregants to pass through the cloister in order to enter the church for Sunday mass, for baptisms and funerals, and all other rituals conducted in the sacred space. Churchgoers stared upward at creatures both mundane and spectacular, while men, beasts, and hybrids gazed back at them. In this lecture I present images from the cloister of Fréjus in a discussion of the natural world bordering the Atlantic at the dawn of European expansion.
Series information:
Nature and Culture in the Early Modern World
Peter C. Mancall
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
University of Southern California
This series of three lectures will explore aspects of the relationship between people and nature in the Atlantic World in the sixteenth
century. Each of the lectures will begin with paintings: a series of images in a fourteenth-century cloister in the south of France; a hand-painted atlas, now housed at the Huntington Library, created in Dieppe in 1547; and a 1585 water color of a Carolina Algonquian town by the English artist John White, now in the collection of the British Museum.