Date/Time
Date(s) - 14 Mar 2013
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
Category(ies) No Categories
The Rutgers British Studies Center is pleased to announce the next speaker in its Distinguished Lecture Series ….
Barbara Newman
Professor of English, Religion, & Classics
Northwestern University
“Holy Sinners: Revisiting Sir Gawain and Sir Gowther ”
Thursday , March 14th, 2013
4:30 – 6:00pm (Reception to Follow)
Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
169 College Avenue – New Brunswick, NJ
Among the most interesting character types in medieval romance is the holy sinner, a figure who inhabits the generic boundary between hagiography and romance. This talk looks at two opposing versions of the type, as found in the English romances of Sir Gowther and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . In the first case, we see a penitential hero who rises from the most abysmal depth of sin and crime to be crowned with chivalric and spiritual success. For Sir Gawain, on the other hand, spiritual and chivalric perfection is a point of departure, a pinnacle from which he falls by a felix culpa into humiliating?but humanizing? sin. Reading these disparate tales together affords a way to approach the medieval hermeneutic of both/and, a strategy for reading texts in which the sacred and the secular rub shoulders.
Sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center with assistance from the Program in Medieval Studies.
For more information, please visit http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu