Mean Love: The Cloud of Unknowing and What Can’t be Thought

21 February 2013, 5pm

Van Pelt, Meyerson Conference Room

Title: Mean Love: The Cloud of Unknowing and What Can’t be Thought

Vance Smith (Princeton, Dept. English)

Professor of English at Princeton, D. Vance Smith has published widely on medieval literature.  He has recently finished a study of the medieval literature of dying, Arts of Dying, the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience. He has edited a special issue of New Literary History on medieval cultural studies (with Michael Uebel), and The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (with Andrew Cole), and has written a number of prefaces and afterwords for essay collections and journals. Current projects include a study of negation in mysticism from Gregory of Nyssa to Julian Norwich, Love Without Object, an edition of an important Piers Plowman manuscript, and a study of heraldic manuscripts.

A reception will follow the lecture