Month: January 2019

We are very excited to announce that on 1 April 2019 at 19:00 our very own Peter Brown, Professor of Medieval Literature and Academic Director of the Paris School of Arts and Cultures, will be delivering a talk on ‘Chaucer in Italy’ at the American University of Rome.

Synopsis:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) was ahead of his time. Having visited Italy twice on diplomatic missions he modeled a significant number of his narratives on works by Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, long before these writers were ‘discovered’ during the English Renaissance. My lecture will consider Chaucer’s encounter with Italian culture and how it prompted a rebirth of his creative outlook.

Biography of our speaker:

Peter Brown is Professor of English Medieval Literature at the University of Kent and Academic Director of its Paris School of Arts and Culture. He has recently edited A New Companion to Chaucer (Wiley–Blackwell, 2019) and is the author of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has published on a wide range of topics to do with the cultural and historical context of medieval literature. 

Please go to https://aur.edu/events/chaucer-italy to register!

Photo: Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer from the Regiment of Princes by Thomas Hoccleve. London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, f. 88 (1411–12).

Happy New Year everyone!

Tom Henry writes:

Next year’s MA History of Art in Rome (2019-20) will be built around two great anniversaries and the exhibitions that will accompany them. 2019 marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death in France, and will be marked by a great exhibition at the Louvre in Paris (opens October 2019). 2020 is the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death in Rome and there are going to be great exhibitions in Rome (spring 2020) and in London (autumn 2020, I am co-curating this exhibition). Kent’s Rome School of Classical and Renaissance Studies is putting these anniversaries at the centre of our events and our teaching. I will be teaching first Leonardo (autumn 2019) and then Raphael (spring 2020), and have been asked to give a major lecture linking Raphael and Leonardo. It should be an exciting year.