For more information on all events, please contact Carol Symes (symes@illinois.edu).
Ancient Evidence for Congenital Syphilis in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece: Texts and Artworks
Wednesday, September 17th at 5:00pm in Lincoln Hall 1002 (warning: presentation features images that may be disturbing to viewers)
For centuries, syphilis and other treponemal diseases (bejel and yaws) were understood as “New World” exports, brought to Afro-Eurasia as part of the Columbian Exchange after 1492. But recent paleopathology and aDNA studies have demonstrated the presence of these diseases in the “Old World,” too, while Dr. Salmon’s own research has helped to prove their existence in medieval Europe. In this presentation, she offers compelling evidence to demonstrate the presence of syphilis in many ancient civilizations, including those Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean. Much of this evidence, especially for congenital syphilis, concerns infants and children and may be distressing to viewers: discretion is advised.
The Legal Value of Written Records for Jews and Christians in Medieval Provence
Thursday, November 6th at 5:00pm in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (1080 LCLB)
In fourteenth-century Provence, the volume of contracts produced by scribes known as public notaries increased rapidly from thousands each year to millions. By the fifteenth century, virtually all social and economic relations could be guaranteed by a notarial act. Reliance on the written word expanded both geographically and socially, reaching even the region's most remote rural communities and serving the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities. This talk seeks to answer fundamental questions about this extraordinary moment in late medieval law, literacy, and technology: Why did written records become so wildly popular so quickly? What were the consequences of this rapid legal and cultural transformation? And how did the lives and logics of everyday legal actors change as a result?
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An Envoy State: Turfan and the Integration of Medieval Eurasia -- Prof. Xin Wen (Princeton University)
Large political entities such as the Byzantine and Tang empires are often seen as the main upholders and drivers of medieval trans-Eurasian connections. But even at the height of their powers, these empires controlled only small parts of this vast territory—so who was maintaining connections in the spaces between? This lecture focuses on the Central Asian kingdom of Turfan from the fifth to the seventh centuries. Its history is known to us because its inhabitants clothed the bodies of their dead with used papers, including government documents, and its arid climate preserved these texts. From them, we can see that an extraordinary number of travelers from the Mediterranean, India, China, and the Steppe world converged in Turfan, not as a destination, but en route to other large states. To provide for their needs, the kingdom devoted outsized resources to receiving, accommodating, and protecting these travelers. In this way, Turfan fashioned itself into an “envoy state”: a state which disproportionately served travelers from other, larger states. States like Turfan were thus indispensable agents in maintaining the long-distance connections that enabled the cultural and political integration of early medieval Eurasia.
Illinois Troupe Peforms at Humanities Open House on October 4th
Saturday, October 4th at noon and 1pm
Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni participated in an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the University of Toronto on June 7th. Performing annually in the English city of York from the 13th to the 16th centuries, local guilds staged Christian history from Creation to the Last Judgment over the course of one long summer day, beginning at dawn and ending at midnight. In Toronto, we joined 17 other groups from all over North America to stage all 50 Middle English plays, performed on wagons pulled through the campus and staged at three different sites. Our troupe was entrusted with two of the most elaborate, *The Entry into Jerusalem* and *The Road to Calvary*. Both of these processional pageants fully integrated dramatic action with audience involvement and emphasized the immediacy of medieval theater as an always-contemporary performance practice. Although not clustered together in the production, these two plays are mirror images and provided opportunities for linking the festive entry of Jesus to its inverse, the journey toward crucifixion. An imaginative reconstruction of *Calvary*'s missing manuscript folio was devised by the cast in rehearsal, featuring the 15th-century "Coventry Carol" as well as a new hymn, "Open My Eyes," written by Miriam Endersby (b. 1999), with music composed by Kristina Arakelyan (b. 1994), commissioned to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2022.