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Built on the site of a Roman basilica and restored over a dozen centuries, Notre Dame long reigned in splendor as the cultural, intellectual, religious, and economic center of Paris, the most powerful city in northern Europe during the Middle Ages. The cathedral's powerful towers, grand gargoyles, flying buttresses and soaring interior represent amazing achievements in medieval Gothic architecture. Its magnificent stained glass, sumptuous art, and glorious music have inspired awe and creative expression throughout the ages.
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Friday, November 4, 2011, 7:30 to 10:00 pm
Notre-Dame of Paris and Manifest Destiny.
Stephen Murray (Medieval Art, Columbia University).
The great cathedral dominates the urban skyline, overawing us with its boat-like silhouette, powerful towers, menacing gargoyles and velvety-dark interior spaces pierced by shafts of brilliantly colored light from high windows. For us, Notre-Dame of Paris appears to represent the certainty of France becoming France, with Paris as its capital. However, when this great church was begun the Capetian kings of France were struggling for control over a city that was not yet capital of a France that was not yet France, while their rivals, the Plantagenets, controlled a mighty empire extending from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Can we return to the uncertainties of the mid-twelfth century and the start of work on a great church that was quite different from anything ever seen before and quite different from the Notre-Dame we know? Are there surprises to be found in this, the best-loved and most visited of all the great cathedrals? And how is it that Gothic, born in such precarious circumstances, can create such a powerful illusion of manifest destiny?
Performance
The Cathedral and the Lady.
Clerestory: Jesse Antin, Kevin Baum, John Bischoff, Dan Cromeenes, Chris Fritzsche, Tom Hart, David Kurtenbach, Clifton Massey, Jim Monios, and Justin Montigne. Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna (Director of Music Administration, SF Opera).
Saturday, November 5, 2011, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm
The Gothic Enterprise: Cathedral Building in Europe, 1137-1550.
Robert A. Scott (Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford).
Notre Dame de Paris is one of Europe's greatest cathedrals, and we are awestruck and humbled by its magnificence. But it is equally astonishing to realize that hundreds of other cathedrals and great churches were being built during the same period all over Europe, together comprising one of the architectural and social achievements of Western culture. Gothic Cathedrals invite us to think about what inspired the audacity to build them. Why would a society that was so impoverished want to invest so much capital and effort in buildings that were physically stupendous, yet produced nothing tangible? What conception of the divine lay behind their creation? What were they for? And how did religious and secular leaders use cathedrals for their own social status and political advancement? In this lecture Scott explores the social, cultural, religious, ideological and political contexts in which Notre Dame and other cathedrals of Europe were conceived and built.
Notre Dame and the Emergence of the Medieval Retributive Cosmos.
Hester Gelber (Religious Studies, Stanford).
During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, just when the Bishops of Paris were planning and erecting the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the concept of retributive justice, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked, began to dominate the western European imagination. Christ and Mary as the dispensers of justice and mercy ruled over a spatialized terrain in which their mythologized interaction in the salvation and punishment of souls set the model for the mythologized interactions of kings and queens in the earthly retributive sphere. In this retributive cosmology, justice and mercy, mediated through obedience, were the dominant virtues, virtues prominently in evidence in Gothic cathedral façades. Both bishops and kings had a vested interest in the imagery of justice and mercy, and the sculpture of Notre Dame is a nearly perfect evocation of the emergent retributive system.
Lunch Break
Performance and Lecture.
Apocalypse and Debauchery: Anti-clericalism in Medieval French Music and Literature. Multi-instrumentalist and Singer Tim Rayborn (Berkeley) explores the rise of secular culture in mid-thirteenth-century Paris and the conflicts with religious organizations that followed from it. He focuses on the arguments between the secular masters and the mendicant orders at the University of Paris, and how this debate found its way into the secular music and poetry of the time. He will present examples of this poetry and music, performed with medieval instruments, and show how anti-clericalism became an important part of medieval French artistic culture, despite the inherent dangers of angering Church authorities.
Victor Hugo and Notre-Dame de Paris.
Suzanne Guerlac (French, UC Berkeley). In French the title of Hugo's celebrated and very popular novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is simply Notre Dame de Paris, the name of the Cathedral that still sits in the heart of Paris. What happens in this act of translation? How is it that in passing from one language to another we seem to slide from the sublime, the sacred monument, to the grotesque character of Quasimodo, whose body is hideously deformed and whose spirit is quickly broken. Which one lies at the heart of the novel? In fact, they both do, one inside the other. What is the meaning of this identification between the two?
Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.
Related Events:
Humanities West Book Discussion with Lynn Harris
Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame
October 19, 2011
5:30 to 6:30 pm
Board Room, Commonwealth Club of San Francisco
595 Market Street.
RSVP: commonwealthclub.org
Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Member-Led Forum
Free
Fireside Chat with George Hammond
A Notre Dame/Paris Preview
>Note New date and time:
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
6:30 pm
Orinda Library, Orinda
Free
>Postponed: Lecture and Reception
George Hammond and Robert Scott (Stanford) in conversation about scholasticism’s influence on the building of Gothic Cathedrals.
November 2, 2011
>new date: January 9
Reception 5:30 pm, Lecture 6 pm
Commonwealth Club of San Francisco
595 Market Street
Robert A. Scott, Author of The Gothic Enterprise, and George Hammond.
Scholasticism and the Design of the Medieval Gothic Cathedral. The design of
the great Gothic Cathedrals of Medieval Europe is characterized by their
geometric regularity. The strict adherence to geometry in the design and
building of these great churches derives from Scholasticism, a strain of
theology that swept Western Christianity during the middle ages. George
Hammond will explain the origins of Scholasticism in Aristotelian philosophy
and identify its fundamental precepts. Robert Scott will explain how these
ideas were combined with theological notions about light to produce the
so-called Gothic look.
RSVP: commonwealthclub.org
Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Member-Led Forum
Commonwealth Club charges a fee of $8 for members and $20 for non-members.
Lecture: Why the West Rules-For Now
November 14, 2011
6 pm
Commonwealth Club of San Francisco
595 Market Street.
RSVP: commonwealthclub.org
Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Member-Led Forum
Free to Commonwealth Club Members
$20 for non-members
Ian Morris (Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and History,
Stanford) will be presenting a lecture on his book.
Humanities West Book Discussion with Lynn Harris
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most
Devastating Plague In All The World by John Kelly.
November 16, 2011
5:30 to 6:30 pm
Board Room, Commonwealth Club of San Francisco
595 Market Street.
RSVP: commonwealthclub.org
Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Member-Led Forum
Free
This program is presented with support from The Consul General of France in San Francisco, Grants for the Arts/SF Hotel Tax Fund; George and Judy Marcus Family Foundation; Bank of the West; Stanford Humanities Center; the Institute of European Studies and the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies at UC Berkeley, Marines Memorial Theatre, and individual donors.
In cooperation with American Decorative Arts Forum Northern California; California Academy of Sciences; Center for the Art of Translation; Commonwealth Club of San Francisco; Docents Council, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning; Humanities Department, San Francisco State University; Mechanics' Institute; Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), UC Berkeley; San Francisco and Oakland Unified School Districts; Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Stanford History Department; Stanford Arts Initiative; Stanford University Libraries; Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley.
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