On behalf of the Medieval Club of New York it is my pleasure to invite you to the Rossell Hope Robbins Memorial Lecture, this Friday, March 27, at 7.30 p.m. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (365 Fifth Avenue, room 4406), to hear Professor Patricia Clare Ingham, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University and editor of the award-winning journal Exemplaria, speaking on: “New Worlds: Tracking an Enchanted History.”

There will be a wine and cheese reception afterwards.

Abstract: The year 1492 stands first among the markers of historical rupture, as the harbinger of a New Humanist Age, one enthusiastic about novelty (Grafton). According to this view, data mined from a “New World” revolutionized a bookish commitment to old geographies, and a medieval culture enamored with the power of tradition. This talk, drawn from the culminating chapter of my forthcoming book, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation, argues instead that the apparent opposition between “tradition” and “novelty” needs to be rethought, and that the case of Columbus can sharpen this rethinking. Early editions of the Letters of Columbus (such as those held at IU’s Lilly Library) demonstrate what it means that Columbus’s “New World” claims depended on a diverse set of recursions and repetitions, some imaginative, some editorial, some technical, and some desirous. I conclude by assessing the implications of this rethinking for the state of the question of “innovation” in the contemporary University.

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