Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Culture
Chair: Erica Zou
Manuel Magán Abollo (Madrid/Warburg Institute): Some Ideas of Geography and Space in the Cantigas of Santa Maria
Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford): The Design of Montaigne's Essais
Manuel Magán Abollo is a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the History of Medieval Art Departament in the Complutense University of Madrid (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), where he is working on his PhD thesis El espacio en las Cantigas de Santa María. He has received a B.A. in History of Art from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain), a M.A. in Medieval Studies and another M.A. in ‘Teacher Training: Secondary and Upper Secondary Education’, both from the same university.
Vittoria Fallanca completed a BA in philosophy at the university of Cambridge and an Mst in French at the university of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, also undertaken at Oxford, looks at the use of the word 'dessein' (aim/Intention but also material plan/design) by Montaigne. She argues that the author of the Essais uses this word in such a way as to tease out those aspects of writing that are akin to the process of drawing as understood by some Renaissance art theorists.
Abstracts
Manuel
Magán Abollo (Madrid/Warburg Institute): Some
Ideas of Geography and Space in the Cantigas of Santa Maria
The Cantigas de Santa María are a set poems (many of them contain their own images and music)
written in Galician by the King Alfonso X and dedicated to praise the Virgin Mary by singing some of her alleged miracles. Despite being a devotional work, it transcends the religious field and proposes a tour around European, Asian and North African territories
through a wide range of geographic references and ways of depicting places or other parts of the space itself, like architecture. Despite the interest of studying space and geography in the Cantigas de Santa María, this type of analysis has never been carried
out. Thus, through systematic studies of spatial references, my work aims to make a first reading of the aforementioned medieval corpus under the perspective of Literary Geography and Geocriticism. Moreover, these theories will be applied under the History
of Art perspective and using technologies and approaches from Digital Humanities. This communication aims to explain, briefly, the main objectives and work progress of the PhD thesis El espacio en las Cantigas de Santa María, supervised by María Victoria Chico
Picaza (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Elvira Fidalgo Francisco (Uinversidade de Santiago de Compostela).
Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford): The
Design of Montaigne's Essais
This paper
looks at the notion of ‘design’ in the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Montaigne’s Essais. Montaigne uses the word design (‘dessein’ in French) in ways that make use of the full spectrum of semantic possibilities offered by the word: from denoting
a mental aim or intention to a material plan or drawing. Indeed, writing at a time when the French word for drawing, ‘dessin’, was not yet in use, Montaigne uses its cognate ‘dessein’ in ways that evoke the more material and visual dimensions of design, often,
crucially, to characterise his own project, and practice, of writing. In my presentation I consider some instances of the word ‘dessein’ across the Essais to draw out Montaigne’s particular approach to the creative process – both in terms of authorial intention
and material production - and then compare these to a selection of uses of the word ‘disegno’ by Italian art theorists active in the years before, during and after the Essais were written. I argue that this comparison affords us important insights into Renaissance
attitudes to design and offers new perspectives on Renaissance enactments of the Horatian dictum ‘ut pictura poesis’.