About the Talk:

Visiting scholar Ardis Butterfield (Yale) will give a public talk titled "Reading Medieval Song" as part of the UT Humanities Center’s 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Songs can bring together music and words in powerful and lastingly memorable ways. Our records of song from the medieval period are tantalizingly incomplete, yet this does not prevent medieval song from captivating modern audiences and performers. Taking examples of songs with English, French, and Latin texts from the 13th to the 15th centuries, this lecture will investigate the strange arts of turning sound into written shape.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is held in Hodges Library’s auditorium on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!

Ardis Butterfield’s visit is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

About the Speaker:

Ardis Butterfield is Marie Borroff Professor of English, Professor of French and Music, at Yale. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002), and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009). Most recently, she has co-edited with Andrew Kraebel and Ian Johnson, Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Alastair Minnis (Cambridge 2003). She is currently completing an edition of medieval English lyrics for Norton, and a book on medieval song: Medieval SongWriting, along with work on untranslatability and medieval global multilingualism.

About the Series:

The UT Humanities Center's Distinguished Lecture Series brings acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus for research-based conversations with UT faculty and graduate students and to give a public talk on a topic of the speaker's choosing. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today. Details on this season's program are available on our website.

Where:

Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101)
John C. Hodges Library (1015 Volunteer Blvd., Knoxville TN)

OR

Via livestream at tiny.utk.edu/DLS-Butterfield