Professor Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia

30th April, 1st, 7th and 8th May 2013

Mark Vessey is Professor of English, University of British Columbia. His research interests include Jerome, Augustine and Latin late antiquity; Erasmus and the literary Renaissance; classical and Christian traditions in European literature.

Writing before Literature: Later Latin Scriptures and the Memory of Rome

No other city has written its name across time, space, language and culture like Rome. Configured in the late republican and Augustan eras and updated as required in the early Empire, the signifying codes of an assimilative and multiethnic Romanity were comprehensively revised by emperors, artists and ideologues of late antiquity in both East and West. At the same time, they were converted to the ends of a Christian universalism that transcended the limits of Rome's empire. These lectures explore the process as it unfolded in the Latin West in the generation of Jerome and Augustine, and reflect upon its implications in the scriptures/literatures of European, western and global romance, romanticism, and post-romanticism.

Lecture One: Legends of the Fall

Lecture Two: Masters of Memory

Lecture Three: Acts of Scripture

Lecture Four: European Literature and Latin Late Antiquity