UCLA holds one of the largest groupings of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts in the Americas, yet little is known about their provenance. This event will shed light on the sources of some of UCLA’s twenty collections of manuscripts in Arabic script. This event will draw attention to manuscript provenance by hosting five talks from […]
Previously scheduled for January 23, 2026. The UCLA Medieval Texts Reading Group welcomes undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty interested in medieval literature. On the third Friday of each term, we meet to discuss a text in English translation from across the Global Middle Ages and consider what it tells us about its cultural […]
Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and […]
This talk explores Chaucer’s depictions of love alongside Avicenna’s Treatise on Love and related Arabic medical and philosophical texts that circulated in Latin. It explores how an Arabic-Islamic metaphysics of love shaped by Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Sufi thought can reshape our understanding of fin’amors in Middle English poetry. Rather than simply tracing “influence,” I ask how we […]
“The Origins of the Authorial Colophon in the Latin West” Guest Speaker: Daniel Hobbins (University of Notre Dame) In the early twelfth century, a group of translators working in Iberia began supplying their works with colophons as though they were scribes. They simply replaced the date of copy with the date of composition. Modern scholarship […]
Guest Speaker: Hannah Weaver (Columbia University) On the basis of manuscript evidence and a textual tradition that includes Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Chaucer, this paper traces the uneven capacity of cloth to communicate. Hannah Weaver is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of articles on Latin […]
Late Antique eXcursus (LAX) is a new seminar series at UCLA sponsored by the Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval History and by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. The series, which hosts a visiting scholar of Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages each quarter, is designed to support graduate education, make […]
“‘Breedlings’ and the ‘most sad Fenns’: Perceptions of Untameable Places and People in Samuel Pepys’s England” Guest Speaker: Molly Warsh (University of Pittsburgh) In this talk, Warsh will consider Pepys’s observations about the English fens and their inhabitants in the context of shifting seventeenth century ideas about what made certain places and people wild. With Pepys’s […]
“Ilícita Amistad: Women’s Plural Relationships in Bigamy Cases of Colonial Mexico” Guest Speaker: Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles (History) This paper examines ilícita amistad—illicit or informal romantic relationships—as a central feature of women’s lives in colonial Mexico, particularly as revealed through bigamy cases prosecuted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico City […]
The series, which hosts a visiting scholar of Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages each quarter, is designed to support graduate education, make new connections across our community of scholars in southern California, and explore exciting projects-in-progress in the field. Stefan Esders (Freie Universität Berlin) will question forced baptism in Late Antiquity Register to […]