Torment and Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City

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Organized by the Early Modern Research Workshop
Henry Berlin (RLL) and Erik Seeman (HIS), Coordinators

This symposium examines what was distinct about early modern violence. The growth of state power, dramatic religious changes, and the emergence of race-based slavery all shaped early modern violence and how it was represented in literature. Echoes of that violence are with us today.

The four presenters are:

• Susan Juster (Michigan, History)
• Hal Langfur (UB, History)
• Nicole Legnani (Princeton, Spanish and Portuguese)
• Cynthia Nazarian (Northwestern, French and Italian)

Schedule

Friday, Sept. 28, Park Hall 280

9:45 am | Welcome and coffee

• Erik Seeman (UB, History)

10:00 am – 12:00 pm | Session 1: Race and Violence

• Moderator: Carla Mazzio, (UB, English)
• Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil – Hal Langfur (UB, History)
• Loving Violence in Ercilla’s Araucana and Oña’s Arauco domado – Nicole Legnani (Princeton, Spanish and Portuguese)

12:00 pm – 1:00 pm | Lunch (free with advance registration)

1:00 pm – 3:00 pm | Session 2: Religion and Violence

• Moderator: Stephanie Schmidt (UB, Romance Languages)
• God’s Wounds! Blasphemy and the Violence of Language in Early America – Susan Juster (Michigan, History)
• Sacred Suffering, Unholy Ends: D’Aubigné’s Martyrdoms – Cynthia Nazarian (Northwestern, French and Italian)

3:15 pm – 4:15 pm | Roundtable Conversation

• Moderator: Amy Graves Monroe (UB, Romance Languages)

This event is free, but registration required. Lunch is included for those that register by Wednesday, Sept. 26. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Co-sponsors: The UB Humanities Institute’s Conferences and Symposia Fund with the UB Departments of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and English.

Abstracts

Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil

Hal Langfur (UB, History)

The history of racial violence in colonial Brazil can be understood as a transatlantic “coercive pedagogy.”  Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper identifies practices refined by colonial authorities to teach Portuguese settlers, as well as peoples of indigenous and African descent, the parameters governing the permissible use of force.  Langfur’s aim is to clarify how colonizers came to accept violence organized along racial lines.  Far from inevitable, this learned consent required the relentless forging of a system of reeducation whose origins and intricacies remain poorly understood.

Loving Violence in Ercilla’s Araucana and Oña’s Arauco domado

Nicole Legnani (Princeton, Spanish and Portuguese)

If the virility of the victor is traditionally encoded in the preference for war and public spaces, whereas the femininity of the vanquished is encoded in a preference for love and private spaces, Fresia’s public disavowal of her husband Caupolicán with furia – usually ascribed to male warriors – has proved troublesome for many critics of Alonso de Ercilla’s Araucana (1569-1589). This paper reads Fresia and Caupolican’s marriage as both an allusion to and a reversal of book 6 in the Iliad and book 4 in the Aeneid. Legnani argues that these reversals perform a “loving violence” – both troubled and troubling – against the potential of genealogical succession among native elites in Chile.  The paper concludes by reading the Araucana in light of the criollo Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado (1596).

God’s Wounds! Blasphemy and the Violence of Language in Early America

Susan Juster (Michigan, History)

In early modern Anglo-America, blasphemy – reviling and cursing God – was considered a form of religious violence, and magistrates used violence to punish blasphemers. Although modern legal scholars consider blasphemy a victimless crime, early modern men and women understood the harm done by the blasphemous tongue to be directed at the corporeal body of Christ and his church. This paper explores several cases of blasphemy in the seventeenth-century English colonies to highlight linkages between language, religious violence, and sexual transgression.

Sacred Suffering, Unholy Ends: D’Aubigné’s Martyrdoms

Cynthia Nazarian (Northwestern, French and Italian)

This paper explores how Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné’s religious and love poems traffic in the language of martyrdom. Written in the midst of the French civil Wars of Religion (c.1562-1598), these poems feature spectacular – and oddly similar – violent imagery. In D’Aubigné’s verses, the real brutalization of French Protestants clashes against metaphors of love for a tyrannical Beloved to produce new ways of thinking about endurance and suffering.