Folger Institute Seminar: “The Visual Art of Grammar” (by registration only)

“The Visual Art of Grammar: Iconographies of Language from Europe to the Americas”

This event is by registration only, with priority in admission accorded to faculty members, postdoctoral scholars, and advanced graduate students. The deadline to enroll is September 3, 2019. Apply.

Grammar was the cornerstone of Renaissance humanism. The design and decoration of manuscripts and books devoted to the discipline signaled its importance, while elaborate diagrams and allegorical illustrations gave a fuller impression of the vital role of grammar in education. Such visualizations could acquire deeper significance, given the connection in ancient Greek between gramma, “drawing” or “letter,” and grammatike, source of the Latin grammatica. Further depictions and emblems were devised by creole and native artists in the Americas, as missionary linguists applied the European art of grammar to the systematization of indigenous languages in the New World. This interdisciplinary seminar will welcome up to sixteen faculty and graduate student participants to consider the early modern iconography of grammar as a basis for exploring broader historical conceptions of the relation between language and the visual field. Participants will also have the opportunity to examine copies of relevant Renaissance texts from the John Hay Library as well as a number of grammars, artes (manuals), and vocabularies of American languages in the John Carter Brown Library.

Director: Andrew Laird is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University. His books include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Epic of America (Bloomsbury, 2006) and Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (Wiley, 2018). His most recent publications treat the relation of Latin to Amerindian languages, and the influence of European humanism on missionaries and native scholars in post-conquest Mexico. The seminar will be joined by Ahuvia Kahane (Trinity College Dublin).

This event is presented by the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World.

Cogut Institute for the Humanities

History, Cultural Studies, Languages, Humanities, Early Modern World