Name: Holy Fools and Peasant Liberation: Medieval History and Post-War Italian Cinema
Start: 2024-10-24T17:30:00+10:00
End: 2024-10-24T19:00:00+10:00
Location: Museo Italiano, 199 Faraday St, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

You are invited to the 2024 Louis Green Lecture
Holy Fools and Peasant Liberation:
Medieval History and Post-War Italian Cinema
A lecture by Professor Clare Monagle (Macquarie University)
Thursday 24 October 2024, 6.30-8pm at CO.AS.IT., 199 Faraday Street, Carlton
Free event. Registration essential here: https://www.coasit.com.au/l-green-memorial-lecture
St. Francis of Assisi (and his movement) received a great deal of cinematic attention in Italy after World War II. Film makers such as Roberto Rossellini, Liliana Cavani, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Franco Zeffirelli meditated upon Francis’ radical commitment to poverty and the natural world, and considered its implications for a nation reeling from its experiences of fascism and military defeat. This lecture will place these filmic representations of Francis within the long historical tradition of thinking through Francis in Italian social and intellectual history, exploring his ongoing meaning as a figure of counter-cultural resistance to economic norms, be they feudal, mercantile or capitalist.
Clare Monagle is Professor of History in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. She is interested in the history of intellectuals in the Middle Ages and in the histories of the institutions that housed them. She is currently engaged with the uses of gendered categories in scholastic thought between 1150 and 1520. Her work is also concerned with the “medievalism” of twentieth and twenty-first century thought, that is, the uses to which the concept of the medieval is put within definitions of modernity and progress. She is the author of Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the Development of Theology (2013) and co-author (with C. James, D. Garrioch, and B. Caine) of European Women’s Letter-Writing from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries (2023). Among other works, she has edited The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages (2021) and co-edited (with D. Vardoulakis) The Politics of Nothing: On Sovereignty (2013). She has written many books and articles on medieval thought, the history of emotions, modern Catholic thought, and medievalism.
The Louis Green Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture on intellectual and social history in honour of the distinguished Monash University historian Louis Green. It is jointly organised by the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, and is endowed by Adjunct Professor Wallace Kirsop FAHA.