Online talks: Apocalyptic Renaissance, Teaching Power in History, Inquisition, Rare Books

Hello, readers! The past few weeks have been very intense for me with the 2021 run of my Papal Election Simulation, but I wanted to post some links and announcements about a couple of free online talks, two recent and two upcoming. 

One is today (May 13th) at 5:30 PM Central time on “The Apocalyptic Renaissance” for the U Chicago Smart Museum of Art’s fabulous new exhibit Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe.” I’ll be presenting some material from my book in progress “Why We Keep Telling the Myth of the Renaissance.” Sign up for free at this link.

The second  is a talk on Saturday at 1 PM Central time for the Chicago Women’s Alliance (also free and open to anyone) on “Who Has the Power to Change History?” in which I’m going to talk about my teaching and how I use historical reenactments and role-playing to teach better ways of thinking about power, what really controls change (individuals, great forces, both?), and thus encourage feelings of empowerment and activism. Several former students will be joining me to talk about how the role-playing elements of my teaching changed the way they think about history and power and how they apply that in their activities. I’m really excited to discuss the question with my students there too. Sign up for free at this link.

And two other recent things I did which are now online:

I did a fun interview for History Hacks podcast, about The Inquisition(s) and the history of censorship (drawing on my research).

And I did a video lecture for the Paideia Institute about Recovering a Lost Classic in the Renaissance, with webcam footage of some real 16th century books and manuscript samples from my book history teaching collection. So excited to have a webcam I can do that with; hoping to do more like that this summer!
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5 Responses to “Online talks: Apocalyptic Renaissance, Teaching Power in History, Inquisition, Rare Books”

  1. Hello.
    Thank you for this post.
    The link to your Paideia Institute talk is missing.
    Here it is: https://youtu.be/PHM9fySEvc0
    Best.

  2. […] May 13) Online talks: Apocalyptic Renaissance, Teaching Power in History, Inquisition, Rare Books. https://www.exurbe.com/5546-2. […]

  3. James McKay said:

    I got here in a round about way. Having watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in which the Winter Soldier asked Baron Zemo what he was reading, he said Machiavelli. And upon closer look thru youtube commentators the book was actually Fortune is a River.

    So I bought the book, read it, still re-reading it now, and watched the Borgias (Borgia isn’t on Netflix anymore but the Showtime series is still up). Then I google truth and fiction of the series which got me to your site.

    I’m happy I got here. And since ExUrbe doesn’t seem to have search function, do you have more on Da Vince and Machiavelli? thanks!

  4. Nancy Lebovitz said:

    Thank you very much for this. Is there any way to tell what effect the Inquistions had? That seems like an even larger and more chaotic topic, but perhaps a little can be found out.

    You say that the only thorough way to prevent censorship is for people to become more courageous, but how do we get from here to there? Also, while there’s no institutional way to absolutely prevent censorship, I’m hoping that legal structures like the first amendment at least supply some tools for pushing back.

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