Donald Beecher will give a lecture entitled entitled .
Donald Beecher is Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His scholarly interests and publications range from early music to the history of Renaissance medicine.
He is series director of the Carleton Renaissance Plays and the publications of The Barnabe Riche Society (early English prose fiction), to which he has contributed several critical editions. In all Professor Beecher has edited 11 books on a variety of Renaissance topics.
As publisher of Dovehouse Editions, he produced 55 performing editions of Renaissance & Baroque music for viola da gamba, which are highly regarded in the early music field.
He has received many professional honours including fellowships for study in Birmingham, England and Montpellier, France
Donald Beecher has had a lifelong passion for Renaissance studies. He has followed several critical orientations during his career from new historicism to most recently, cognitive approaches to literature.
In his profile on the Carleton University website he says “Much of my long term research has been caught up with scholarly editing, a way of realizing the joys and conquests that come with restoring deserving authors from the Renaissance through critical and historical editions. Currently I am editing the 73 stories of Francesco Straparola’s Piacevoli notti (1550); past projects include the works of such English authors as George Gascoigne, Barnabe Riche, Thomas Lodge, John Dickenson, and Sir Thomas Overbury.
My critical writing is eclectic, vacillating between the history of ideas and cognitive approaches to literature. For a number of years I explored the medico-literary relationships arising from lovesickness—intellectual history almost entirely. This work includes editions of Jacques Ferrand’s Treatise on Lovesickness (1623) in both French and English. But when, in more recent years, I found myself writing about laughter, memory, contagion, suspense, spiritual conversion, mind theatres, and the theatrical dimensions of folk psychology, perspectives from the cognitive philosophers began to appear with increasing frequency.
I am currently working on several projects involving the following topoi: diseases of the imagination, nostalgia, invectives, Ben Jonson, folklore and witchcraft, ideological conflict in the English theatre, and the place of the cognitive sciences in general in the study of Renaissance culture”.
: Associazione Culturale Italo Britannica, Via Farini 35, 40124 Bologna, 051 221249, info@italobritannica.com.
: alle 18.00 il 21 ottobre 2009
: Associazione Culturale Italo Britannica, Via Farini 35, 40124 Bologna |
