Ellen Arnold to Speak in Vienna
Rachel Carson Center Lecture, 51. Mini-Symposium of the Center for Environmental History
21.03.2013 at 18:00
The first Rachel Carson Center Lecture in this symposium series, her presentation will attempt to assess the "environmental imagination" of the early Middle Ages in Gaul by examining the poems, letters, and religious writings of three men: Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Venantius Fortunatus.
Arnold will “discuss the ways in which the poets described and used rivers in their writings, and how rivers helped them to present and negotiate complex issues of ethnic, cultural, and political identity. The rivers of Gaul, on the one hand fixed and permanent, on the other always shifting and changing their courses, came to stand in for the problems of defining, marking, and bounding the many ethnicities of the Roman and post-Roman world.”