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Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Illuminated manuscript in Bishop Cosin's Library, Palace Green

Slater Lecture: Dominique Brancher (Yale University), ‘Sign Hunters: From Montaigne’s Spine to Molière's Spy'.

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10 March 2025 - 10 March 2025

5:30PM - 7:00PM

Tunstall Chapel, University College, Durham.

  • Free and open to the public.

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This is an exciting opportunity to hear the Slater Fellow 2024-25, Dominique Brancher (Yale University), explore the reception of two leading French authors in the Tunstall chapel at Castle, in association with IMEMS. It is of particular relevance to those interested in literature, history, medicine…and spy stories.

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What link exists between medical hermeneutics and literary criticism? Between the practice of espionage and the art of deciphering texts? Do they not all seek to uncover some hidden truth?

 

In 1979, the historian Carlo Ginzburg published a much-discussed essay, Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario, which plays on the ambiguity of the Italian word Spie, which means both clues and spies. From the Neolithic hunter to Freud and Conan Doyle, he draws out a hunting model of research and reflection for the human sciences.

 

We would like to put this paradigm to the test through two canonical authors of French literature. What happens when doctors dissect the work of Montaigne? And when one of the founders of the CIA builds one of the largest collections of Molière in the world?

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Free and open to the public.