A Celebration in Honor of David Hult
Monday, May 2, 2022, 2:30-6:00
4229 Dwinelle Hall (French Library)

2:30
Mary Franklin-Brown (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge) “The Architecture of Song.”

This talk will examine two sets of architectural remains—the Chertsey tile and the ducal hall built for Richard Cœur de Lion in Poitiers—in the light of lyric form and Pythagorean harmony.

3:30
Spencer Strub (Princeton University) “‘Lancelot’s Shame’ and the Philology of Emotion.”

This talk resituates David Hult’s 1988 “Lancelot's Shame” as a pioneering essay in the history of emotions anticipating later lexical-cultural studies. By way of case example, the talk turns to Middle English "shame" and its cognates, borrowing Hult’s insights about the historical flux between social and internalized emotion in order to read a later generation of literature in a different language tradition.

R. D. Perry (University of Denver) “Charles d’Orléans’s Auto-Allegoresis”

This talk reads Charles d’Orléans’s English poetry in conversation with his French works in order to understand it as an experiment in the allegoresis of the writing self.

4:30
Lukas Ovrom (Emory University) "Learning from Mistakes"

In this talk, I return briefly to the first project that I worked on under David Hult's direction, a study of reworking and scribal error in the manuscript tradition of the Old French Death of King Arthur, in order to ask, To what extent were the things that we now label "errors" apparent to readers of the past? And in what sense are modern readers in a better position to differentiate between choice and accident in a medieval manuscript culture? 

Noah Guynn (UC Davis) “Honoring David Hult, Mentor and Friend”

A reception will follow the talks.