Anna Majeski
From Cethyn to Sicily: The Worlds of Georgius Fendulus’s “Liber astrologicae”

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was an explosion in the circulation of astrological knowledge throughout the Mediterranean. Retracing the movement of these ideas allows us to explore encounters between ways of seeing and understanding the cosmos, and breaks down essentialist notions of culturally specific cosmologies. The illuminated manuscript known as the Liber astrologiae—produced for the southern Italian court of Frederick II ca. 1220–40—offers particularly fruitful ground for exploring the circulation of astrological knowledge that was critical to the emergence of a new scientific culture in the medieval Latin West. Anna Majeski uses the concept of “translation” to deconstruct essentialist notions of scientific knowledge that have shaped the readings of this manuscript. Moreover, by homing in on one specific object, she examines translation as an empirical process that occurs through specific triangulations between texts, objects, and individuals—rather than as an encounter between cultural monoliths. Finally, she will ask how the translation of images in this manuscript operates differently than the translation of texts.

Majeski is the Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Marcel Sanchez Prieto
Architectural divides: Verticality of a sociopolitical landscape

The eighteenth-century palazzo in Naples and its reconfiguration between the portal, courtyard, and stair responds to a series of limits/thresholds imposed under Spanish rule that have been contested through time, unraveling the politics of space and, in many cases, creating unique conditions between power, city dwelling, and the architecture that frames it.

Marcel Sanchez Prieto is the Frances Barker Tracy/Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, a partner at CRO Studio in San Diego and Tijuana, and professor in the School of Architecture at Woodbury University.

The event will be held in English. Watch Majeski’s shoptalk live at https://livestream.com/aarome.