Please join the Department of English for lectures by faculty members Chris Crosbie and Timothy Stinson.

Crosbie's lecture is titled "Reading Intention in Shakespeare’s England: Communitarian Ethics and the Art of Social Settlement." Crosbie will briefly sketch the ethical frameworks early moderns used for reading claims of intentionality and then turn to three snapshots from Shakespearean drama — Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar and Henry IV, Part 1 — to consider how the stage offers up models for utilizing, in the service of communal good, the flexibilities inherent in responding to others’ unknown intentions.

Stinson's lecture is titled "Avenging Christ: Vengeance, Devotion and Violence in Late Medieval England." Stinson will present on his monograph project, Avenging Christ, which reframes the discourse surrounding how narratives of Jerusalem’s fall were read and understood in medieval England and fills a significant void in the history of Judeo-Christian relations and in English literary history. The overarching argument of the book is that the narrative of Jerusalem’s destruction played three important roles:

• Shaping Christian self-identity in opposition to Judaism. 
• Inscribing Rome’s imperial and religious centrality as a model for emerging English national identity.
• Providing both inspiration and a paradigm for crusading activity aimed at recapturing the Holy Land.