Auerbach Lecture

As part of my three-month Fellowship at the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, I contributed to their Winter Semester 2022/2023 Lecture Series. The lecture took place at 18.00 on Monday, 9 January 2023 at the International House of the University of Cologne. The Auerbach Institute recorded the lecture, and a video of it is available to watch on their website or, if that link ever breaks, directly on YouTube.

The lecture shares a title with the paper I am contributing to the ‘Realism in hagiography’ workshop later this week (Edit: a plain-text draft of the paper is available to read here for anyone interested). However, there ended up being relatively little overlap between the paper and the lecture as I delivered it. I decided on this change out of consideration that the audience at the Auerbach Lecture would be quite different from that who will be joining the workshop. The audience at the Auerbach Lectures contains a mix of backgrounds – some have backgrounds in modern literature and are interested in realism as a framework for reading and interpreting texts, while others are Late Antique and Medieval historians who will inevitably be more familiar with the historical context of the literature than with methodology adapted from literary studies. In the talk I try to bridge the interests for these two distinct audiences, and hope that I succeeded in having something for everyone in the talk.

Thematically the talk is something of a first draft of my thoughts for an introduction to the proceedings of the workshop. While my original concept for the project focused more on the concept of realism and what the use of a realist framework did for our analysis of these sources, in preparing this lecture I became more convinced that the category of ‘hagiography’ was also problematic in its own way and in need of explicit discussion. Whether there is the space for such discussion within the current structure of this project, or whether that is a problem that I need to come back to later, remains to be seen.

Many thanks to everyone who came and to those who asked questions!

January 11th, 2023 by DC Whalin