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Samuel Zeitlin – Geopolitics & Political Thought in the Twentieth Century

Hinton Seminar Room Worcester College, Oxford

In the second Pharos Tuesday Seminar, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin shifts the focus to the liberal conservative political theorist Raymond Aron, examining his relationship with the German jurist Carl Schmitt to draw out two vastly contrasting perspectives on the international politics of the last century. The first lectures will examine Schmitt’s analysis of the First World War, his critique of the League of Nations, and his characteristic approach to the history of political thought. The final lecture will consider Raymond Aron’s response to Schmitt’s political thought, particularly on matters of foreign policy international affairs, in Aron’s studies of Clausewitz and of international relations. The lectures will also consider the Schmitt-Aron correspondence.

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a distinguished historian of political ideas at University College London. He has worked extensively on the thought of Sir Francis Bacon, alongside Continental theorists of the twentieth century.

Free

Alexander Marr – Art & Wit in the Renaissance

Noel Salter Room New College, Holywell Street, Oxford

From the satirical barbs of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) to the urbane games of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), wit was a serious subject in the Renaissance, addressed in natural philosophy and medicine as the intellective part of the human soul, in artistic theory as the wellspring of creativity, and in criticism as one of the most important markers of authorial voice. Yet wit’s visual fortunes in the period have barely been explored.

Visual wit was a kind of pictorial ingenuity, through which artists sought to rebut the humanist claim that by imitating nature they were merely replicators, not inventors. Hans Holbein the Younger, in particular, engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare with the humanists he knew and portrayed, including Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, appropriating their ingenious techniques of ambiguity, self-contradiction, and disguise in a playful contest between painting and poetry.

This series of lectures will trace visual wit in Holbein’s hands, as he evoked breath, voice, and brain through cunning conceits such as More’s ambivalent half-smile and Erasmus’s keen nose. In so doing, we will touch on some major themes in sixteenth-century culture: the complex nature of ‘character’; disputes over biological and artistic parentage; the paradox of lively death; and the vexed relationship between the thinking mind and skilled hand.

Dr Alexander Marr FSA is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and President of Leonardo da Vinci Society. His most recent book is Rubens's Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius, (2021).

Free

Elizabeth Roberts – Montenegro: Realm of the Black Mountain

Old Dining Hall St Edmund Hall, Queen's Lane, Oxford

Montenegro was admitted to the UN as its 192nd member in June 2006, thus recovering the independence it had lost nearly ninety years earlier at the Versailles Peace Conference. Realm of the Black Mountain is the first full-length history of the country in English for a century, tracing the history of the tiny Balkan state from its earliest roots in the medieval empire of Zeta through its consistently ambiguous and frequently problematic relationship with its larger neighbour Serbia, the emergence of a priest/warrior ruler in the shape of the Vladika and its emergence from Ottoman suzerainty state at the Congress of Berlin. More recently, the book focuses on its troubled twentieth century history, its prominent role in the Balkan wars, its unique deletion from world maps as an independent state despite being on the winning side in the Great War, its ignominious role in the wars leading to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its final reemergence as a member of the international community on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 2006.

Lady Elizabeth Roberts is a Balkan scholar and former diplomat. She has taught Southeast European History at universities in the United States and Ireland. Roberts is also the co-author, with Kenneth Morrison, of The Sandžak: A History (2013)

Free