Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/23/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Matt Ancell, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, joins the Humanities Center as this week’s colloquium speaker on Thursday, January 23rd at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. He will be discussing his recent research into Calderón’s works and the uncertainty and conflicts of the English Reformation as portrayed in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors. We hope you’ll join us.
Title: “A World with Two Suns: Skeptical Faith in Calderón de la Barca The Schism in England”
My project proposes that what is at play in Calderón is an aesthetic expression of skeptical arguments that increasingly found purchase as received knowledge came under attack. By the late sixteenth-century, a complex of factors challenged world views and promoted a growing epistemological doubt that found confirmation in Greek skepticism. This philosophical position is articulated by the Sophists as dissoi logoi, originally a rhetorical term indicating that there are two sides to any particular argument, that expands to describe the conflicted nature of the universe itself and finds expression in the intractable predicaments of tragedy’s protagonists.
While the larger project samples Calderón’s corpus and traces his tragically skeptical point of view as it fits within his faithful worldview, this presentation examines Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533) as a representation of the circumstances leading to the English Supremacy and its effects on the European stage, particularly Calderón’s La cisma de Inglaterra [The Schism in England] and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The painting is, in a sense, a drama. The “plot” of this spectacle locates the observer in a position of doubt regarding the proper perspective regarding the proper point of view and reading of the work, and thus as uncertain about the very source of truth. Seen from different perspectives, the structural ambiguity of the anamorphic painting enacts the epistemological crisis and disharmony of the English Reformation and its reverberations on the rest of Europe.
About our presenter:
Matthew Ancell received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and is now Associate Professor of Humanities and Section Head of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. His research interests include the Baroque in Spain and Italy, early-modern skepticism, and deconstruction. He has published articles on Luis de Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, Diego Velázquez, and Jacques Derrida in venues such as Oxford Art Journal, Hispanic Review, Renaissance Drama, The Comparatist, Montaigne Studies, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
