Sanctuary Seminar Series: Safe Harbour in Carthage: Dido
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
The Sanctuary Seminar Series, given by Professor Marina Warner, explores the meaning of sanctuary. The seminars are open to students on the following postgraduate courses: MA Renaissance Studies, MA Medieval Literature and Culture and MPhil/PhD students researching the period 1500-1680.
The concept of sanctuary ranges from a specific holy space, such as a temple or shrine, to a place of safety or refuge, both physical and metaphorical; it is set apart by certain processes from ordinary locales and sites of activity and its special 'sacrosanct' status depends on consensus to continue. It includes ideas of asylum, stronghold, home and inner sanctum or private territory. The medieval law of sanctuary offered a refuge to fugitives in certain churches, whatever the reason for their flight, and a popular sign still says, 'To you this may be a shed. But to me it's a sanctuary.' Sanctuary develops through shared notions about the rights of others and the obligations of hospitality, and therefore contributes to defining the claims of nation and home; these contradictory elements have been formed historically by a complex mesh of taboos, laws, customs and values that still reverberate today, in times when the numbers of refugees, from war, famine, and other dangers are perceived with growing hostility.
The seminars look at how different forms of sanctuary are established.
- How do places become holy, beyond consecrated sites of religious worship?
- What are the laws of hospitality and shelter and how have they changed?
This second seminar focuses on the story of Dido and Aeneas and the founding of Rome, as told in Virgil's Aeneid, dramatized by Christopher Marlowe and translated by John Dryden: Dido founds Carthage in Africa after fleeing Phoenicia, and then offers Aeneas a place of safety in Carthage, but he leaves her for his greater destiny in Italy.
Seminar 2 reading:
- Virgil The Aeneid,trans. John Dryden, Books II, III, IV and VI.
- Burden, Michael, A Woman Scorn'd: Responses to the Dido myth. Faber, l998.
- Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage.
- Henry Purcell/Nahum Tate, Dido & Aeneas, opera.
Contact name:
Euan Griffith