Events & Calendars Biennial Lecture in Honor of Professor Jay L. Caplan: “The Histoire Mémorable Between News and History: Framing Accounts of Current Events in the French Wars of Religion”

Professor Andrea Frisch from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Leibniz Universität Hannover will give the biennial lecture in honor of Professor Jay L. Caplan. Her talk, “The Histoire Mémorable Between News and History: Framing Accounts of Current Events in the French Wars of Religion,” will address the ways in which current or very recent events were packaged generically in the turbulent context of the French Wars of Religion.

“At the center of my investigation is the histoire mémorable, since in 16th-century France – in contrast to her European neighbors – some form of this label was regularly applied to accounts of current events. As a generic indicator, the category is deeply ambiguous: On the one hand, the term 'mémorable' implied a shared inheritance of consensually venerated material that one had a duty to remember, and that was traditionally associated with History; on the other, in the glut of printed matter in the age of confessional conflict, the epithet 'mémorable' was repeatedly attached to material that was recent, undigested and frequently contentious, characteristics more typical of what was coming to be known as news. Ultimately, the histoire mémorable was the terrain upon which personal, polemical, pamphlet-style accounts could make a bid for entry into the long-term, capital-H historical record.”

This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

This event is co-sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series at Amherst, the Amherst College Department of French and the Turgeon Fund.