The Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture was established in 2010 to honor the memory of Virginia Brown, senior fellow at the Pontifical Institute from 1970 until her untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2009. Professor Brown was one of the leading scholars in Beneventan script and she served as editor of Mediaeval Studies and the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum. Her publications in palaeography and classical reception have had a major impact on the discipline. The endowed lecture, held during the Texts & Contexts Seminar, recognizes her great accomplishments and highlights her continued influence on a younger generation of scholars.
In Memoriam for Virginia Brown by Professor James Hankins, Harvard University
Virginia Brown Lectures:
2023 - Fátima Díez-Platas, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, "Mutatas videre formas: manuscripts, miniatures and medieval visual responses to Ovid’s Metamorphoses."
2022 - Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, "The Fragmentation of Medieval Manuscripts: Some Examples from the Library of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto."
2019 - Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University/Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: "Medieval Conceptions of Imitation and the Classical Tradition."
2018 - Siân Echard, University of British Columbia: "Writing (on) History: Annotation in Manuscripts of Medieval British Historians."
2017 - James Hankins, Harvard University: "The I Tatti Library: Adventures in Editing."
2016 - Gregory Hays, University of Virginia: "Mapping Medieval Mythography."
2015 - Erika Kihlmann, Stockholms Universiteit and co-director, Ars edendi: "Sacred Poetry - Secular Practice. Editing and Understanding Medieval Sequence Commentaries."
2014 - Francis Newton, Professor Emeritus, Duke University: "'Lucius Triumps Over His Fortune' (Met. 11.15): Apuleius' Extraordinary Texts and the Extraordinary Monte Cassino Manuscripts That Saved Them for Civilization."
2013 - Julia Haig Gaisser, Eugenia Chase Gould Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College: "Excuses, Excuses: Racy Poetry from Catullus to Joannes Secundas."
2012 - Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University: "Handwritten Marginalia in Early Printed Virgil Editions."
2011 - Susan L'Engle, Assistant Director, Vatican Film Library: "Dice, Daggers, and Divination: Decoding Reader's Glosses to the Corpus of Roman Law."
2010 - Jacqueline Hamesse, Professor Emeritus, Université Catholique de Louvain: "The De Spiritu et Anima and its Enigma."