Bennett Lecture: Rita Copeland, Politics, Ethics, Style: Why Giles of Rome’s 'De regimine principum'?

W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Rita Copeland, will deliver the annual Bennett Lecture, with her talk, Politics, Ethics, Style: Why Giles of Rome’s 'De regimine principum'?

Join us in person at 4 pm in Alumni Hall 400, or register to receive the Zoom link to attend virtually. A reception to be held in the Shook Common Room at PIMS (59 Queen's Park Crescent East) will follow the lecture.

ZOOM Registration: 2025 Bennett Lecture: Rita Copeland

Abstract

Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (c. 1281) was the most influential and widely diffused “mirror of princes” in the Middle Ages, surviving in nearly 400 manuscripts in Latin and vernacular, and in at least six printings through the early seventeenth century.  But why was a work dedicated to a king and aimed at rulers so extraordinarily popular with readers of many different estates?  In this lecture I consider this book as a meeting point for different kinds of reading practices and textual cultures:  of academic readers who used it alongside the new Aristotelian moral philosophy: of pastoral readers who combed it for homiletic themes; of vernacular readers who valued its pedagogical method and its interface with literary genres; and finally its role in a much larger and long-lived enterprise, the making of vernacular philosophical prose, the “translation” of a philosophical style into vernacular writing.

Biography

Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991); Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2001); Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter; Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck; 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558 (2016), and most recently, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021), winner of the 2025 Haskins Medal. She was a co-founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. She is General Editor (with the late Peter Mack) of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric in five volumes. She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.  She has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, University of Iceland, and University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.