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"Shameless": The Sense of a Pejorative, from St. Augustine until Now

Apr 25, 2013
Swift Hall, Common Room
1025 E 58th St,
Chicago, IL 60637
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Co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Workshop

Readers interested in the history of Christian writing are often surprised and nonplussed by the uninhibited polemic they find; scholarship often treats such polemics as obviously pathological. This talk takes one common form of medieval denunciation “the habit of calling” certain opinions and practices “shameless,”as a sort of laboratory specimen, showing what it meant, how it worked, and why serious thinkers took to it. It will suggest that the same judgment, in different words, is still part of scholarly discourse today.