Quilligan

Embattled female rulers will be the subject of the annual Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Maureen Quilligan, the Department of English’s 2015 M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor. “When Women Ruled the World: the Synergies of Female Sovereignty in the Renaissance” will be held Thursday, Nov. 5, at 4:30 p.m. in the A.D. White House.

“Professor Quilligan has a genius for bringing forward out of the past what is fascinating and relevant – to everyone, not just scholars of the European Renaissance. She is truly an inspiring intellectual presence,” says Rayna Kalas, associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences.

History usually presents Catherine de Médicis, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor as competitors, but Quilligan notes that they referred to each other as “sister” and even “daughter,” signs of their shared experience as they faced down resistance to their reigns. “The successes and failures of one had an undeniable influence on the policies of the others,” says Quilligan, who is teaching a seminar on the topic this fall.

“It’s been a special thrill for me to welcome Maureen Quilligan to Cornell this year,” says Roger Gilbert, professor and chair of English. “I took her graduate seminar on “The Faerie Queene” at Yale in 1983, and I’m sitting in on the same class she’s teaching here – she’s just as brilliant and funny as I remember.”

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Quilligan earned her doctorate at Harvard University and has taught Renaissance English literature for 42 years at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania and now at Duke University. She has published four books on medieval and Renaissance texts and has co-edited three collections of essays. This summer, she wrote a play about a woman enslaved as a teenager in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and who went on to become the “Oscar de la Renta” of Civil War Washington and a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln. Quilligan’s current book project examines female political authority in the 16th century.

This year, the English department will offer a new approach to the seminar accompanying the Gottschalk Lecture. Quilligan will join Ann Rosalind Jones, Ph.D. ’76, the Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Smith College, for a collaborative discussion, “Textiles as Political and Public Array.” Jones is author, with Peter Stallybrass, of “Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory.” The seminar will be held Friday, Oct. 30, at 10 a.m. in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. RSVP to LBL3@cornell.edu; seminar materials are available at on the English department website.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of “The Meanings of Hamlet,” who died in 1977 at the age of 38.

The M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professorship was established in honor of Abrams and his contributions to Cornell and the field of English. The professorship was made possible by a gift from Stephen H. Weiss ’57, former chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.