Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Nancy Bilyeau, “The Tapestry: A Novel”
    May 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Nancy Bilyeau will share excerpts from the latest installment in her award-winning Joanna Stafford series, The Tapestry. The novel takes place in Tudor England, with Joanna, a Dominican novice, struggling to survive the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII. Set in a world of royal banquets and feasts, tournament jousts, ship voyages, and Tower Hill executions, this thrilling tale finds Joanna in her most dangerous situation yet, as she attempts to decide the life she wants to live: nun or wife, spy or subject, rebel or courtier. Bilyeau will also discuss the research she undertook into Renaissance tapestries and the art of Hans Holbein, which she did in preparation for writing the book.
    39 min
  • Lauren Meier, “Frederick Law Olmsted's Legacy of Public Parks”
    April 27, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In this collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservatory, Lauren Meier will highlight the parks, parkways, park systems, and scenic reservations featured in the latest volume of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks. She will also explore the park design legacy of the Olmsted firm, which carried Olmsted’s innovation into the 20th century.
    56 min
  • Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, “Opinel: Poems”
    April 26, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Opinel is the name of a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps. Like the knife, these poems cleave away the false and deceptive to reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland—from Ezekiel’s Flight and the Book of Kells, to tales of the Tamil goddess, Meenakshi.
    29 min
  • Rosanna Warren, “Graffiti: New Poems”
    April 14, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Rosanna Warren will read poems from her most recent collection, Ghost in a Red Hat, and from a forthcoming chapbook, Graffiti. In Ghost in a Red Hat, Warren draws inspiration from her life and from the works of other artists, classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive.
    44 min
  • Richard Buckley, “The King Under the Car Park: The Search for Richard III”
    April 12, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    For centuries, the final resting place of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, remained a mystery. In 2012, a team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester set out to search for the burial site of the king, who died in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Against all odds, the project located the site under a parking lot in central Leicester. In this lecture, Richard Buckley, the leader of the search team, will tell the remarkable story of the search and the complex process of confirming Richard’s identity.
    Find more information at: https://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/
    1 hr 1 min
  • Colin Woodard, “American Character"
    “American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good”
    March 31, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in America’s history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and the run-up to the Civil War, to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.
    In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the two and a half centuries of the nation’s existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them.
    47 min
  • David Derbin Nolta, “The Narrative Technique of Figural Mirroring in Renaissance and Baroque Art”
    March 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    This year’s John Hubbard Sturgis Eaton Endowed Lecture will present the concept of reflectivity as it recurs in Italian painting from the 15th through the 18th centuries. Focusing less on the literal presence of the mirror in art—a topic widely explored—this talk will take on the more mysterious and intriguing connotations of the repetition of figure and pose in painted narratives from Piero della Francesca to Pietro Longhi. Artists considered will also include Botticelli and Caravaggio, each an insightful and original experimenter and exploiter of the human figure as mirror, as well as the potential of figural reflectivity.
    50 min
  • Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman, “Sargent's War”
    March 9, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    For John Singer Sargent, Corsano and Williman argue, the Great War changed everything, particularly after the death of Robert André-Michel, the husband of Sargent’s beloved niece Rose-Marie Ormond. During most of the war, Sargent busied himself with work in London and eventually went to America to escape the realities of war. When Rose-Marie herself was killed in the spring of 1918, Sargent promptly left Boston and traveled to France to paint. Corsano and Williman will discuss Sargent’s reflections on the war, which can be viewed in the murals of the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, among other works.
    51 min
  • Adam Rothman, “Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery”
    February 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In this talk, Adam Rothman will share excerpts from Beyond Freedom’s Reach, the true story of one woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage. In the gripping, meticulously researched account, Adam Rothman lays bare the mayhem of emancipation during and after the Civil War. After Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, the slave-owning De Harts fled to Havana, taking Rose Herera’s three children with them. When Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans in 1865, she was surprised to find herself taken into custody as a kidnapper. As Rothman will share, the case of Rose Herera’s abducted children reveals to the reader the prospects and limits of justice that existed during Reconstruction. In his book and during the talk, Rothman will offer a poignant reflection on the tangled politics of slavery and the hazards that were faced by so many Americans on the hard road to freedom.
    42 min

About Boston Athenaeum

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The Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, first opened its doors in 1807, and its rich history as a library and cultural institution has been well documented in the annals of Boston’s cultural life.…