Newsletter
September 2000  (No. 53)

Professor Harry R. Secor (1924-2000)

This past 29 March, Professor Harry Secor passed away peacefully at his home in Toronto.
     One of the founders of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in 1963-64, Professor Secor served as its second Director during the difficult years of the early 1970s when severe financial cutbacks threatened the growth and future of the fledgling CRRS.
     During his 37 years of close involvement with the CRRS, Professor Secor worked untiringly to develop and strengthen the CRRS library, and especially its holdings of sixteenth-century editions and primary sources in Renaissance French literature.
     Professor Secor was also, in a way, the co-founder of the Renaissance Studies Programme at Victoria College - in the mid-1970s, together with Professor Ruth Harvey he introduced the VIC 240Y course, "Renaissance Culture", thus providing the initiative for a series of interdisciplinary courses that, today, constitute the very successful Renaissance Studies Programme. At his retirement in July 1990 the CRRS recognized publicly his devotion to teaching by instituting a prize in his honour for the best essay written in the second-year Vic Renaissance course. Until last year, when his illness prevented him from doing so, Professor Secor eagerly took part in the adjudication and the awarding of the prize. We will all miss him greatly.
      In recognition of his love for the Renaissance, Prof. Secor's family has indicated that donations in his memory may be directed to the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. His family has also decided to donate many volumes from Professor Secor's personal collection to the CRRS, thus continuing the legacy that he had begun nearly forty years ago.

NEWS

Directors, old and new. This past 30 June Konrad Eisenbichler finished his second term as Director of the CRRS, thus completing ten years at the helm. On 1 July the R&R ship passed under the command of William R. Bowen, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. Bowen knows the CRRS from the keel  up, having first come on board as a Graduate Fellow in 1982. In the 1990s he  served as Associate Director (1990-2000) and as Acting Director (1996-97), not to mention his many years on the Publications Committee, the Electronic Committee, and others. We all wish him and the CRRS the best and we look forward to a splendid voyage together over the next five years.

Curators, old and new. Our Curator, Dr Michael Milway, resigned his position this past April in order to follow his family to the Boston area, where his wife Katie has accepted a promotion and transfer. In his three years at the CRRS Michael contributed tremendously to the vitality and well being of the Centre. He will be greatly missed. His successor is Dr Victor Thiessen, a graduate of Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario). Dr. Thiessen received his Ph.D. in Reformation history with a thesis on the German nobility. He was, for several years, a Visiting Graduate Fellow and, this previous year, a Fellow of the CRRS, so he knows our collection, activities, and community quite well.

A Home! There is much rejoicing at the CRRS. After nearly forty years of camping out on the rear quarter and the walkway of the Pratt mezzanine, the CRRS will soon move to a beautiful, airy, and well-lit space on the third floor of the Pratt building. This new space will finally bring together the collection, the offices, and the display areas. It will provide for 10 carrels and several work tables, for direct access to the Curator and the Director, and for plenty of sunlight (indirect, from the north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows). Across the hallway there will be a room ideal for our Friday seminars and meetings, and next door an electronic class-room. The Pratt library staff will be on the south end of the same floor, thus facilitating communications with the librarians and library technicians that help us so much with the care of the collection.

But still camping out ... While the renovations of the Pratt building are underway, the CRRS has been temporarily relocated to the second floor of the Kelly Library, at St. Michael's College (150 meters to the south). The generosity and hospitality of the Kelly and SMC staff have been incredible. They have provided the CRRS with enough space to house about 80% of the open-stack collection (the other 20%, comprising the entire P-PZ section, is in unretrievable storage for the time), a spacious reading-area, offices for the Curator, and work space for the Publications Manager, not to mention plenty of moral and technical support. The temporary location has placed us in the same building as the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, which has also been extremely supportive of us, putting at our disposal an office for the Director and a secure area for the Erasmus Rare Books collection. We all look forward to our year-and-a-half in the Kelly Library as an opportunity to develop closer ties with our neighbours and partners in scholarly research on pre-modern topics.

The CRRS Graduate Fellows for 2000-01 are Richard Raiswell (History), Margaret Reeves (English), and Monica Dominguez (Fine Art). Mark Crane (History) has been appointed Publications Manager and Jeff Creighton (Classics) continues as Bibliographic Fellow in charge of cataloguing the rare books. A full list of CRRS staff for 2000-2001 can be found here.

Congratulations
This past January Professor Konrad Eisenbichler received the 1999 Howard R. Marraro Prize for his book The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 (University of Toronto Press, 1998). His volume, the first to examine a confraternity for youths in its various aspects (devotional, recreational, social, administrative, etc.) is the fruit of ten years of archival work in Italy. The prize is awarded annually by the American Catholic Historical Association in conjunction with the American Historical Association and the Society for Italian Historical Studies at their meetings during the AHA congress.

Quite a number of past and present CRRS Graduate Fellows and Assistants made significant career moves this past year. After two years of teaching at the University of Buffalo and at Brock University, Mary Watt has now accepted a tenure-track appointment in Italian at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Stephen Pender also defended his thesis and then accepted a tenure-stream appointment in English (17th-cent. British Lit. & Cultural Studies) at the University of Windsor. Having completed two years on a SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Tony Ricci has accepted a three-year appointment as a Research Fellow for the Medici Archive Project and has moved to Florence, Italy. After three years as an Adjunct at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Lisa Celosvki has accepted a tenure-track position in English at Suffolk University in Boston (Mass.). During the first year of her appointment at Suffolk, Lisa will be accompanied by her husband and past CRRS Curator, Dr. Joseph Black, who in 2000-01 will be on sabbatical from the University of Tennessee. Andrew Bethune completed his Ph.D. and accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Albion College (Albion, Michigan). In doing so, Andy is stepping into the position vacated by Professor James W. Cook, himself no stranger to the CRRS; on several occasions Prof. Cook spent either a term or even a full year with us as a Visiting Fellow. In the fall of 1999 Margaret McGeachy defended her thesis. She continued as CRRS Publications Manager and then this past July accepted a tenure-track appointment in English at D'Youville College (Buffalo, NY). After a year of teaching at the University of Toronto Deana Basile has accepted a one-year appointment in Italian at her alma mater, the University of North Hampshire. This past April Mary Hewlett defended her thesis on "Women, Sodomy, and Sexual Abuse in Late Renaissance Lucca" then, in July, accepted a one-year appointment in Renaissance and Reformation history at Western Washington University (Belligham, Wash.). And in early July Laura Hunt defended her thesis on Tuscan-English relations in the 16th century and moved back to California to spend a year on research.
 
To all these past fellows and assistants, our congratulations and kudos for their wonderful career moves!
 
Events:
There are quite a number of events planned at the CRRS this year. The year will open with a welcoming reception for faculty and graduate students in Renaissance and/or Reformation studies. The reception will take place in Alumni Hall at Victoria College, Friday, 21 September, from 4 to 5 pm. The following week the eminent English historian David Starkey will be with us as this year's Erasmus Speaker; Dr. Starkey will be speaking on Erasmus and the young Henry VIII. In second term the 2001 Distinguished Visiting Scholar will be the Catholic Reformation historian Elisabeth Gleason, professor emeritus from the University of San Francisco. Over the course of the academic year a rich series of  Friday afternoon seminars will offer colleagues and advanced students the opportunity to present their current work-in-progress, while the public lectures series co-sponsored with the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium and a number of occasional lectures organized in conjunction with other departments at the university will bring to the podium local and visiting scholars of international reputation. In April we will run a short series of hands-on seminars on reading sixteenth-century Italian scripts and end the month with an international conference on Shell Games: Scams, Frauds and Deceit. And, every week, we will welcome the weekend with our Stammtisch, or "regular table" at the Duke of York (on Prince Arthur Street at Bedford) where the libations will begin at 5:15 pm every Friday afternoon. All bona fide Ren or Ref scholars, students, and amici are welcomed!
 For a detailed list of Renaissance and Reformation events in the Toronto area, please consult Local Events on this website.
 

Call for Papers
Deadline: 19 Jan. 2001. Papers for the Mid-Atlantic Renaissance and Reformation Seminar, 6-7 April 2001, at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. Twenty minute presentations on art, literature, religion, history, or any other aspect of Renaissance and Reformation studies will be welcome. Send proposals and direct inquiries to David S. Peterson, Dept of History, Newcomb Hall, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA. Tel: (540) 463-8094, fax (540) 463-8498.

Deadline: 31 Jan. 2001. The Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society announces a call for papers for its 2001 conference to be held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, on 10-12 May 2001. The conference welcomes participation from a wide variety of disciplines on this year's special topic: Renaissance Styles and Renaissance Status. Proposals of 250 words for individual papers or of 500 words for panels should be submitted in triplicate to: Patricial Badir, Dept of English, University of British Columbia, 397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada.

Deadline: 15 May 2001. Papers on "The Body" are invited for a session at the 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, to be held in May 2002. Send 250 word abstracts (literature, religion, culture, politics, law) to Maureen Thum, English, Univ. Of Michigan-Flint, Flint, MI 48502-1950 USA or to Harvey Brown, Political Science, Univ. of Western Ontario, London, Ont. N6A 5C2, Canada.

CRRS NEWSLETTER - published twice a  year (Fall and Spring), and distributed free of charge by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (Victoria University in the University of Toronto).
Editor: Konrad Eisenbichler
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