Thursday, October 12, 2023 - 5:30pm S150 Lamar Dodd School of Art Guest speaker "The ancient Roman emperor Nero often figures today as a stock embodiment of an abominable ruler. In the late Middle Ages, Nero also was deplored, but for crimes long forgotten in modern accounts. This lecture explores a story about unusual demands Nero made on a cluster of doctors, presented in word and image in a pair of illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts created in Bavaria, circa 1400. The original audiences for the tale lived at a time of increased professionalization and regulation of medicine, when public health was understood to be a means toward urban peace more broadly. The Nero episodes in the World Chronicles invited readerviewers to reflect on harmony in the public sphere by engaging with entertaining scenes of Nero’s corporeal eccentricity."
