CORVALLIS, Ore. - Carlos Eire, one of the nation's leading historians of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, will deliver the 23rd annual George and Dorothy Carson History Lecture at Oregon State University on Monday, Oct. 10.
The lecture begins at 7 p.m. in the Construction and Engineering Auditorium of LaSells Stewart Center. Titled "When Nuns and Witches Flew: Writing a History of the Impossible," the lecture is free and open to the public.
Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming "Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1470-1700 (Yale University Press, 2007), "From Madrid to Purgatory" and "War Against the Idols."
Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, Eire taught at St. John's University and the University of Virginia and was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years.
Eire is best known as the author of "Waiting for Snow in Havana." For that memoir of his childhood during the Cuban Revolution, Eire received the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2003.
Many accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries tell of people flying and hovering in the air. Among Catholics the flyers were either saints or witches. Among Protestants only witches could fly. Eire's topic, "When Nuns and Witches Flew," seems tailored for the Halloween season, but the phenomenon of flying witches and nuns raises questions of broader concern. What are historians to make of these reports? And what are we to make of differences of opinion concerning the miraculous? When the seemingly "impossible" is presented as "fact" in historical documents, how should we interpret both the "impossibility" and the "fact"?
The Carson lectures were founded in honor of the late George Carson who was for many years professor of Russian history at OSU and his wife, Dorothy.
Jonathan Katz, 541-737-1276