On April 26, the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Tropes and the Invention of Bureaucracy: Prosopopoeia, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Art of Centralized Administration" as the second installment of their Cultures and Knowledge Workshop series for Spring Term. This workshop will be presented by Professor Julie Orlemanski.
This talk investigates how literary style can be a technique of bureaucratization: specifically, asking how literary tropes are entailed in the medieval history of institutional forms. Taking Bernard’s Sermons as a key text, this talk poses some new questions tying together theology, literature, and institutional history. Bernard of...