When   Tuesday, November 3, 2009   Time   7:00 PM - 9:00 PM  
Where   1703 Orrington Avenue  
Audience   - Faculty/Staff - Student - Public
Contact   Beverly Zeldin-Palmer   +1 847 467 3970  
Group   Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
More Info   www.epl.org

What can the intuitions of medieval saints and poets tell us about the experiences of modern transplant patients--and vice versa?  Lovers in medieval romances often exchanged hearts, just as women mystics exchanged hearts with Jesus.  Now that we have the capacity to transplant physical hearts, what can these works of the medieval imagination still teach us about the mysterious nature of identity?

Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religion, and Classics and John Evans Professor of Latin at Northwestern University.  She is the winner of a 2009 Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.  Her most recent books are Thomas of Cantimpré:  The Collected Saints’ Lives (2008) and Frauenlob’s Song of Songs:  A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece (2006). Prof. Newman is also the author of God and the Goddesses:  Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2002), From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (1995), and several books on Hildegard of Bingen.