Description:

Featuring Pannill Camp, Washington University in St. Louis

Historians routinely explain the importance of Freemasonry to the French Revolution by claiming that the brotherhood served as an incubator for emerging political ideas. But Masonic lodge activity, or "craft" also provided a source of memorializing practices that were adapted to the political and cultural programs of the 1790s. This talk examines the operations of memory inscribed in a collection of short Masonic, or "adoniramite" plays by François-Félix Nogaret, who served as librarian to the Comtesse d'Artois before the Revolution and later wrote numerous Revolutionary festivals.

Pannill Camp teaches drama and performance at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is the author of The First Frame: A Cultural History of Enlightenment Theatre Space (Cambridge University Press) and is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Arts of Brotherhood: French Freemasonry in Performance.