De Lamar Jensen Lecture

De Lamar Jensen Lecture

“‘Out of Spite I Will Become A Turk’: Anger and Conversion in the Venetian Inquisition”

In 1689 the Franciscan Friar Fra Alfonso Moscato lost his temper, and woke up the next morning a Turk (Muslim). This lecture will examine Fra Alfonso’s case as a way to understand the powerful place that emotion occupied in stories of conversion occupied in the early modern Mediterranean.

Eric Dursteler

Eric Dursteler (Brown, 2000) is the De Lamar Jensen Professor of Early Modern History, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of Honors at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, in particular gender, language, food and identity. His publications include Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2006), Renegade Women: Gender, Identity and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2011), (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 (2013), (with Monique O’Connell) The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (2016), and In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Ambassadorial Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2018). He is currently completing a book on food and foodways in the early modern Mediterranean, and preparing a volume on the Renaissance in the Mediterranean for Cambridge University Press. His work has been supported by, among others, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the European University Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare and Huntington libraries. He is the editor of News on the Rialto.

Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.