Music-filled lecture featuring Notre Dame historian set for Oct. 10 at UNL

            A music historian from the University of Notre Dame will deliver this year’s Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Oct. 10. The public is invited to attend the free lecture featuring music from the UNL Chamber Singers, as well as a reception that will follow.

            Margot Fassler, an expert in medieval and American sacred music and co-director of Notre Dame’s Master of Sacred Music Program, will present “Playing at the Center of the Cosmos: The Meaning of Hildegard’s ‘Ordo Virtutum.’” The program will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St.

            Fassler’s talk will explore the musical works of German medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen, an abbess and interdisciplinary theologian who brought her ideas to life through poetry, music, drama and the visual arts. Among those ideas was her vision that the universe was like an egg. The lecture will focus on Hildegard’s Cosmic Egg vision, but one that situates her sung play, the “Ordo Virtutum,” at its center.

            The annual lecture, sponsored by UNL’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, brings a medievalist whose work on women, gender and/or the family honors McLaughlin’s legacy. This year’s lecture has been organized in collaboration with Lincoln’s Hildegard Center for the Arts.

            McLaughlin, a Grand Island native, earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Nebraska in 1940, a master’s degree the following year and returned to the university to teach while writing her dissertation. She received her Ph.D., from Columbia University in 1953.

            Medieval scholars hold McLaughlin’s work in the highest regard, particularly her research on the role of women, children and families in the Middle Ages. She died in 2006 at age 87.

            The event is co-sponsored by UNL’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and the School of Music.

Writer: Jean Ortiz Jones, University Communications, 402-472-8320