Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Witches of Antiquity,” on the sorceresses of ancient Greece and Rome, with Barbette Stanley Spaeth, professor emerita of classical studies at William & Mary and scholar of magic and the supernatural in the ancient world.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-witches-of-antiquity ]

Seductive enchantress. Murderous sorceress. Corpse-mangling hag. The witches of the ancient world were among antiquity’s most vivid and disturbing characters.

Get to know some of antiquity’s most unforgettable women with the help of Barbette Stanley Spaeth, who last year gave fantastic Profs and Pints talks on ancient magic and ancient terrors of the night.

We’ll spend time with Homer’s beautiful Circe, Euripides’ passionate Medea, and Horace’s sinister Canidia. You’ll encounter Lucan’s terrifying Erictho, a witch so powerful she could raise the dead and force even the gods to obey her.

Along the way, we’ll ask why the image of the witch changed so dramatically as it traveled from Greece to Rome. Greek writers often imagined witches as beautiful, alluring, and sometimes even helpful. Roman authors, on the other hand, increasingly portrayed them as ugly, lustful, dangerous old women. What can these frightening figures tell us about ancient attitudes toward magic, women, sexuality, and power?

The answers take us beyond spells and potions into some of the deepest anxieties of the ancient world, about women who possessed power, men who feared losing it, and what might happen when accepted boundaries—between male and female, human and divine, living and dead, and even order and chaos—began to break down.

For over thirty years at William & Mary and Tulane University, Dr. Spaeth taught courses on ancient magic and the supernatural. She has published several studies of ancient witchcraft and is currently working on a book on the subject. Her talk is sure to leave you spellbound. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From “Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus,” an 1891 painting by John William Waterhouse (Gallery Oldham / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Haunted Landscapes of Middle-Earth,” on J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of horror, with Peter Grybauskas, who has written extensively on Tolkien and teaches courses on him at the University of Maryland and abroad in the UK.

[Doors open at 4:30 and the talk starts at 5:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-haunted-landscapes ]

Come on a tour of some of the spookiest sites in Tolkien’s invented world to learn where, how, and why the beloved author injected hearty doses of horror into his high fantasy. You’ll learn how Tolkien tapped into medieval sources, dreams, and his own war experiences to make Middle-earth frightfully real.

Your guide on this journey, Peter Grybauskas, is the editor of a volume of Tolkien’s scholarship and poetry, The Battle of Maldon (together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth) and author of A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. He has wowed Profs and Pints fans in giving this talk in Washington D.C.

We’ll venture into the abandoned Mines of Moria, look out at the Dead Marshes, and explore other terrifying realms. From there, we’ll go on a haunted-hayride detour through Tolkien’s Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, a one-act play in which a young poet and an old farmer take a wagon out after dark to pick their way through a freshly-fought battlefield to find the headless body of their English lord.

Come for the jump scares, ghoulish sights and grisly discoveries. Stay for the profound exploration of the cost of war, the codes of chivalry, and the sources of poetic inspiration, all conveyed through some of Tolkien’s finest alliterative dialogue. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Tolkien drew from his memories of World War I battlefields like this one in creating the corpse-filled “Dead Marshes” of The Lord of the Rings. (Subsequently tinted November 1917 photo of Passchendaele by William Rider Rider/ Library and Archives Canada.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “What Drove Witch Hunts,” on past centuries’ persecution of those accused of sorcery, with Larissa "Kat" Tracy, medievalist and visiting assistant teaching professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/what-drove-witch-hunts .]

The witch trials of late medieval and early modern Europe and early colonial America have inspired fear and horror for centuries. They left behind questions we still struggle to answer, such as: What sparked belief in witches? What compels societies to seek out and persecute those supposedly in command of darkness?

Hear such questions tackled by Dr. Larissa Tracy, a medieval literary historian who has appeared on several History Channel documentaries on medieval torture and brutality and given several excellent Profs and Pints talks in the past.

Although the witch hunts have been metaphors in the modern era for tyranny and corruption, the real history of witchcraft and the witch hunts lies in the desire for power and control, as well as genuine fear that the Devil walks among us, she’ll explain.

Although we frequently think of the witch hunts as a medieval phenomenon, accusations of witchcraft escalated after the Reformation, during the early modern period. Dr. Tracy will discuss how kings, queens, and witch-finders general all played a role in the torture and execution of innocent women and men. Those targeted included herbal healers, religious heretics, dissidents, social rivals, and marginalized members of society.

Exemplifying the darker aspects of human society, the witch hunts culminated in some of the most tragic events in history. The history of them still holds important lessons for today. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A 1655 Ralph Gardiner illustration of the hanging of witches in England. (Public domain.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Life of Frankenstein,” on the birth, evolution and impact of a tale of man-made monstrosity, with Bernard Welt, an emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University who frequently lectures on Frankenstein in literature, cinema, and culture.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-life-of-frankenstein .]

Guillermo del Toro’s lush and lovingly produced film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is just the latest of many iterations of the story to capture the public’s imagination. People have watched Victor Frankenstein give life to his monster in numerous films, on television, and on stage, and even perform “Putting on the Ritz” with him thanks to the comic genius of Mel Brooks.

Mary Shelley did not just tell a tale. She spawned the modern genre of speculative fiction and gave rise to a myth that would crop up in debates over nature versus nurture and other matters. Even today it stokes anxieties over the potential impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, by evoking the image of a monster turning on its progenitor.

Come gain a new appreciation of Mary Shelley’s creation with the help of Dr. Bernard Welt, who has studied the relationship between nightmares and the horror genre and is the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.

Dr. Welt will start by telling a literary origin story almost as famous as Frankenstein itself, of how an 18-year-old Shelley started writing Frankenstein in 1816 while staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with two of her era’s leading poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover. Housebound by foul weather, the three read Gothic tales of ghosts and monsters and challenged each other to produce something even more terrifying. Mary dreamed up a story of a man who defied death by creating a living being out of scraps of deceased men harvested from graveyards and anatomy labs.

The resulting novel, Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, would by that century’s end become a touchstone in philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity and in political discussions of imperialism and populism. By the 21st century, Mary Shelley (as she became) had earned a more significant place in the literary canon than Byron and her husband Shelley.

We will examine how this grisly tale became a landmark of modern thought and look at the part played by numerous film adaptations from the first years of cinema to the present day. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: From a Theodor von Holst engraving in an 1831 edition of Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley of London.