Tag Archives: CRASSH

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 15 March 2017, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Death’
Emily Rose (Harvard), John Robb (Cambridge)

 

Ralph Roister Doister

Tuesday, 14 March, 7 PM, Judith Wilson Studio, English Faculty

Presented by the Marlowe Society and the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL)

Ralph Roister Doister thinks Christian Custance loves him madly. Christian Custance thinks Ralph Roister Doister is a twit. Only one of them is correct.

Join the Marlowe Society as we set out on a new venture–exploring the lesser-performed plays of the early modern period through script-in-hand stagings. On March 14, we begin with Nicholas Udall’s 1552 comedy about a dim-witted man convinced of his own importance attempting to force himself on an unwilling woman. Sound like anyone in the news today?

Presented in partnership with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature, the evening will include a panel discussion on the legal issues invoked by the play. Tickets are free and admission is first come first served, but space is limited!
https://www.facebook.com/events/179933412507462/

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

Thursday, 16 March 2017, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Space, Privacy and Gender in the early modern Italian Palace

Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway, University of London)

 

 

IN LONDON

London Shakespeare Seminar

Monday 13 March, 17.15-19.00, Senate Room, Senate House
Gary Taylor, ‘Collaborative History: Parts of Henry VI’

 

Society, Culture & Belief, 1500-1800 (IHR)

Thursday, 16 March, 17:30, John S Cohen Room N203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Making a record of the self: Individual Stories and Collective Histories in the Archives of the London Livery Companies, c. 1540-1660

Jennifer Richards (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge)

 

Tudor & Stuart History (IHR)

Monday, 13 March, 17:15, Montague Room, G26, Ground Floor, Senate House

Mini-colloquium on Lord Burghley

Norman Jones (Utah State University), Simon Healy (History of Parliament), Neil Younger (Open University)

 

Events This Week

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Embodied Things: Histories of Cognition, Practices, & Theories (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 22 February 2017, 12:30-14:00, Seminar room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Dress’

Rebecca Unsworth (QMUL/V&A), Elizabeth Currie (Central Saints Martins)

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, 22/02/17, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room SR24

Marilynn Desmond (Binghamton University), Chaucer and the Matter of Troy: Reading the Blank Spaces in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61

 

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 21 February 2017, 5.15pm Old Combination Room at Trinity College

Jon Whitman

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“THE SECOND-GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD”

It is sometimes said that the narrative of Scripture is the greatest story ever told. The story that I would like to discuss in my presentation is what might be called the second-greatest story ever told. It is the story of the provocative effort to make the greatest story ever told an even greater story—not just a story that speaks to diverse peoples, but a story spoken by diverse peoples, in diverse tongues, at diverse times—a universal story. It is the intriguing record of how controversial movements in poetics come to align Scripture with a broad realm of imaginative discourse once regarded as largely distinct from Scripture, so that sacred Scripture itself comes recurrently to be considered a form of imaginative literature at large.

Scholarly approaches to this critical change have commonly concentrated on the modern era. Despite important research exploring certain earlier aspects of the transformation, attitudes toward the subject as a whole regularly tend to focus on extensive interpretive and cultural developments after the Reformation that lead by the nineteenth century to a “crisis of faith”—a cumulative process in which the divine authority of canonical texts is increasingly questioned, while, conversely, other texts are invested with a virtually religious aura. Though this general view has its point, it seems to me to be historically inadequate and sometimes misleading. Already before the Reformation, for example, there are far-reaching efforts in the Christian world to align biblical writing with other writing, including the poetic writing of non-Christian peoples. These efforts arise in part from an ecumenical impulse in Christian faith itself that aims to ease distinctions between diverse texts and cultures. In this respect, the inclination to coordinate Scripture with literature arises not from the abdication, but from the amplitude, of Christian belief. In the end, it appears that this very amplitude advances the crisis of faith that it is designed to avert, even while it raises fascinating questions about the foundational concept of “Scripture.”

In my presentation I plan to explore some of the crucial turning points in this multifaceted process from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. My analysis will focus on three formative periods and places: 1) twelfth-century France, 2) fourteenth-century Italy, and 3) sixteenth-century England. Whereas early Christian interpretive theory assigns the Christian Bible a unique historical status, a special figural method, and a singular doctrinal position, a number of striking critical texts in these times and settings show how that assessment is gradually transformed. As prior distinctions—historical, methodological, and conceptual—between Christian Scripture and other kinds of writing are increasingly blurred, poetry at large tends to modulate into a form of Scripture, while Scripture tends to modulate into a form of poetry.

It should be stressed that not everyone—either in the past or in the present, either inside or outside the Christian world—has endorsed the development of the “second-greatest story ever told.” At the close of my presentation I would like to open the question of how the complex issues raised in efforts to align Scripture with literature imply still broader issues about the extent to which beliefs and idioms can be translated from one people or milieu to another. From this perspective, an inquiry into the poetics of Christian Scripture as imaginative literature is more than a study of religious and literary change. It is an exploration of some of the attractions and risks in the very drive for human consensus and community.

Jon Whitman is Professor in the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research explores the interplay between conceptual and literary changes from antiquity to the modern period, and his publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford/Harvard, 1987) and the edited collections Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden, 2000) and Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge, 2015). He is presently conducting a multiyear research project entitled “The Literal Sense: Scriptural Interpretation, Poetics, and Historical Change”.

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 22 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Jens Åklundh (Trinity)
‘“Admett mee again into the church”: individual and communal responses to excommunication in Restoration England’

 

IN LONDON:

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 23 February, 17:15, Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘Conscience, obedience and British royalism’
Calum Wright (Birkbeck)

 

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History of Material Texts Workshop

Monday, 6 March, 12.30-2, Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

‘The Medical Book in the Nineteenth Century: From MS Casebooks to Mass Plagiarism’
A workshop led by Sarah Bull, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, HPS

 

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Thursday, 9 November 2016, 12:30-14:00, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Passageways’

Jacqueline Nicholls
Doors, Gates & Curtains
Traditional Jewish texts utilises imagery of different types of entrances, each evoking particular ideas with regard to the relationship between physical reality and the world of the divine. This visual art presentation will focus on drawings that interpret relevant Talmudic texts about doors, gates and curtains as barriers and entrances.
Daniel Jütte
Living Stones: Architecture and Embodiment in Premodern Europe

Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following the call of this year’s seminar convenors—to “investigate human understanding of the world vis-à-vis objects”—the talk will probe the history of one particular idea: the house as a living being. The focus will be on the late medieval and early modern period when human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. I will also address the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.


Bios

Jacqueline Nicholls is a London based visual artist and Jewish educator. She uses her art to engage with traditional Jewish ideas in untraditional ways. She co-ordinates the Art Studio and other Arts & Culture events at JW3, and regularly teaches at the London School of Jewish Studies. Jacqueline’s art has been exhibited in solo shows and significant contemporary Jewish Art group shows in the UK, USA and Israel, and she was recently artist-in-resident in Venice with Beit Venezia. Jacqueline is a regular contributor to BBC R2 Pause for Thought.
Dr Daniel Jütte  is a historian of early modern and modern Europe. He is an associate professor (currently on leave) in the Department of History at New York University. His research interests lie in cultural history, urban history and material culture, history of knowledge and science, and Jewish history. He is currently working on a history of transparency from antiquity to modern times. Jütte is the author of two monographs. His award-winning The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (Yale University Press, 2015; first German ed. 2011) offers a general history of secrecy in the early modern period, with particular attention to the role of secrecy and secret sciences in Jewish-Christian relations. His second book, The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (Yale University Press, 2015), explores how doors, gates, and related technologies such as the key and the lock have shaped notions about security, privacy, and shelter.

Before joining NYU, Jütte taught as lecturer in the History Department at Harvard University as well as at the University of Heidelberg, from which he earned his Ph.D. in 2010. He has also held a number of fellowships: Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2015); Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin (2015–16); and Eurias Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2016–2017). In addition, his work has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung), and the Daimler Benz Foundation. Jütte has been recognized for excellence in teaching, but he also enjoys engaging non-academic audiences and readerships, e.g., as a regular contributor to major European daily newspapers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Welt.

Open to all.  No registration required

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, February 8, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room SR24

Jackie Tasioulas (Cambridge), The Point of Remembrance in Chaucer and Henryson

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 7 February 2017, 5.15pm in the Old Combination Room at Trinity College.

Stephen Halliwell (University of St Andrews)

“INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE MIND: THE GREEK POETICS OF INSPIRATION”

The family of ideas usually grouped together under the heading of ‘inspiration’ forms a remarkably long-lasting component of Western poetics. But such ideas constitute a far from harmonious family; their tangled relationships are too often simplified by historians of poetics. This paper will offer some selective and revisionist thoughts on versions of poetic inspiration found in three different ancient Greek contexts: the treatment of the Muses in the earliest surviving Greek poetry (Homer and Hesiod); the notorious series of challenges to poetic authority voiced in several Platonic dialogues; and the treatise On the Sublime by (pseudo-)Longinus. Three main theses will be advanced: first, that an excessively literalist and primitivist tradition of interpretation has obscured the important sense in which the Muses were never a source external to poetry but a symbolic self-image of poetry’s own powers; second, that the scattered remarks on poetic inspiration in Plato accompany a perception of poetry’s resistance to a philosophical demand (which Nietzsche calls ‘aesthetic Socratism’) for cognitive transparency; third, that On the Sublime makes inspiration internal to the self-perpetuating traditions of literature, but thereby imposes on writers a responsibility which Longinus himself recognises as a potential burden of anxiety. If an adequate history of the concept of inspiration were ever (improbably) to be written, it would need to recognise far more complexity in the ancient roots of this concept than current orthodoxies allow for.

Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greek and Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on ancient poetics and aesthetics, especially in relation to the intersection between literary and philosophical traditions of thought. In addition to his monograph Aristotle’s Poetics (1986/1998), he has produced two separate translations of Aristotle’s treatise (one for the Loeb Library, 1995). His other books include Plato Republic Book 10 (1988), The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002), Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (2008), and Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (2011). He is currently working on a commentary on Longinus, On the Sublime, for the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla series, ‘Scrittori greci e latini’.

 

Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe

February 8-11, Cambridge Arts Theatre, presented by the Marlowe Society

Directed by Caroline Steinbeis

On Thursday evening, there will be a post-show talk with Simon Russell Beale (Edward II, RSC)

Son to an impressive father, husband to a passionate queen, King Edward II struggles to find his own voice amidst the clamour of stronger personalities in the English court. Despite the disapproval of his nobles, he finds consolation in his relationship with the low-born Piers Gaveston, often choosing his pleasures with Gaveston over the responsibilities of his position. When his queen and nobles unite against Gaveston, Edward must decide how far he is willing to go to assert his own will in the face of hostile resistance.

Christopher Marlowe’s gripping drama of deceit and responsibility is brought vividly to life by the Marlowe Society, Cambridge University’s leading drama society. The Marlowe return to Cambridge Arts Theatre after their recent acclaimed productions of Measure for Measure and Dr Faustus; it has been responsible for launching the careers of some of Britain’s greatest actors including Ian McKellen, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston and Derek Jacobi.

Tickets available here.

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 8 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Peter Marshall (Warwick),
‘Reformation on Scotland’s northern frontier: kirk and community in early modern Orkney’

 

IN LONDON

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 February, 17:15, Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Finola Finn, Durham University

‘The principle of life, both for naturall and spirituall actions: The heart in nonconformist religious experience, c.1640-1700’

 

 

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

25 January 2017, 12:00- 4:00, Seminar room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Collecting’

Associate Professor Sean Silver (University of Michigan)
Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)

 

History of Material Texts

Monday 23 January 2016, 5pm, Faculty of Asian and Middle Easter Studies, The University of Cambridge, Room 8-9

Prof Sasaki Takahiro (Keio University, Shidō bunko)

Formats and Contents of Japanese Books (wahon): A Meaningful Interrelation

For many centuries Japanese antiquarian materials (kotenseki 古典籍) have used five types of binding originally invented in China. The choice of one form of binding over another depended on the type of contents contained in the book alongside its purposes. Something similar happened in the case of the script, i.e. the Chinese characters and the two scripts developed from them in Japan (hiragana and katakana). Namely, the aims of a book as well as the conditions of its production determined the choice of what form of writing was used. Therefore, by studying both binding and script, we discover a meaningful interrelation between them and the contents. This type of analysis allows us to gain understanding of the genre consciousness that existed at the time as well as to determine the nature and the value of the verbal text preserved in a physical book. This lecture discusses concrete examples that will shed light on the features of Japanese antiquarian materials, which, in turn, are helpful in the study of Japanese pre-modern culture.

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 24 January 2017, Old Combination Room at Trinity College.

Colin Burrow (University of Oxford)

“PRACTICAL CRITICISM, ELIZABETHAN STYLE”

At least since G. Gregory Smith’s anthology of Elizabethan Critical Essays of 1904 there has been a tendency to classify Elizabethan works as ‘literary criticism’ if, and sometimes only if, they resemble works of poetics, which offer abstract discussions of the principles underlying the production of literary texts. This paper will explore the consequences of widening the sphere of what we think of as Elizabethan literary criticism to include a range of other kinds of text: polemic, epideictic rhetoric—laus and (especially) vituperatio—as well as local and often personalised attacks by one writer on another for particular acts of indecorum. The paper will concentrate on the so-called ‘war of the theatres’ between Jonson, Marston, and Dekker. I will discuss some of the intellectual backgrounds to the war, as well as its practical consequences for the development of abstract theorising about the nature and practice of literature in the early seventeenth century and beyond.

Colin Burrow is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. He has published extensively on the relations between Renaissance literature and its classical forebears, and also has active research interests in early Tudor literature, Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and Shakespeare. His publications include Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), Edmund Spenser (Plymouth, 1996), Manuscript Miscellanies c. 1450-1700 (London, 2011; with Richard Beadle), and Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), as well as editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002) and Troilus and Cressida (London, 2006), Metaphysical Poetry (London, 2006), and Ben Jonson’s Poems (Cambridge, 2012). His current projects are a history of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English Literary History, and a book on the theory and practice of literary imitation, from Plato to the present day.

 

Cambridge Early Modern French Seminar

27 January, 2-4 PM, Clare College, Latimer Room

John O’BRIEN (Durham)

Cicero the Revolutionary: Some Insurrectional Motifs in the Literature of the French Wars of Religion

 

CAMBRIDGE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Thursday, 26 January, Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library, 5:00 pm

Dr Nick Hardy (Munby Fellow), ‘New evidence for the drafting, revision, and intellectual context of the King James Bible (1611)’

Tea from 4:30 pm before the lectures.

 

IN LONDON

London Shakespeare Seminar

23 January, Senate Room, Senate House between 17.15 and 19.00

Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage’
Darian Leader, ‘Hand Technology: Then and Now’

Papers will be followed by questions, and then drinks and dinner at Busaba Eathai Bloomsbury (Goodge Street).
For more information and to be included on the LSS mailing list please contact Gemma Miller at shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk

 

London Renaissance Seminar

Saturday, January 21, 1.30-5pm, 114 / Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square
Writing Place & Writing Motion in Early Modern England

Speakers : Patricia Fumerton, Andy Gordon, Julie Sanders

Download the full programme here and the abstracts here.

The London Renaissance Seminar meets at Birkbeck to discuss topics in the culture of the Renaissance. Anyone with an interest in the Renaissance is welcome to attend. Seminars are usually held in the School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 12 January, 17:15

Pollard Seminar Room, N301, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

A Water Bawdy House: Women and the Navy in the British Civil Wars
Elaine Murphy (Plymouth)

 

 

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 23 November 2016, 12:30-14:00, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Knowledge’

Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)
Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE  (UCL)

Poetics before Modernity

Thursday, 24 November, 5.15pm, Old Combination Room, Trinity College.

Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania)

“AN EMOTIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF STYLE”

How did medieval teaching identify the “literary” or “literature” as a particular quality to be achieved and imitated? What was the role of style in defining the realm of the “literary”? I will begin by considering a relatively modest “anthology” from the thirteenth century, MS Glasgow, Hunterian, MS V.8.15. This teaching collection expresses its interests in terms rather different from what we associate with better known and prestigious poetic anthologies of the same period. The anthology reveals its motives in metaliterary terms: it signals a moment at which medieval rhetoric recognizes itself as the instrument for theorizing literary style as the engine of emotion. This anthology exemplifies the kind of teaching that was to enable a writer like Petrarch to invest style with the power to move emotions and even to compel ethical judgments. I conclude with a rhetorical reading of Petrarch’s Seniles 17.3 to explore how the “lesson” of style has been incorporated and naturalized in literary production.

Rita Copeland is Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests range across ancient and medieval literatures, history and theory of rhetoric, literary theory and exegetical traditions, and medieval learning. She has pursued these themes in various publications, especially Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages; Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with Ineke Sluiter); and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Peter T. Struck). Most recently she has edited the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558. She is also a founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. Her newest project is on rhetoric and the emotions in the long Middle Ages.

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 23 November, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Laura Sangha (Exeter)
‘“Take care that nothing be printed”: the public and private lives of supernatural narratives in later Stuart England’

 

IN LONDON

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 21 November, 17:15, Room G35, Ground floor, South block, Senate House

Eilish Gregory (UCL)
‘Networks in mid-seventeenth century England: the navigation of the sequestration and compounding process by the Catholic gentry’

 

 

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)
Wednesday, 09 November 2016, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Passageways’

Jacqueline Nichols (Independent Artist), Daniel Jütte (CRASSH, NYU) – at Things

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, 09 November 2016, 5:15, English Faculty Room SR24

Idolography: Saints and Idols in the Katherine Group vitae And Buried Treasure: In Search of the Old Norse Influence on Middle English Vocabulary

Johannes Wolf (Cambridge) and Richard Dance/ Brittany Schorn (Cambridge)

 

Early Modern British and Irish History

Wednesday, 9 November, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

David Coast (Bath Spa)
‘“The tears of the oppressed people of England”: grievance, complaint and the vox populi in early Stuart political culture’

 

IN LONDON

 

London Shakespeare Seminar

Monday, 7th November, 17.15 to 19.00 in the Senate Room, Senate House

This is a special event to commemorate the life and work of Professor Russ McDonald.
Speakers:

Dr. Hannah Crawforth (KCL) : ‘Shaping the Language: Words, Patterns, and the Traditions of Rhetoric’, in Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30-46.
Dr. Gillian Woods (Birkbeck) : ‘Planned Obsolescence or Working at the Words’, in Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On, ed. By G. B. Shand (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 27-42
Dr. Eric Langley (UCL) Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 39-41 and 43-52.

A group discussion about the legacy of Russ’s work will follow the speakers’ presentations. To be added to the LSS distribution list and to receive copies of the extracts in advance contact Gemma Miller at shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk.

Please note that there will be drinks after the papers, and we have a table booked at Busaba Eathai Thai restaurant near Goodge Street station for those wishing to join us for dinner. Everybody is very welcome.

Twitter: @ldn_shakespeare
Email: shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk
Facebook: @londonshakespearecentre

 

London Renaissance Seminar

1:30 – 5 pm, Saturday 12 November 2016, Room 114, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

Ship and Nation in Early Modern England

Examining the connections between ships, literature and national identity speakers will explore the cultural paths between shipyard, theatre and pageant and the links between London’s maritime history and the city as a site of performance.

Download the programme here.

London Renaissance Seminar Contact: Sue Wiseman

 

Courtauld Early Modern Research Forum

Wednesday 9 November 2016, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Research Forum Seminar Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

Caravaggio: Anatomist?

Prof. Frances Gage (State College at Buffolo, New York)

Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin has been likened to a dissection scene in its presentation of a dead putrefying body, surrounded by onlookers. But could Caravaggio also have taken a genuine interest in anatomy and what knowledge of this field might he have had, if any? Given Caravaggio’s appropriation of the work of Michelangelo, who was acclaimed as an anatomist, to what extent may Caravaggio’s allusions to cutting and severing have served his claim to know the body as well as Michelangelo had?

Frances Gage is associate professor of Renaissance and Baroque art history at the State College at Buffalo, New York. She is a historian of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian art and criticism, collecting, intellectual history and medicine. Her articles and essays have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Intellectual History Review and The Burlington Magazine and in numerous volumes including Display of Art in Roman Palaces, 1550-1750 and Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. She is the author of Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, published by Penn State University Press in 2016.

 

Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800 Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 10 November, 17:30, John S Cohen Room N203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Tawny Paul (University of Exeter)

Work culture, occupation and masculine identity in eighteenth-century Britain

It is well known that people in early modern Britain undertook multiple jobs in order to make a living. The occupational titles that men claimed in legal and institutional settings did not necessarily reflect the work that they undertook. While this relationship between title and work poses challenges for understanding men’s productive activities, it also opens up a number of questions related to identity. Work is often given a central place in accounts of masculine status. What happened, however, when men undertook multiple jobs? How did men account for their worth and status against plural employments? This paper draws on the diaries of three male artisans in the pre-industrial eighteenth century to investigate how men “accounted” for their work in social and cultural terms. It challenges some of the prevailing associations between occupation and masculinity, and investigates the interrelationship between labour, leisure, skill, income and status.

 

Tudor & Stuart History (IHR)

Monday, 7 November, 17:15, Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

Steven Ellis (NUI Galway)
‘Defending English ground: the crisis of lordship in early Tudor Northumberland’

 

 

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IN CAMBRIDGE:

Embodied Things: Histories of Cognition, Practices, & Theories (CRASSH)

Armour
26 October 2016, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Victoria Bartels (Cambridge)

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, October 26, 5:15 PM

English Faculty Room SR24

Sexuality and dishonour: punishing adultery & other crimes in southern France (c.1150-1320) – John Arnold (Cambridge)

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday 25th October 2016, 5:15, Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)

“ALLEGORESIS AND ETYMOLOGY”

For many centuries, especially from Late Antiquity until the seventeenth century, European scholars often chose to interpret the foundational texts of their culture—for example, the Bible and the works of Homer and Virgil—by attributing to them more or less systematically coherent meanings that were strikingly at variance with those that uninformed readers would likely have thought they were communicating; and the same scholars often buttressed their interpretations by claiming that some of the words used in those texts had in fact a different, original meaning from the ones that ordinary speakers attached to them in everyday conversation. In so doing, these scholars were applying the procedures of allegoresis to those texts and of etymology to these words. These two scholarly practices also flourished independently of one another in this period; but their complex and intense interaction is one of the features particularly characteristic of the Western Classical tradition. This paper examines their nature, functions, and interrelations during Classical antiquity.

Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, and Heidelberg. He has published books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion, on literary theory and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. Among his most recent publications are the edited collection Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach (with Anthony Grafton; Cambridge UP, 2016), and a nine-volume edition of Early Greek Philosophy in the Loeb Classical Library (with André Laks; Harvard UP, 2016).

 

Early Modern British and Irish History

Wednesday, October 26, 5.15pm
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Stephen Tong (Corpus Christi)
‘John Bale: a Protestant bishop afloat in an Irish see’

 

Economic and Social History

Thursday, 27 October, 5 PM, Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall
Dr Judy Stephenson (Oxford)
‘Labouring in early modern London’

 

IN LONDON:

Courtauld Institute of Art

Thursday 27 October 2016, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

Caroline Villiers Fellow Lecture

‘Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone: Technical Study of Two Scoto-Jacobean Stranger-Painters’

Caroline Rae: Caroline Villers fellow 2016-17, The Courtauld Institute of Art

The project will use established methods of technical art history in order to examine the materials and techniques of Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone, two Netherlandish artists who worked in Jacobean Scotland. Religious persecution and fortuitous trade relationships led many Protestant Netherlanders to emigrate to Britain in the sixteenth century. Vanson and de Colone are notable amongst this group as they were patronised by the highest echelons of society: Vanson was James VI’s court painter and de Colone was the most prominent painter working in Scotland in the 1620s (who also painted the king). Thomson, whose publications remain a seminal source, constructed their core oeuvres in the 1970s. However, little technical examination has been undertaken on their works to date. The project will focus on the technical examination of paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland collection with the aim of clarifying issues of attribution and identity and illuminating their workshop practices.

Caroline recently completed her Ph.D (jointly hosted by the Department of Conservation and Technology at the Courtauld and the National Portrait Gallery, where she was a member of the Making Art in Tudor Britain team) which focused on issues of workshop practice, authorship and cross-cultural dialogues between native and émigré artists working in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. Previously, Caroline graduated with first class honours in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh/ Edinburgh College of Art and from the Conservation of Easel Paintings course at the Courtauld. Caroline contributes to the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon and has published on de Critz and Fuseli.

The event will also include a presentation by the 2016-17 Associate Fellow, Anna Koopstra, on Investigating Saint Jerome in his study by Hendrik van Steenwijck the Younger.

 

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 24 October, 17:15

Venue: Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

Chris St John-Smith (Oxford)
‘Political management of the law and the implementation of religious policy by the Privy Council during the personal rule of Charles I’

 

 

 

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Things-(Re)constructing the Material World Seminar

‘Bronze’

8 June 2016, 12:00 – 14:00

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Dr Victoria Avery (Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)
Andrew Lacey (Artist and Independent Scholar)

Bronze was used in Renaissance Italy for numerous types of functional objects (artillery, bells, coins, lamps, inkwells) as well as decorative ones (equestrian monuments, statues, busts, medals). Extremely expensive, meaning-laden and complex to produce, works of art cast in bronze were desirable status symbols for Humanist patrons, and proofs of incredible technical mastery by sculptors and casters. Sculpture historian, Vicky Avery, and sculptor-founder, Andrew Lacey, will discuss ‘bronze in Italy c. 1500’ in terms of its meanings, usage and technology, focussing on the enigmatic Rothschild Bronzes, recently attributed to Michelangelo.

Open to all.  No registration required .

 

IN LONDON

Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture

Thursday 9 June 2016, 19.00
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe

‘Remembering and forgetting Shakespeare (and Cervantes and Jonson and Beaumont), or, what 1616 (and 1916) did for us.’
Professor Gordon McMullan (KCL) gives the 2016 Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture.
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/events/lectures-talks/fellowship

 

All the World’s a stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas

Friday 10 June 2016, 10.30-17.00
Conference Centre, The British Library
This study day brings together leading specialists to explore Shakespeare’s cultural presence in Europe and the Americas.
http://www.bl.uk/events/all-the-worlds-a-stage-shakespeare-in-europe-and-the-americas

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 June, 5.15pm

“His Lands as well as Goods / Sequestered ought to be”: the introduction of sequestration, 1642-3

Charlotte Young (RHUL)

Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 June, 5.15pm

Building Henry VII’s Savoy Hospital, 1505-1520

Charlotte A Stanford (Brigham Young University)

Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE:

 

Things-(Re)constructing the Material World

25 May 2016, 12:30-2 PM

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Slaves’

James Poskett (Cambridge), Stefan Hanß (Berlin)

 

Cambridge Bibliographical Society

Wednesday, 25 May, 5 PM

Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library

Tea from 4:30 pm before the lectures.

Dr Kathryn James (Munby Fellow), ‘Loss and the English imagination: writing the dissolution of the monasteries in the early eighteenth century’

 

Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop

Friday 27 May 2016- 2-4 PM

Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor David Ganz: ‘When is a ‘Script’ not Several Scribes?’

 

Early Modern French Seminar at the Whipple Museum

Friday 27 May, 2-4pm

New Gallery, Whipple Museum, Free School Lane.

Katherine Reinhart, CRASSH and King’s College, Cambridge

‘Miscellany and Marginalia: The drawings of the early Académie Royale des Sciences’

 

IN LONDON:

Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar (IRC, UCL)

May 25, 5:15 PM

‘In Pewter two dozen great and small: From quantification to affective qualities in material culture’

Antony Buxton

Much analysis of material culture relies on the evidence of individual affective responses to artefacts, as well as the assumed contemporary perception of the properties of the object itself. This paper will discuss the potential of quantitative evidence to reveal qualitative conclusions.  In a study based on the evidence of early modern probate inventories – in conjunction with contemporary texts and images – the capacity of the relational database to tease out nuanced variations in practice indicated by household furnishings makes possible a practice-based reading of the interrelationship between people and objects, and its indication of a changing social dynamic.

Venue: Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR, UCL)

Thursday, May 26, 5:15 PM

‘”Lying, flattering addresses?” Allegiance, popularity and status in loyal addresses 1658-1661’

Ted Vallance (Roehampton)

Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar (IHR, UCL)

Thursday, May 26, 5.15pm

‘The pre-Fire church of St Botolph Billingsgate’

Stephen Freeth

Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Events this Week

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Welcome back! Here are some events happening around Cambridge this week.

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 27th April at 5.15pm,
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Harriet Lyon, Elly Robson, and Alice Soulieux-Evans,

‘Historiography panel: Space, Geography and Memory’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday, 28 April at 5pm in Room 12 of the History Faculty.

We normally have dinner with the speaker afterwards. All welcome.

Beatrice Zucca Micheletto (University of Rouen)

Women, property and work: some considerations of the Italian case
(Turin, 18th century)

Recent research that emphasises differences between northern and southern Europe has argued that in southern countries where a dowry system was widespread, young girls, married women and widows were not encouraged to participate in the labour market since they could merely count on their dowry. On the contrary, I will argue that in pre-industrial Turin, dowry and women’s work were strictly connected. Not only was the dowry often earned by the work of young girls, it was also invested in the family business in which wives and widows played a crucial role as workers. The speaker has recently published Travail et propriété des femmes en temps de crise (Turin, XVIIIe siècle) (2104), and articles in Gender & History (2015); The History of the Family(2014), and Feminist Economics (2013).

 

Professor Lyndal Roper to give the 2016 Lee Lecture

We are delighted to announce that Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, will give the 2016 Lee Seng Tee Distinguished Lecture on 28 April at 6.15pm, in the Lee Hall.

The talk will be on The Battle of the Quills: Luther and the German Reformation, the subject of Professor Roper’s current research.

All are welcome to this free talk, which is the ninth lecture in the series. Booking is recommended – please book by email or by calling 01223 335936.

For more information please visit the Lee Lecture Series webpage.

 

Things: (Re)Constructing the Material World

Paint

27 April 2016, 12:00 – 14:00

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Christine Slottved Kimbriel (Assistant to the Director, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge)
Dr Jose Ramon Marcaida (CRASSH, Genius before Romanticism, Cambridge)