Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

 

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

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, 08/03/17, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room GR04

Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania), Enthymeme and Emotion from Aristotle to Hoccleve

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 7 March 2017, 5.15pm, Old Combination Room at Trinity College

Gavin Alexander (University of Cambridge)

“LYRIC POETICS?”

This paper is about lyric poetry’s place in classical and early modern poetics. That place looks less sure than does that of tragedy or epic—which may be Aristotle’s fault, or due to the nature of lyric; it clearly has something to do with the fact that lyric is hard to define and delimit. I question two common myths about lyric’s place in the system of poetic genres: that there has always been a straightforward and accepted tripartition of poetry into epic, dramatic, and lyric; and, conversely, that this tripartition was only a Romantic discovery. I also resist the direction of the “new lyric studies”, which attempts to challenge the usefulness of the category “lyric” to the understanding of various kinds of short poetry. I trace lyric’s presence in less familiar theoretical settings (grammar, rhetoric) in order to ask if we might consider such treatments as a part of the poetics of lyric. And I aim to show how the interplay between the paradigms and taxonomies of rhetoric and poetics contribute to lyric’s vexed (and rich) status in the history of literary theory. Do Sappho, Pindar, Horace, Petrarch, and Shakespeare actually have something in common that might be captured by the term “lyric”; or should ancient lyric can only be grouped with modern lyric of a strictly neoclassical bent? In considering why it has been difficult to agree about both what a lyric poem is and what features of form, content, mode, or method might characterise lyric, I will suggest how theoretical muddle might be contained by a larger clarity.

Gavin Alexander is Reader in Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His publications include Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford, 2006), editions of Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London, 2004) and William Scott’s Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013), and the collection Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007; with Sylvia Adamson and Katrin Ettenhuber).

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 8th March, 12-1:15pm, English Faculty, Board Room

In Collaboration with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL)

Dr Maria Mendes (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa) will present the following paper:

Praise with Purpose: Flattery in Early Modern England

Susceptibility to flattery has long been considered a character flaw, which is the reason those who believe it are usually described as being vain, proud, tyrannical or conceited. I will close-read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so as to question if Caesar’s failure to anticipate the conspirators’ plot is, as is usually thought, an illustration of his proneness to flattery or, as I hope to show, an example of the flatterer’s capacity to mirror one’s own mind. Flatterers might be very able in showing rhetorically what the flattered person’s ideal self would look like, and they might in turn tend to supplement rhetorical suggestion with their own desires and concerns. If this is the case, flattery is central to understanding that Julius Caesar describes a hermeneutic difficulty, and characterises the difficulties of knowing another’s mind.

 

Early Modern French Seminar

Friday, 10 March, 2-4pm, Clare College, Latimer Room

Phillip USHER (New York University)

Exterranean Insurgency in the Humanist Anthropocene

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

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

Alice Soulieux-Evans (Wolfson),
‘“Because thou canst not walk in thy minster’s way”: cathedrals, conformity and the Church of England in the Restoration period’

 

 

IN LONDON

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

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

‘The Print that Binds: official print and personal record keeping in seventeenth-century England’
Frances Maguire (York)

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 28/02/17, 5.15pm in G-R06-07
David Hillman (Cambridge)
‘Farewell as welcome (and vice versa) in Antony and Cleopatra’

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 1st March, 12-1:15pm, English Faculty, Room GR03

Nailya  Shamgunova (University of Cambridge)
‘Queering the Anglo-Ottoman Contact, c. 1550-1700’

 


Early Modern French Seminar

Friday, 3 March, 2-4pm, Clare College, Latimer Room

Mathilde BOMBART (Lyon 3)

‘La posture insurrectionnelle de l’auteur dans la polémique au XVIIe siècle: du littéraire au politique? Autour de Guez de Balzac’

 

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 1 March, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Jamie Trace (St Catharine’s)
‘Giovanni Botero and English political thought’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday 2nd March, 5pm, Room 9 of the History Faculty

John Morgan (University of Manchester)
Storm surges and state formation in early modern England: coping with flooding in coastal and lowland Lincolnshire

Recurrent flooding was a condition of life in low and wet grounds. Erecting dams, scouring ditches and laying drains consumed significant amounts of labour time and money, as the profitability of agriculture rested on maintaining appropriate water levels. The success of one farmer was reliant on another, requiring complex co-ordination and administration. I will outline how flood protection was provisioned, its costs and their impact.

 

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

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

Censorship and philosophy in the Two Sicilies, c. 1688-1767

Felix Waldmann (Cambridge)

 

 

IN LONDON

 

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 27 February,17:15, Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘Ralph Sheldon of Beoley & Weston (1537-1613): No Catholic or no consequences?’
Hilary Turner (Independent scholar)

 

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE:

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)

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 15th February, 12-1:15pm, History Faculty, Room 5

Dr Alex Robinson (Sorbonne)
‘Et le roi prit tant plaisir à la musique’: Royal taste and music in the Renaissance – the case of Henri IV of France  (1589-1610).

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 15 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Elly Robson (Wolfson),
‘“Unles ye bee stronger then wee”: contested justice, sovereignty and violence in seventeenth-century fenland drainage riots’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday, 16th February, 5 PM, Room 9 of the History Faculty

Julie Hardwick (University of Texas at Austin)
Accounting for women: account books, petty commerce and re-thinking the transition to capitalism

In 17th-century France, even small-scale traders used ‘account books’ as instruments of everyday commercial activity. Wives usually kept accounts in small enterprises, producing perhaps the largest surviving corpus of non-elite women’s writing. The ‘books’ were freighted with legal, commercial, cultural and personal meanings. The gendering of financial record keeping is one of the ways in which women were integral in the intensification of market practices.

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

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

“The Trouble with Community and Diaspora: Ottomans in Vienna and Trieste in the 18th century.”

David Do Paço (Paris, Sciences Po)

 

 

IN LONDON

London Shakespeare Seminar

Monday 13 February, 5:15-7:00 PM, Senate Room, Senate House Library

Katherine Schaap Williams, ‘Unfixing Renaissance Disability’
Simon Smith, ‘Acting Amiss: Pleasure, Judgement and the Early Modern Actor’

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.

 

Courtauld Institute of Art

Monday, 13 February 2017, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Research Forum seminar room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

‘The making of the sixteenth-century interior in England’

Prof. Maurice Howard (University of Sussex)

The physical interiors of early modern England exist now only in fragments or later re-modellings, but piecing together this evidence shows how care for materials, improvisation and a willingness to use painted illusion gave internal spaces a degree of visual cohesion. Three other kinds of evidence offer more to the historian: the documentary sources of commissions and inventories, the small but significant number of representations in paint and print, the descriptions of contemporaries, all of which sometimes complement each other but often tell us more about their various and highly individual modes and conventions of recording than give us a composite understanding.

Maurice Howard is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Sussex. His books include The Early Tudor Country House 1490-1550 (1987), The Tudor Image (1995), and The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (2007). He co-authored The Vyne: A Tudor House Revealed (2003), and co-edited Painting in Britain 1500-1630 (2015). He was Senior Subject Specialist for the Tudor and Stuart sections of the British Galleries at the V&A, and is a former President of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the current President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

 

Wednesday 15 February 2017, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

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

‘Portraits of Art Collectors in Mid-Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century Venice’

Prof. Linda Borean (Università degli Studi di Udine)

In the Cinquecento and Early Seicento, Venetian portraiture developed a sub-genre depicting portraits of art collectors. These, have been generally investigated taking into account the connections between the artist and the patron, since many of them have been executed by the foremost painters and sculptors of the period, including Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Bernardo Strozzi and Tiberio Tinelli. In this paper, I would like to shift the attention from these relationships to focus instead on the way in which portraits shed light on the biographies of the art collectors as we know them from wills, inventories, printed biographies and poetic compositions. This paper explores this topic by examining a series of case studies, including those of Andrea Odoni, Giovanni Paolo Cornaro, Alessandro Vittoria, Bartolomeo dalla Nave, Alvise Molin and Giovan Donato Correggio.

Linda Borean has been Professor of History of Art at the University of Udine since 2001. She is member of the Committee of the Ph.D in Art History. She has been Getty Scholar (2003/2004) and Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2012/2013). Linda Borean’s research, supported by some grants (Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, Royal Society of Edimburgh Grants in Humanities), concerns history of art and art collecting in Venice in early modern age. She has been member of the project Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia supported by the Fondazione di Venezia and by the Getty Research Institute. In this context, she is the co-editor of the volumes Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Seicento (2007) and Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento (2009). She has published essays in international journals (Arte Veneta; The Burlington Magazine) and given papers in international symposiums, universities (University of St. Andrews; Pune, India, Technology Institute; Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence; INHA, Paris) and museums (London, National Gallery; Madrid, Prado; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).

 

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

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

‘The Company of Inmates: Collective Identity and Self-government in the 17th-century London Prison’
Richard Thomas Bell (Stanford University)

 

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar

Monday, 13 February, 17:15, Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘Henry VIII, the colonisation of Boulogne and the development of the English Empire’
Neil Murphy (Northumbria University)

‘Ralph Sheldon of Beoley & Weston (1537-1613): No Catholic or no consequences?’
Hilary Turner (Independent scholar)

 

Events This Week

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’

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 31/01/17, 5.15pm in G-R06-07
John Gillies (Essex)
The conversational turn in Shakespeare

 

History of Material Texts Workshops

Monday, 30 January, 12.30-2, Milstein Exhibition Centre/Seminar Room, University Library

A guided tour of the Cambridge University Library exhibition ‘Curious Objects’, in the company of lead curator Jill Whitelock, followed by discussion.

Places are limited–please email jes1003 to reserve.

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 1st February, 12-1:15pm, Little Hall, Sidgwick Site

Dr Hannah Murphy (University of Oxford)
“No day without a line”: calligraphy, perspective and the craft of writing in early modern Nuremberg

 

Cambridge Early Modern French Seminar

Friday, 3 February, 2-4pm, Clare College, Latimer Room

Sophie WAHNICH (CNRS)

Émeutes, émotions: la scène de quel conflit?

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 1 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Carys Brown (St John’s), Julie Kelsoe (Clare), and Fred Smith (Clare), ‘Historiography panel: toleration, coexistence and neighbourliness’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday 2nd February, 5pm in Room 9 of the History Faculty

Christof Jeggle (University of Würzburg)
Divergences or varieties in European economic development?

The debate over divergence in early modern Europe sees the Dutch Republic and Great Britain as the core of progressive economic development, and considers that the rest of the continent lagged behind. Using qualitative indicators I will question the notion of divergence in a continental perspective, offering case studies and proposing some reassessments in respect of comparing economic development.

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

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

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

Record-keeping as a tool of female self-formation in Early Modern Tuscany

Emma Nicholls (Cambridge)

Attendees are welcome to bring lunch to this brown-bag seminar. Tea and coffee will be served. All welcome.

 

Writing Women in History

Tuesday 31 January, 11am-noon, RFB142 (the media centre)

Our first session of the new year and new ‘Women and the Law’ theme for the term will be focused on an angry woman, Calefurnia, and the depiction of female rage in the Sachsenspiegel, a Germanic law code circulated in the 13th-15th centuries. We will be reading and considering the article ‘Calefurnia’s Rage: Emotions and Gender in Late Medieval Law and Literature’ by Sarah Westphal exploring how how gender and emotion are framed in literary and legal sources from medieval Central Europe.

Email writingwomeninhistory@gmail.com for article.

 

 

IN LONDON

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 30 Jan 2017, 17:15- 19:15, IHR Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

‘Rewriting the figure of the martyr: John Donne and the foundation of Christianity’

Shanyn Altman (Sussex University)

‘Sir Francis Walsingham and Anglo-Scottish politics, c. 1580-90’

Hannah Coates (Leeds University)

 

European History 1500-1800 (IHR)

Monday, 30 January, 5:15pm, IHR Past and Present Room, N202, Second Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

‘A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany’

Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews)

 

 

 

 

Events This Week

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

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’

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 01/11/16, 5.15pm in G-R06-07
Andy Kesson (Roehampton)
‘Peculiar houses: building public theatres in Elizabethan London’

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, November 2, 12-1:15pm
English Faculty, Room GR03

Professor Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham)
Options and Experiments: Defining the ‘Global Middle Ages’

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 2 November, 5.15pm
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Sarah Ward (Oxford)
‘“This rebellion against heaven”: the north-east Welsh gentry, royalism, and the Church of England’

 

Early Modern European History

Thursday, November 3, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Tom Hamilton (Cambridge)
Sharing Beds: Intimacy and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France

 

Writing Women in History

11am-12pm, 1 November, RFB 142

‘Women entering convent life’

Texts available on the website

 

IN LONDON

 

Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, November 3, 5:15 PM
Room SH246, 2nd floor, South block, Senate House

Niccolò Fattori (Royal Holloway)
With a little help from my friends – Networks of mutual support in the Greek community of Ancona during the sixteenth century

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, November 3, 5:15 PM

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

Bethany Marsh (Nottingham)
The experience of charitable aid in the British and Irish Civil Wars: the reception of Irish Refugees in the English localities, 1641 to 1651

 

 

Events This Week

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’