Events this Week

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)

 

 

London Renaissance Seminar Summer Programme

London Renaissance Seminar Summer Programme

 Summer Lecture, 13 July 2015 5.30pm, Room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1:      Professor Jyotsna Singh, Anglican Global Crossings and the Specters of Islam in the Early Modern Period.                                                                                                               Wine will be served.

Saturday 18th July 2015, 2pm-6.30pm, Room 538, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX:                                                                                                                                    The Performance and Experience of Domestic Service                                             Organiser: Dr. Emma Whipday

All welcome. Any queries please contact s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk

Events This Week

Monday 18 May

Oxford Bibliographical Society                                                                             5.15pm, Taylor Institution:

Jason Scott-Warren (University of Cambridge)                                                                The Archaeology of an Elizabethan Library: Reading Richard Stonley (c. 1520-1600)

Richard Stonley, an Elizabethan exchequer official and the first documented reader of Shakespeare, left two fascinating traces in the archives. The first comprises three volumes of journals covering periods of the 1580s and 1590s; the second is a booklist that was compiled when the contents of Stonleys house on London’s Aldersgate Street were sold off to defray his alleged embezzlements in office in 1597. This paper will dig into both documents in order to contextualize a highly distinctive early modern library.

Tuesday 19 May

 

Crossroads of Knowledge Reading Group                                                            2pm-4pm English Faculty S-R19:   

The reading group will be looking at Thomas Traherne, contact Tim Stuart-Buttle for more information and some pre-circulated reading material: ts630@cam.ac.uk.

Neo-Latin Reading Group                                                                                      King’s College London, 5.15pm B7:

Maya Feile Tomes (University of Cambridge)                                                                   The shield of Aeneas in the hands of Christopher Columbus — again. New thoughts on weaponry ekphrasis in the Neo-Latin Columbus epic corpus.

The Neo-Latin subgenre of the Columbus epic – which, just as it says on the tin, is a small collection of (early modern) Neo-Latin poems on the subject of Christopher Columbus’ voyages to America – has recently increased in size from five known examples to six. By the same token, the previously known instances of the intriguing ekphrastic phenomenon that is the American shield ekphrasis (shields depicting visions or quasi-maps of the newly encountered continent), of which there were formerly thought to be just two, now find themselves joined by a third example: one which, at over 150 lines, is indeed by far the longest of them all (and, for that matter, considerably longer than the Shield of Aeneas itself!) and, in many senses, very intriguing. In my talk, I will introduce the new text and its ekphrasis, considering how its ekphrastic representation of America interacts with precedents both classical and ‘Columbian’.

 

Wednesday 20 May

CRASSH Things That Matter Seminar                                                                           ARB SG1 from 12.15pm – 2pm:                                                                           ‘Reproduced Things’

Professor Helen King (Classical Studies, Open University)
The Material Womb                                                                                                            In the western tradition of thinking about the body, wombs have not only been illustrated in a variety of shapes, but been made in a variety of materials: ancient terracotta ‘votive wombs’ meet today’s brightly coloured, perky knitted wombs, while eighteenth-century glass wombs give way to nineteenth-century rubber wombs. In this paper, as an aspect of a wider project concerning what has been thought to constitute a body ‘part’, I will consider the colours and materials used for wombs. I shall be arguing that something more than factual knowledge guides the visual representation of the womb, and that taking the long view changes the assumptions we now make, and the questions we put to the past.

Professor Michelle O’Malley (Art History, University of Sussex)
Botticelli and Reproduction                                                                                                In the art historical tradition of thinking about Renaissance painting, we conceptualise pictures as ‘autograph’ and ‘workshop’, admiring the former as, say, a Botticelli, and often denigrating the latter as a slavish and dull copy. But these two strands of production were not divergent: both were outputs of the business of a master painter, and both involved, in varying degrees, the input of the master and his assistants. In this paper, I will consider the production of Botticelli’s ‘workshop’ works, drawing particularly on technical analysis to discuss approaches to the manufacture of these material objects created for the Renaissance home. I will argue that ‘workshop’ work—Botticelli’s re-produced things—represent decisions he made about manufacture in the business and that their construction calls into question some of our most fundamental tools for assessing attribution and understanding how Renaissance painters worked.

London Festival of the Arts Lecture, 5.30pm-7.30pm                                                   UCL Roberts G08:

Carole Levin (University of Nebraska)                                                                   Pregnancy, False Pregnancy, and Questionable Heirs: Mary I and her Echoes

London Renaissance Seminar                                                                                   Room G01, 43 Gordon Square:

6pm – 7:25pm Renaissance Ways of Seeing
How did people ‘see’ in the Renaissance? In this panel discussion Joanne Anderson (Birkbeck) will ask who coloured Mary Magdalen and why it matters, looking particularly at early Renaissance artworks produced in Alpine Italy. Paul Taylor (Warburg Institute) will explore the multivalent idea of ‘imitation’ in relation to life and art in the Renaissance. Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck) will explore the visionary ‘seeing’ (or ‘skrying’) of John Dee’s angelic conversations. Gill Woods (Birkbeck) will investigate how characters went invisible on the Renaissance stage, and what that tells us about theatrical seeing.

7:40pm – 9pm Keeping it in the family: Renaissance writing dynasties?
Kingsley and Martin Amis were not the first. In the Renaissance, a remarkable number of writers (and scholars) belonged to a family double act – most often father and son, or brother and brother, but sometimes father and daughter, or mother and daughter. In a culture in which literature and learning earned new kinds of social prestige, transmitting the craft or vocation of writing from one generation to the next could help achieve social ascent. Why did people write together – was the aim to create dynasties, within which writing was a central plank? Join Professor Neil Kenny (All Souls College, Oxford) to explore how in the French and European Renaissance literature and learning did and didn’t make families a new place in the world.

Thursday 21 May

IHR: Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar                                   5.30pm, Seminar Room A, V&A South Kensington Research Department, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2R:

Dr Pamela Long (Independent Scholar)                                                              Engineering, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome