IN CAMBRIDGE:

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday 17 May, at 5.15pm in GR06/7 in the Faculty of English

Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘New pleasures and old pain: Donne and sensation’.

Throughout his rich and varied corpus, John Donne repeatedly seeks
meaning in the sensations of pleasure and pain. His literary career is
marked by robust avowals of the pleasures of lyric intimacy, as well as
by urgent expositions of the conventional pains of religious suffering.
In this paper, I argue that part of what is distinctive and compelling
about Donne is his careful attention to sensation. While Donne may have
only been partly successful in the attempt to find a lexicon of
suffering that could escape an inherited logic of redemptive pain, he
succeeded admirably in the effort to carve out an emergent discourse of
sanctioned erotic pleasure.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the
University of Michigan, where he has taught since he received his Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He is also a Life
Member of Clare Hall. He is the author of /Prayer and Power: George
Herbert and Renaissance Courtship/ (University of Chicago Press, 1991),
/Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in
Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton/ (Cambridge, 1999) and /The
Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry/ (2010); and editor of
the /Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets/ (2006).He is
currently editing /John Donne in Context/ for Cambridge, working on a
book for Blackwell’s entitled /Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry/, and
researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern
England.

Cambridge New Habsburg Studies Network Annual Lecture

‘The Habsburgs and their Eastern Neighbours: Re-evaluating the Religious Landscape of 16th-century Central Europe’

Tuesday, 17th May 2016, Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall, 5pm-6:30pm

Professor Howard Louthan (Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota)

While relations between the Habsburgs and their Valois, Tudor, and Ottoman rivals have been well studied, their connections with their eastern neighbors, the Jagiellonians, have not been examined with the same degree of scrutiny.  The paper will first offer an overview of the complicated web of relationships that developed between the two families.   I will then argue that a fixation with diplomatic and dynastic history has obscured our vision of a common cultural and intellectual landscape the families shared.  We will pay specific attention to a great scandal that occurred in mid-sixteenth century Poland and unpack that incident to explore some of the distinctive features of a multiconfessional religious culture that developed across Central Europe during the Age of Reform.

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 18 May, 12-1:30 PM

Liesbeth Corens (Jesus College, Cambridge):

‘Witnessing, Mission, and English Catholic Counter-Archives’

SR-24, Faculty of English

Cambridge Medieval Paleography Workshop

Friday 20 May 2016, Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library, 2-4 PM.

Dr. Katya Chernakova: Title To Be Announced.

Dr. Eyal Poleg: ‘The Late Medieval Bible’

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

IN LONDON:

Courtauld Institute of Art

Renaissance Work-in-Progress seminars

‘Titian and the Renaissance Model’

Wednesday 18 May 2016 – 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

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

Dr Joost Keizer: University of Groningen
Titian’s models muddle the boundaries between art and life. They lived in two worlds: in the social world and the world of the artwork. The questions assembled in the model were therefore not just aesthetic; they also redefined art’s relationship to life. How much distance should art take from lived experience? And how much does our perception of reality change when art trespasses the territory of the real? These questions are the subject of this talk.

Dr Joost Keizer (PhD Leiden University ’08) is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. He has written Michelangelo and the Politics of Art (Yale University Press), The Realism of Piero della Francesca: The Life & the Work (Ashgate), and a book on Leonardo da Vinci with illustrations by Christina Christoforou (Laurence King). He has co-edited a volume on The Transformation of the Vernacular in Early Modernity. And he has published articles on Michelangelo, fifteenth-century portraiture, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and the concept of style.

Institute of Historical Research (UCL):

Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar

Wednesday, 18 May, 5.15 pm

‘Divers other trifles: the material culture of the sugar banquet in early modern England’

Louise Stewart

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, sweet banquets consisting of preserved fruits, confections such as comfits and lozenges, and sculptures in sugar paste or marzipan were a significant element of aristocratic and gentry sociability.  Indeed, an elite person in early modern England would expect to be entertained with a sweet banquet at every wedding, christening and funeral as well as at other significant social occasions hosted by their peers.  What meanings did the banquet hold that led it to be so closely associated with these important life events?

This paper invites the audience to tour the spaces in which foods for the banquet were prepared and consumed; the banqueting house, the sweetmeat closet, and the child-bed chamber.  Inventories of these spaces, surviving material culture and contemporary descriptions of banqueting provide new insights as to why the sugar banquet was so pervasive in early modern England.  It provided opportunities for participants to demonstrate their refined manners, excellent education, good connections, virtue and inherent nobility.  As a cultural practice which was associated with femininity, did the sugar banquet also provide opportunities for female empowerment and creative expression?

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

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar

Thursday, 19 May, 5.15pm

Gogmagog and Corineus: from the West Country to the New Troy 
‘Trojans and giants on the sea-coast of Totnes’
John Clark (Museum of London)

‘Gogmagog come(s) to London’
Alixe Bovey (Courtauld Institute of Art)

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