Renaissance
EASTER TERM 2024
There are two meetings of the seminar this term, on 7 and 21 May (details below). Start time 5.15, and we're in GR06/07 in the English Faculty for both. As always, we'll be taking the speakers out to dinner afterwards and company is much appreciated, so do let me know (scnr2) if you'd like to join on either occasion - the deadline for responses is 12.00 on the Monday before the seminar.
Tuesday 7 May, Dr Katherine Hunt, 'Making literature in a brazen world' (5.15, GR06/07)
Early modern writers liked to compare literature favourably to brass in terms of value (Sidney’s description of nature’s brazen world in contrast to poetry’s golden one); or of duration (Horace’s assertion, much-quoted in our period, that his Odes will be more lasting than brass). In this paper I explore two connected pieces of writing by Ben Jonson and George Chapman which use brass in a different way: less as a foil for literature and more as an analogue to it. In particular, these two writers are interested in how this metal might provide a site from which to think through processes of making, in literary writing as well as in artisanal craft, and to focus on the moments of formation that are crucial to understanding the relationships between form and matter. Brass is a particularly useful focus for such investigations because—unlike gold, or silver, or iron—it is an alloy, a hybrid: it has to be deliberately made. The analogues that Jonson and Chapman develop speak to current work in literary studies—and across early modern studies more generally—which is engaged in questions of process, making, and method.
Tuesday 21 May, Dr Lauren Working, 'Cavalier Poets and the Colonial Gaze: Madagascar to Bermuda' (5.15, GR06/07)
In the late 1630s, William Davenant applied his literary energies to the island of Madagascar. His 21-page poem, Madagascar (1638), cast Charles I's nephew, Prince Rupert, as a dashing conqueror, subduing Madagascan and European rivals through his beauty and taking control of the island for the English. Edmund Waller's 'Battle of the Summer Islands', written around the same time, imagined Bermuda as a pleasure ground, transforming Arcadia into a colonial georgic landscape. This paper focuses on how cavalier poets brought colonialism into Caroline poetics. It does so through the lens of 'fancy', proposing the importance of this term in understanding the colonial imagination in early Stuart wit literature, and in seeing the material and erotic desires that often lay behind it.
