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Events This Week

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Tuesday 16th February

Wren Library, Trinity College, 3pm

Nick Hardy (Cambridge)

Intended principally for graduate students interested in working on early modern Latin texts, this session will introduce some of the research methods that can be used in the study and contextualisation of humanistic printed books and manuscripts. Topics covered will include censorship; coterie and manuscript publication; the reconstruction of humanists’ libraries and the study of their marginalia; and the social, religious and political relationships between authors and other figures involved in the production of books.

Wednesday 17th February

CRASSH (Re)constructing the Material World, 12:30-2pm, SG1, Alison Richard Building
Interiors
Dr Antony Buxton (Tutor in design and domestic history, Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford)
Dr Ulrich Leben (Associate Curator of Furniture, The Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor)

Early Modern British and Irish Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall
Aislinn Muller (Girton),
English Catholics and the Excommunication of Elizabeth I: Communication, Resistance and Remembrance

Thursday 18th February

 Early Modern European History Seminar, Green Room, Gonville and Caius, 1pm
Katy Bond (Cambridge)

Charles V’s Universal Empire: Fresh perspectives on a costume project, c. 1547

IHR Society, Culture, and Belief, 1500-1800, Past & Present Room (N202), IHR
Hillary Taylor (Yale University)
The affective economy of social relations in early modern England

If you would like to advertise an early modern event here please email ab2126.

Conference on Shakespeare’s Musical Brain

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Shakespeare’s Musical Brain
Great Hall, King’s Building, Strand, 16th April 2016, 10am-6pm

Student rate: £35                                                                                                            Full price: £95

Unsurprisingly, reflecting the immense influence and inspiration that Shakespeare’s work has brought to all the various art-forms over the centuries, 2016’s commemorative activities will include many operas, ballets, orchestral and choral works, chamber music recitals and exhibitions, that draw upon his plays and poetry. This conference, however, aims to turn the subject through 180° so as to explore the vital importance of music to Shakespeare himself and the role it played in his and his company’s creative processes as well as in the experience of audiences then and now.

The conference will consider the relationship between words and music in aesthetic and scientific terms. Expert speakers in the relevant fields of literature, music and cultural history will be joined by peers concerned with the sciences. The conference will look at how music effects the relationship between actor and audience then as now. Bill Barclay, Director of Music at the Globe Theatre, will explore the Music of the Spheres, both as this relates to Shakespeare and its meaning from ancient times through to modern physics. Prof Michael Trimble, behavioural neurologist, will examine the similarities and differences in the conception and reception of words and music, understanding their distinct and mutual importance better through the medium of Shakespeare himself. Actors and musicians will take a leading part, illustrating and responding creatively to the lectures, joining in discussion and ending the event with a performance of music and readings that reflect the themes of the day.

The Musical Brain is a registered charity founded in 2010. Its objectives are to encourage, foster, assist and promote the advancement of public understanding of the effects of music and other art forms upon the human mind, brain and body, including the scientific, historical and cultural context of music and its potential therapeutic value.

Register here. Please direct enquiries to shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk.

Graduate Lecture Series

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Friday 12th February, 1-2pm, GR06/07                                                              Discovering Richard III in Early Modern Legal Writing                                                    Jitka Štollová

The hasty burial of Richard III in Leicester in 1485 gave rise to one of the most fascinating literary-historical afterlives in English history. In the next two centuries, historians, poets, and playwrights examined and re-examined this controversial figure. Shakespeare’s mesmerising king-villain ultimately became the most iconic and influential portrayal: partly thanks to the intrinsic qualities of his play, partly to the rising popularity of Shakespeare, especially from the eighteenth century onwards. As a consequence, Shakespeare’s Richard III became our Richard III. Yet the seventeenth century has much more to say on this character.

My talk will focus on the representation of Richard III in seventeenth-century legal writing. This century witnessed vivid debates about the limits of royal and parliamentary powers under the Stuart kings, culminating in the conflict of both parties in the Civil Wars. The figure of Richard III became a field of theoretical study about the definition of tyranny and usurpation. But rather than simply confirming these labels, seventeenth-century legal scholarship found new perspectives for assessing this monarch and his rule. My talk will trace the influence of this revision in seventeenth-century authors, and will locate the position of Shakespeare’s Richard III in these debates.

This lecture is particularly relevant for the following papers: Part I, Paper 4 (English Literature and its Contexts, 1500-1700); Part I, Paper 5 (Shakespeare); Part II, Paper 7 (Early Modern Drama 1588-1642).

Matthew Parker: Archbishop, Scholar, and Collector

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Matthew Parker: Archbishop, Scholar, and Collector

Programme available here.                                                                                                   17 March 2016 – 19 March 2016                                                                           CRASSH (SG1&2) and Corpus Christi College

The figure of Matthew Parker (1504-75), which should be prominent in the history of the early years of Elizabeth I, represents a remarkable gap in our understanding of the sixteenth century. His political and ecclesiastical career has been neglected by the historians of the past fifty years; his institutional and intellectual patronage have been studied without reference generally to the broader world in which he moved; his remarkable salvage of the manuscript remains of Anglo-Saxon England is known to specialists but not to those working in cognate fields; his efforts to recreate the history of the English Church have been studied without systematic reference to the continental and English models that he imitated. This conference aims to bring those with an interest in Parker together for the first time, to encourage work bridging existing fields of Parkerian study and setting aspects of his career into their full context, and, as a result, to present for the first time a new and coherent picture of a major figure in mid-sixteenth-century English (and Continental) intellectual and religious life, bringing into particular focus Parker’s role in collaborative scholarship and the retrieval of the past.

The conference is co-hosted by Corpus Christi College (of which Parker became Master in 1544), which will allow study sessions to take place in the Parker Library and to be accompanied by a rolling exhibition of books and manuscripts from Parker’s collections (changing as appropriate for each paper). Confirmed speakers include Alexandra Walsham, David Crankshaw, Alexandra Gillespie, Jeffrey Todd Knight, Paul Nelles, Elizabeth Evenden, Lori Anne Ferrell, Brian Cummings, James Carley, and Arnold Hunt.

Conveners

Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)
Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge)
William Sherman (V&A/University of York)

Graduate Lecture Series

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Screenshot 2016-02-04 10.52.49Friday 5th February, 1-2pm (GR06/07)                         ‘Let me honour your repentance’: Financial Excess and Repentance in Early Modern Drama                      Ezra Horbury

The early modern prodigal, who finds his ancestor in Luke 15.11­-32, is a character marked by excessive expenditure, rebellion, and riot. Most often a youth and almost exclusively male, the prodigal is one of the most popular archetypes in early modern drama. This type appears across scores of plays, such as Quicksilver of Eastward Ho, Young Lionel of The English Traveller, Bassanio of The Merchant of Venice, and both Hal and Falstaff of the Henry IVs. Prodigals were troubling, timely figures that variably reinforced and subverted a range of early modern mores. This lecture examines examples of the archetype at the height of its popularity in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in order to provide students with a preliminary but concrete understanding of prodigals, prodigality, and the social anxieties with which these characters engage.

While prodigal excess is frequently represented as socially disruptive, these plays also demonstrate that it cannot be unproblematically condemned. Excessive trespasses must be forgiven and the prodigal redeemed to restore social order, but distrust concerning the predictable nature of repentance besets these depictions of Christian closure. This lecture also explores the uneasiness present in Calvinist understandings of repentance and opens lines of inquiry for those who wish to interrogate early modern repentance on a broader level.

This lecture will also be of especial interest to those who wish to learn more about dynamics of authority and rebellion in the family, the morality of excess and moderation, and Calvinist thought in early modern drama and culture.
This lecture will be relevant to Part I students taking ‘Paper 4: English Literature and its Contexts, 1500­-1700’ and ‘Paper 5: Shakespeare’. For Part II students, it will be relevant to ‘Paper 7: Early Modern Drama 1588­-1642’. It may also be of interest to students taking ‘Paper 17: Shakespeare in Performance’.

IMAGE: EEBO, STC 597:06

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

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On Tuesday (9th) Dr Vladimir Brljak (University of Cambridge) will speak on Allegorical Poetics in England after 1600: Fishing in the Dead Water. G-R06/07, all welcome!

Dismissed early on as fallow and insignificant by the Edwardian pioneers of the subject, the earlier seventeenth century remains a neglected and misunderstood episode in the history of English poetics and literary criticism – the ‘Dead Water in English Criticism’, in George Saintsbury’s memorable phrase. The talk will challenge this received view and explore more profitable alternatives, with particular attention to the question of the allegorical conception of imaginative literature in the period’s critical thought.

Vladimir Brljak studied at Zagreb (BA) and Warwick (PhD), and is now Thole Research Fellow in English at Trinity Hall. He works mainly on English literary and intellectual history, 1500-1700, with particular interests in allegory, poetics, and the work of John Milton.

Graduate Lecture Series

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Friday 29th January, 1pm GR06/7.

Conor Leahy (St. John’s) will give a lecture entitled ‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’; a brief abstract follows. All are welcome.

‘Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry’

‘All the traditions of late medieval poetic landscape flow together and coalesce, miraculously, in Gavin Douglas.’ So wrote Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter in their 1971 study, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. Along with Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas (c.1476-1522) helped transform the Scots vernacular into a major European literary language. His pioneering translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1513) into ‘the langage of Scottis natioun’ was praised by Ezra Pound as being ‘better than the original’, while his magnificent descriptions of the Scottish landscape make him (according to Alastair Fowler) ‘effectively…the inventor of nature poetry’.

My lecture seeks to place the poetry of Gavin Douglas in the wider contexts of late medieval landscape writing. My discussion will range from well-known works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s dream poems, to some lesser-known but fascinating pieces,such as Mum and the Sothsegger and the Middle English On Husbondrie. I will examine how the qualities of perspective and spatial consistency developed fitfully and unpredictably in fourteenth and fifteenth century writing, but I will also discuss how descriptions of landscape could have a shifting range of associations in the context of any given work.

Douglas himself could draw upon a diverse tradition of Scottish and English landscape poetry, both for specific details and for structural coherence. In his panoramic descriptions of nature (Prologues VII, XII, and XIII of his Eneados) we find the use of materials as varied as Robert Henryson’s Fables and Testament of Cresseid, Virgil’s Georgics, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and even Douglas’s own dream vision The Palice of Honour (1501). The breadth and sensitivity of his reading allowed Douglas to look searchingly and with fresh insight at the natural world, and to write some of the most vivid and original poetry of the late Middle Ages.

This lecture is of interest to students working on the following papers: Part I, Paper 3 (English Literature 1300-1550) Part II, Paper 5 (Chaucer) Part II, Paper 6 (Medieval Supernatural)

Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment

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Jack Drum's Poster_v8A production of Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment will be coming to the Cambridge Junction on Friday 26th and Saturday 27th February. The play is almost completely unknown but almost precisely contemporary with – and clearly not entirely unlike – Shakespeare’s later romantic comedies. There are eight new songs in the production, all original compositions using Marston’s lyrics. More information below:

In Renaissance London, the cynical Ned Planet observes the changing fortunes of two aristocratic heiresses and their social network: Katherine is courted by the impoverished but loyal Pasquil, the conniving usurer Master Mammon, and the ridiculous Master Puff, while her sister, Camelia, vacillates between an army of suitors according to the self-interested advice of her serving maid, Winifred. Meanwhile, Winifred conducts her own intrigues surrounding the extravagant Frenchman John fo’ de King, who will do anything to get a ‘vench’. 

John Marston’s acerbic city comedy was last performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1600. With its obsession with lust, money and double-dealing and its dense Shakespearean allusion, Jack Drum’s Entertainment is the best Elizabethan comedy you’ve never seen. Jack Drum’s Entertainment will be performed by a new group of 11 to 19 year-olds from The Young Actors Company, one of the most highly regarded theatre companies in Cambridgeshire, especially trained by leading academics and practitioners from King’s College London and University College London. It will brought back to life in a Georgian setting, with Marston’s original lyrics set to fresh compositions, performed live by the company.

More information here.

 

Events This Week

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Monday 25th January

CMT Inaugural Exhibition Launch Party, 10.15-11.15am, English Faculty first floor landing. Come and help us celebrate the arrival of the CMT’s new exhibition cases with coffee and cake.

Tuesday 26th January

Renaissance Graduate Seminar, 5.15pm, GR06/7
Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton University)
Transvernacular Poetry and the Rise of English Literature in Early Modern Europe

Sandars Lectures, ‘Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’, 5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                         John Caius: history as argument

Clark Lectures ‘The Art of Invention’, 5pm, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms                                    Professor Mary Carruthers (New York University)                                                                 Disquiet, Dislocation, Performance: Augustine’s Conversion

 Wednesday 27th January

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, 12pm SR24                                                 Jennifer Bishop (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge):                                                            Making a record of the self: some autobiographical traces of London clerks

Sandars Lectures, ‘Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’, 5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                         Matthew Parker: history as archive

Early Modern British and Irish Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall      Greg Salazar (Selwyn),
Ecclesiastical Licensing, Religious Censorship, and the Regulation of Consensus in Early Stuart England

Thursday 28th January

 Sandars Lectures, ‘Writing and Reading History in Renaiassance England: Some Cambridge Examples’, 5pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene’t Street                                  Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)                                                        Adam Winthrop: history as resource

Friday 29th January

 Graduate Lecture Series, 1pm, GR06/07                                                                   Conor Leahy                                                                                                              Gavin Douglas and the History of Landscape Poetry

Saturday 30th January

Renaissance Revenge: In and Out of Time                                                                            2-6pm Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Room 112

If you would like to advertise an early modern event here please email ab2126.

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

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Faculty of English Wednesdays 12 –1:30pm.

27 January (SR24, English Faculty)                                                                           Jennifer Bishop (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge):                                                          Making a record of the self: some autobiographical traces of London clerks

10 February (SR24, English Faculty)                                                                           Rachel E. Holmes (Crossroads of Knowledge, Cambridge):                                              A widow’s will in early modern adaptations of the Duchess of Amalfi

24 February (Boardroom, English Faculty)                                                                 Richard Oosterhoff (CRASSH, Cambridge):                                                                  Idiot wit: framing lay knowers in the Northern Renaissance