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Events This Week

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Monday 18th January

 

Fitzwilliam College Literary Society Talk, 5.30pm, Upper Hall 1, Fitzwilliam College Professor Helen Hackett (UCL)                                                                                       The Elizabethan Imagination                                                                                            All welcome. Drinks will be served after the talk. No booking requirement but please contact Hero Chalmers (hac26@cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions.

 

London Shakespeare Seminar, 5.15pm Senate Room, Senate House Library               Preti Taneja (QMUL)                                                                                         Shakespeare responses to the Syrian conflict: a presentation of research from Jordan and Syria 2015-16                                                                                                 Katherine Hennessey (Warwick)                                                                                      ‘All the Perfumes of Arabia’: Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula

 

Wednesday 20th January

 

Things, (Re)constructing the Material World: Alcohol, 12.30pm, Alison Richard SG1         Dr Richard Stone (History, University of Bristol)                                                             What is Cider?  What was Cider?  Recovering Seventeenth Century Material Culture        Dr Deborah Toner (History, University of Leicester)                                                    Pulque and Pulquerías

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall Richard Ansell (Leicester)                                                                                     Education, Travel and Family Strategy in Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1750

 

Bibliographical Society Lecture, 5.30pm, Society of Antiquaries, Piccadilly, London     Scott Mandelbrote                                                                                                        Isaac Newton, his library, and the history of scholarship More information here.

 

Thursday 21st January

 

History of Material Texts Seminar, 5pm, SR24

Friday 22nd January

Crossroads of Knowledge, Reading Group                                                              Contact Tim Stuart-Buttle (ts630) for more information.

 

Graduate Lecture Series, 1pm, GR06/07                                                                Rosalind Lintott                                                                                                    Everything you always wanted to know about Isidore of Seville (but were afraid to ask)

 

Early Modern French Seminar, 2pm, Free Gallery, Whipple Museum                           Simon Schaffer (Downing College, Cambridge)
Optical Philosophy in the Republic of Letters

 

Saturday 23rd January

 

Authorship and Attribution in Early Modern Drama: John Marston and Others             Room 114, 43 Gordon Square, London, more information here.

 

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

 

Change and Exchange, 29 – 30 April 2016

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Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Screenshot 2016-01-13 12.57.05This two-day colloquium will explore ideas of change and exchange – and their implicit interrelation – across various early modern domains engaged with ways of knowing. It will put pressure on the wider notion of ‘economy’ itself and how it inflects our knowledge, management and articulations of the world. Using literary interventions and imaginative representations as a point of entry, these ‘exchanges’ will probe the dialogue between the period’s economic thinking and practices on the one hand, and the calculus of emotional and imaginative lives on the other. Day 1 will concentrate on economies of transformation across theology, law, literature and the aesthetics of representation; Day 2 will focus mainly on the cross-overs between the technologies of change in the market-place, and transactions in the sphere of cultural production.

This event is part of the research project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, a five-year ERC-funded project based at the Faculty of English and CRASSH, University of Cambridge.

Convenors:

Rachel E. Holmes, Subha Mukherji, Tim Stuart-Buttle, Elizabeth L. Swann

More information, programme and abstracts here.

DETAIL FROM QUENTIN MATSYS (1456/1466–1530), THE MONEYLENDER AND HIS WIFE (1514), WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

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Lent Term 2016 programme

26/1/16
G-R06/07
Transvernacular Poetry and the Rise of English Literature in Early Modern Europe
Prof. Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

09/2/16
G-R06/07
Allegorical Poetics in England after 1600: Fishing in the Dead Water
Dr Vladimir Brljak (University of Cambridge)

23/2/16
G-R06/07
Know your Enemy: Stephen Batman, Edmund Spenser, and the Art of Protestant Discernment
Dr Anna Hartmann (University of Oxford)

08/3/16
G-R06/07
Shakespeare’s Tailors
Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries (University of Cambridge)

More information here

Events This Week

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Tuesday 1st December

Renaissance Graduate Seminar, 5.15pm, G-R06/07
Prof Catherine Bates (Warwick)                                                                                        On Not Defending Poetry: The Economics of Sidney’s Golden World                                  More information here.

Wednesday 2nd December

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, Glover Room, Memorial Court, Clare, 12pm           Ceri Law (Queen Mary, University of London)
Conservative Oxford and Puritan Cambridge?  The Making and Maintaining of a Reformation Legend                                                                                                     More information here.

Thursday 3rd December

IHR Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Seminar, Montague Room (G26), Senate House Library, London, 5.15pm                                                                                                   Thomas Frank (Pavia)                                                                                           Discussing reform between the 14th and 16th Centuries: the example of Italian hospitals   More information here.

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

 

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

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Tuesday 1 December, 5.15pm, GR06/7.

Catherine Bates (Warwick) will give a paper entitled ’On Not Defending Poetry: the economics of Sidney’s golden world’; a brief abstract follows. All are welcome.

‘On Not Defending Poetry: the economics of Sidney’s golden world’

One of the foundational texts of early modern poetics, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy makes the case that poetry profits both the individual and the state to which he or she belongs by promoting ethical ideals of heroic love and political action. That, at least, is how most critics interpret the text. This talk reconsiders Sidney’s famous image of the poet’s golden world in order to suggest an alternative reading: one in which the Defence is shown to reveal a profound discomfort with the model of profitability and to feel its way toward a radically different – and modern – aesthetic.

Catherine Bates is a Research Professor at the University of Warwick, and is currently in Cambridge for the year as a visiting by-fellow at Churchill College. Her most recent monograph is Masculinity and the Hunt (2013); her previous publications include Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), Play in a Godless World (1999), and The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992). She has edited Sidney’s poems for Penguin (1994) and the Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010); she is currently editing A Companion to Renaissance Poetry for Wiley Blackwell, and she is also the author of numerous articles, essays and chapters in edited collections.

Events This Week

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Monday 9th November

London Shakespeare Seminar, 5.15pm, Senate Room, Senate House Library              Brett Gamboa (Dartmouth College)                                                              Shakespearean Metadrama, 2.0                                                                                   More information here.

Tuesday 10th November

Renaissance Research Workshop, on Lisa Jardine’s work and disciplinary legacy. 1.05-1.55pm, English Faculty GR-03. All welcome.

Comparative Social and Cultural History Seminar, 5pm, Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius Penny Roberts (Warwick)                                                                                                “To my very great regret”: Adversity and Opportunity in the Huguenot Exile Experience  More information here.

Wednesday 11th November

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall Jessica Crown (Clare)
Scholarship and Service in the Career of Richard Croke (1489–1558)                           More information here.

Thursday 12th November

Early Modern European History Seminar, 1pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College Aurelia Martín Casares (Granada)                                                                               Female trafficking in the Mediterranean: North African women in early modern Spain  More information here.

History of Material Texts Seminar, 5pm, Milstein Seminar Room, CUL                    Catherine Ansorge (University Library)                                                                             Ink and gold; how the Islamic manuscripts came to Cambridge                                    More information here.

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

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

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Georgetown University and Carnegie Mellon University have launched the beta version of ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’, which maps early modern social links using data mining and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It is able to be publicly augmented in its current version. The site currently identifies more than 13,000 individuals and highlights approximately 200,000 relationships. Visit or add to the project here.Screenshot 2015-10-19 11.42.16

Welcome, Suparna Roychoudhury!

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In this post, new CRASSH Conversions Fellow Suparna Roychoudhury writes about her project ‘Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science’:

My book project, “Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science,” investigates Shakespeare’s representation of mental images. Shakespeare was clearly familiar with the principles of faculty psychology handed down to the Renaissance from antiquity, according to which “imagination” is the part of the soul responsible for creating “phantasms” or mental images. The project looks at the ways in which Shakespeare’s portrayal of imagination relates to the scientific revolution—to developments in anatomy, medicine, natural philosophy, and natural history. It examines Shakespearean texts alongside the work of such figures as Andreas Vesalius, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, speak to the difficulty of determining imagination’s anatomical nature; similarly, Macbeth is a comment on the ever-increasing pathologization of imagination. Overall, I am interested in the connections between Shakespeare’s imagination and the proto-scientific thinking of his time, and how his work translates epistemic problems into aesthetic representations. While in Cambridge, I will be exploring the relation between imagination and early modern mathematics, and how this relation figures in Shakespeare’s plays.

Suparna Roychoudhury, Mount Holyoke College, United States of America.

More information on Suparna’s work is here, and you can contact her here: sr765@cam.ac.uk.

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

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Michaelmas 2015 schedule for the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, held jointly between the faculties of English and History, in the Glover Room, Memorial Court, Clare College.

21 October, 12-1:30pm                                                                                            Dr Tom Hamilton (Trinity College, Cambridge)                                                Remembering the Wars of Religion: Pierre de L’Estoile and the “Drolleries of the League” from Ephemeral Print to Scrapbook History

4 November,12-1:30pm                                                                                                    Dr Daniel Starza Smith (Lincoln College, Oxford)                                                    Unvolving the Mysteries of the Melbourne Manuscript, or, Editing An Anonymous Stuart Play Fragment

18 November, 12-1:30pm                                                                                                 Dr Lizzie Swann (CRASSH, Cambridge)                                                                   ‘Nothing clearer, nothing darker’: Seeing the Light in Early Modern England

2 December, 12-1:30pm                                                                                                   Dr Ceri Law (Queen Mary, University of London)                                                               Conservative Oxford and Puritan Cambridge?  The Making and Maintaining of a Reformation Legend

All welcome. Any queries please contact ab2126@cam.ac.uk, more information here.