The third Renaissance Graduate Seminar of the term will take place on Tuesday 23 February, at 5.15pm in GR06/7 in the English Faculty:

Anna-Maria Hartmann (Oxford)

Know your enemy: Stephen Batman, Edmund Spenser, and the Art of Protestant Discernment

Abstract

The focus of this talk is the first English mythography, Stephen Batman’s Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577). Like the other English mythographies, this text has been dismissed as an eccentric, yet derivative copy of more successful continental mythographies. I will show that this assumption is false. The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes is a creative manipulation of the genre. It appropriates the mythographical form as well as available concepts of myth in order to address religious anxieties rife in the late 1570s. Once this mythography is restored to its original context, it yields important insights. First, it illustrates ways in which myth was conceptualized and used in the wider culture of the English Renaissance; second, it provides us with new approaches to myth in English poetry. I will demonstrate the potential of English mythography as an interpretative tool by discussing analogies between Batman’s use of myth in the Golden Booke and Spenser’s mythological programme in Book 2, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene (The Bower of Bliss).

Anna-Maria Hartmann is Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow in Greek Mythology at Christ Church, Oxford. She received her Ph.D. in English in 2012 from Trinity College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the reception of myth in the English Renaissance, and she has published articles on this topic in journals such as The Seventeenth Century, Translation and Literature, and Renaissance Studies. Currently, she is completing her monograph English Mythography in Its European Context 1500-1650, and her talk at the RGS is part of this project.