Events This Week | Renaissance Research Group

Things are getting busy! Here are some events taking place this coming week in Cambridge and London.

IN CAMBRIDGE:

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, October 18 at 5.15pm in G-R06-07

Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck)
‘Wheatcroft’s Written World’

History of Material Texts

Wednesday 19th October, 12:30-2, Board Room, Faculty of English

Matthew Symonds (University College London/CELL) will introduce the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe Project and the new Digital Bookwheel (http://www.bookwheel.org/viewer/)

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 19th October, 12-1:15pm
English Faculty, Room GR03

Dr Jonathan Willis (University of Birmingham)
‘Towards a Cultural History of Theology: The Ten Commandments and Popular Belief in Reformation England’

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 19 October, 5.15pm,
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall
Kate Peters (Murray Edwards)
‘Friction in the archives: contested record-keeping in the English Revolution’

Early Modern European History Seminar

Thursday, 20 October 2016, 1-2pm in the Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Attendees are welcome to bring lunch to this brown-bag seminar. Tea and coffee will be served. All welcome.

Daniel Jütte (Harvard / CRASSH EURIAS Junior Fellow)
Defenestration as Ritual Punishment: Windows, Power, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe

Writing Women in History Reading Group

Tuesday, October 18, Room 142 (Media Centre) of the Raised Faculty Building, Sidgwick Site from 11.00-12.00.

This term our theme is ‘Women and Religious Communities’, where we will be tracing the experiences of nuns and female missionaries across the Early Modern world, ranging from Florence to Moscow and beyond. Towards the end of term we will also be welcoming a graduate speaker from the University of Warwick who will speak to us about a female convent community in Medieval France.

In our first session, on Tuesday 18th October, we will be looking at convent regulation and the issue of enclosure comparatively in 16th-century Italy and Muscovy (Early Modern Russia). We will be reading an article by Silvia Evangelisti entitled “We do not have it, and we do not want it: Women, Power and Convent Reform in Florence”, in conjunction with some contemporary convent rules, focussing predominantly on a source from a nunnery in Moscow (provided in translation). Email writingwomeninhistory@gmail.com to receive texts in advance of the session, and to be added to the mailing list.

IN LONDON:

London Shakespeare Centre (KCL)

Still Shakespeare

Nash Lecture Theatre (K2.31)

20/10/2016 (19:00-20:30)

Part of the Arts and Humanities Festival 2016.

Presented by the London Shakespeare Centre as part of Shakespeare400

This event is open to all and free to attend, but booking is required via eventbrite.

Please direct enquiries to ahri@kcl.ac.uk.

‘Still Shakespeare’ – animated shorts screening

Still Shakespeare is a slate of five artists’ short animated films including new works by Shaun Clark, Sharon Liu, Kim Noce and Farouq Suleiman and Jonathan Bairstow. The film aredeveloped in partnership with the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, animation company Film Club at Th1ng and animation company Sherbet.

The aim of the project was to create contemporary artworks that take iconic Shakespearean imagery as their starting point and respond in a variety of irreverent and original ways, making Shakespeare current and engaging to wide audiences and adding a contemporary element to the Shakespeare400 worldwide celebrations in 2016. The artist filmmakers were given access to the research and expertise of the London Shakespeare Centre.

The key research feeding into the project was the PhD by Sally Barnden, in the Department of English Language & Literature. Sally’s research on the intersection of Shakespeare’s plays, performance and photography is concerned with the way that certain well-known iconic images have been absorbed into a shared cultural memory.

The films will be screened, followed by a discussion of the work with some of the artists and members of the London Shakespeare Centre.

London Renaissance Seminar

The London Renaissance Seminar meets at Birkbeck regularly to discuss the literature, culture and history of the English Renaissance. It is free and welcomes all students, academics and people with an interest in the Renaissance or early modern period.

Buried Things in Early Modern Culture: Poetics, Epistemology and Practice

12 – 5 pm, Saturday 22 October 2016

Room 114, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

What role did the practice and figuration of burial play in producing knowledge in Renaissance England? Drawing connections between literature, natural philosophy, urban history and material culture, speakers explore the significance, uses and problems of the lost and buried in early modern culture.

Featuring Elizabeth Swann (Cambridge): The Consolation of (natural) philosophy: knowing death in early modern England (1:10-1:50)

Courtauld Institute of Art

A Graphic Imperative: The impact of print and printed images upon Michelangelo’s design for the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Wednesday 19 October 2016
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

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

Free, open to all.

Dr Charles Robertson: Oxford Brookes University

The Sistine Ceiling stands at a cusp of a development in artistic production. While it preceded the moment when printmaking became a fully integrated, and often determining, part of artistic production, through the interaction of Raphael and his followers with Marcantonio Raimondi and other printmakers, the Ceiling was already created when the visual senses of both the artist and his public were already profoundly affected by printmaking and printed illustrated books. Michelangelo’s earliest work was a painted version of the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Martin Schöngauer, marking only the beginning of an ingrained fascination with prints apparent in his adaptation of printed images by artists ranging from Andrea Mantegna to Albrecht Dürer. Michelangelo was also particularly drawn to illustrated books. This went well beyond the illustrated vernacular Bibles, that he certainly used, and provided both specific instances for the Ceilings ichnographic invention together with formal and design solutions. Furthermore it may be suggested that the viability of the stylistic revolution that the Ceiling represented within the broad context of the High Renaissance depended, in part, on an audience which itself avidly consumed a wide range of printed images.

Charles Robertson is Senior Lecturer in History of Art, Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Oxford Brookes University. His research interests and publications include studies of Milanese art and architecture, particularly the work of Bramantino, the relationship of painting and architecture in the Renaissance, the impact of printmaking, and Michelangelo. He is currently completing a study of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement as a highly contingent work.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Seminar (IHR)

Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House unless otherwise stated

Thursday, 20 October, 17.15

New: Research clinic. Bring a research problem, big or small, for the seminar to discuss (and solve?)

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

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

Thursday, 20 October, 17:15

DeAnn DeLuna (UCL)
The Monmouth plot of 1675