IN CAMBRIDGE
Embodied Things (CRASSH)
25 January 2017, 12:00- 4:00, Seminar room SG1, Alison Richard Building
‘Collecting’
Associate Professor Sean Silver (University of Michigan)
Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)
History of Material Texts
Monday 23 January 2016, 5pm, Faculty of Asian and Middle Easter Studies, The University of Cambridge, Room 8-9
Prof Sasaki Takahiro (Keio University, Shidō bunko)
Formats and Contents of Japanese Books (wahon): A Meaningful Interrelation
For many centuries Japanese antiquarian materials (kotenseki 古典籍) have used five types of binding originally invented in China. The choice of one form of binding over another depended on the type of contents contained in the book alongside its purposes. Something similar happened in the case of the script, i.e. the Chinese characters and the two scripts developed from them in Japan (hiragana and katakana). Namely, the aims of a book as well as the conditions of its production determined the choice of what form of writing was used. Therefore, by studying both binding and script, we discover a meaningful interrelation between them and the contents. This type of analysis allows us to gain understanding of the genre consciousness that existed at the time as well as to determine the nature and the value of the verbal text preserved in a physical book. This lecture discusses concrete examples that will shed light on the features of Japanese antiquarian materials, which, in turn, are helpful in the study of Japanese pre-modern culture.
Poetics Before Modernity
Tuesday, 24 January 2017, Old Combination Room at Trinity College.
Colin Burrow (University of Oxford)
“PRACTICAL CRITICISM, ELIZABETHAN STYLE”
At least since G. Gregory Smith’s anthology of Elizabethan Critical Essays of 1904 there has been a tendency to classify Elizabethan works as ‘literary criticism’ if, and sometimes only if, they resemble works of poetics, which offer abstract discussions of the principles underlying the production of literary texts. This paper will explore the consequences of widening the sphere of what we think of as Elizabethan literary criticism to include a range of other kinds of text: polemic, epideictic rhetoric—laus and (especially) vituperatio—as well as local and often personalised attacks by one writer on another for particular acts of indecorum. The paper will concentrate on the so-called ‘war of the theatres’ between Jonson, Marston, and Dekker. I will discuss some of the intellectual backgrounds to the war, as well as its practical consequences for the development of abstract theorising about the nature and practice of literature in the early seventeenth century and beyond.
Colin Burrow is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. He has published extensively on the relations between Renaissance literature and its classical forebears, and also has active research interests in early Tudor literature, Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and Shakespeare. His publications include Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), Edmund Spenser (Plymouth, 1996), Manuscript Miscellanies c. 1450-1700 (London, 2011; with Richard Beadle), and Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), as well as editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002) and Troilus and Cressida (London, 2006), Metaphysical Poetry (London, 2006), and Ben Jonson’s Poems (Cambridge, 2012). His current projects are a history of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English Literary History, and a book on the theory and practice of literary imitation, from Plato to the present day.
Cambridge Early Modern French Seminar
27 January, 2-4 PM, Clare College, Latimer Room
John O’BRIEN (Durham)
Cicero the Revolutionary: Some Insurrectional Motifs in the Literature of the French Wars of Religion
CAMBRIDGE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
Thursday, 26 January, Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library, 5:00 pm
Dr Nick Hardy (Munby Fellow), ‘New evidence for the drafting, revision, and intellectual context of the King James Bible (1611)’
Tea from 4:30 pm before the lectures.
IN LONDON
London Shakespeare Seminar
23 January, Senate Room, Senate House between 17.15 and 19.00
Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage’
Darian Leader, ‘Hand Technology: Then and Now’
Papers will be followed by questions, and then drinks and dinner at Busaba Eathai Bloomsbury (Goodge Street).
For more information and to be included on the LSS mailing list please contact Gemma Miller at shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk
London Renaissance Seminar
Saturday, January 21, 1.30-5pm, 114 / Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square
Writing Place & Writing Motion in Early Modern England
Speakers : Patricia Fumerton, Andy Gordon, Julie Sanders
Download the full programme here and the abstracts here.
The London Renaissance Seminar meets at Birkbeck to discuss topics in the culture of the Renaissance. Anyone with an interest in the Renaissance is welcome to attend. Seminars are usually held in the School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.
British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)
Thursday, 12 January, 17:15
Pollard Seminar Room, N301, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
A Water Bawdy House: Women and the Navy in the British Civil Wars
Elaine Murphy (Plymouth)
