Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar

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A seminar taking place next week:

Wednesday 29th April
Interdisciplinary early modern seminar, 12-1.30PM, Green Room, Gonville and Caius.

John Gallagher (Gonville and Caius College): “The Italian London of John North: cultural contact and conflict in early modern England”.

This paper takes as its focus a remarkable document of cultural encounter: the Italian-language diary of an English gentleman in 1570s London. On returning from continental travel in 1577, John North continued to keep the diary he had begun while abroad. What emerges from the diary is a uniquely detailed account of the life of an Italianate gentleman: the clothes, the food, the relationships, the books, and the practices that allowed one young man to remake his Italy in London. It offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day and face-to-face business of cultural contact in a decade when the Anglo-Italian encounter was increasingly fraught. This paper shows how we can use North’s diary to reconstruct the social, material, and sensory words of one Italianate gentleman, and poses broader questions about encounters and their anxieties in early modern England.

Welcome to Visiting Scholar Professor Takayuki Katsuyama

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Professor Takayuki Katsuyama is a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall and St Catharine’s College, visiting us from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He tells us about his research below. If you are, or know, a Visiting Scholar who is interested in the Renaissance, get in touch.

Takayuki Katsuyama, Doshisha University, JapanSherley

For the last ten years I have been working on a project: “Shakespeare and English Cartography in the 16th and 17th Century.” The project has been partly sponsored by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan). The whole project was published last year in book form, titled “The English Cartography and Shakespeare’s Plays”. As I did this research on the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and English map-making, I found it was important to investigate how the Englishmen fashioned themselves as “cosmopolitans”, through foreign trade in the Mediterranean Sea. The encounters with the people of different cultures and religions, constituted as “Other” to them – Moroccans, Indians, Turks, Moors, Egyptians and Persians – must have exerted a great influence over the formation of “English” identities. I am sure that my time spent researching at Cambridge will help me a lot in developing and expanding my project on the English map to the Mediterranean map, so that I can complete my next book, which will be titled “Shakespeare and the Orient”.

TITLE-PAGE, anthony nixon, The three English brothers (lONDON, 1607)

 

New Season of V&A/IHR Early Modern Material Cultures Seminars

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Organised by current V&A/RCA History of Design students, these events bring together leading scholars from a range of disciplines and approaches working on material culture between c.1450 and c.1850. Seminars take place every Wednesday from 15 April at 5.15pm at the Institute of Historical Research with an extra session on Monday 1 June.

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5th Tudor & Stuart Ireland Interdisciplinary Conference

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5th Tudor & Stuart Ireland Interdisciplinary Conference, Maynooth University, Ireland, 28-29 August 2015                         merged-john-speed-web-2

Proposals for papers and panels on any aspect of Ireland during the Tudor and Stuart periods are now welcome.  For further information or to submit a paper proposal, please visit www.tudorstuartireland.com/cfp. Postgraduates and early career researchers are particularly encouraged to submit a proposal. The CFP will close on Monday, 20 April 2015.  This year’s conference will feature plenary addresses by Prof. Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge), and Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan (Galway), as well as a panel session on public engagement.

Postgraduate/Graduate students and International researchers affiliated with an institution outside the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland may apply for a bursary award to speak at the conference.  For more details and the evaluation process please visit the conference website at http://www.tudorstuartireland.com.

Email: 2015@tudorstuartireland.com
Follow the conference on Twitter: @tudorstuartire

IMAGE FROM JOHN SPEED’S map ‘the kingdome of irland’ 1610.

The Places of Early Modern Criticism – Keynote

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Lorna Hutson’s keynote paper from the conference The Places of Early Modern Criticism, “Unseen, save to the eye of mind”: criticism and the ‘unscene’ of early modern theatre, can be watched here.

Abstract: 

In France and Italy the relationship between Renaissance neoclassical criticism and theatrical practice is well known; in England, however, the place of the stage and the place of criticism are felt to have been distinct. English dramatists, we are told, rejected the Aristotelian unities of time and place. This paper will argue, rather, that non-allegorical English drama shares with neoclassical criticism an interest in techniques for implying times, places and actions beyond those enacted onstage. Drawing on Quintilian, Erasmus, Ludovico Castelvetro, William Scott and others, and on a range of plays, it will show how a neoclassical critical discourse on evidentia and on the circumstantial topics of time, place, motive, etc. contributed to a more complex integration of diegetic or ‘unscene’ dimensions of dramatic action, enabling dramatists to imply passion, character, causality and, indeed, a wholly imaginary dramatic ‘world’ beyond the stage.

The English Legal Imaginary, 1500-1700

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Registration is open for Part II of this conference, to he held at the University of St Andrews, 1-2 May 2015. The English Legal Imaginary, Part II

Part I: Princeton University, 17-18 April, 2015

Part II: University of St Andrews, 1-2 May, 2015

Summary

The English Legal Imaginary, Part II is an interdisciplinary conference involving leading scholars working at the intersections of law, politics, literature and history in early modern England. The conference papers will contribute to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700. Topics include: Roman law and common law, law and drama; law and education; equity, legal reform and literary censorship.

Speakers include: Martin Butler, Bradin Cormack, Alan Cromartie, Steve Hindle; Rab Houston, Lorna Hutson, David Ibbetson, James McBain, Subha Mukherji, Joad Raymond, Carolyn Sale, James Sharpe, Erica Sheen, Quentin Skinner, Virginia Lee Strain, Elliott Visconsi, Ian Williams, Jessica Winston, and Andrew Zurcher.

 

 

The Places of Early Modern Criticism – Summary

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CRASSH have made a Storify summary of the conference The Places of Early Modern Criticism, which can be read in full here.

This 2-day conference brought together scholars working in departments of English, Modern Languages, Classics and Art History to look at the many different places of early modern criticism.

John Fletcher: A Critical Reappraisal, 26-27th June 2015

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Registration is open for this two-day conference, to be held at Canterbury Christ Church University

The programme is available here

Keynote Speakers: Professor Gordon McMullan (King’s College London); Dr Lucy Munro (King’s College London); Professor Sandra Clark (Professor Emerita, Institute of English Studies, University of London); Professor Clare McManus (University of Roehampton)

Summary

It is fair to say that John Fletcher remains an understudied and underappreciated writer in recent early modern scholarship. Even the very recent success of non-Shakespearean drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the Swan Theatre’s commitment to staging Shakespeare’s contemporaries, has proved fruitless so far in introducing Fletcher to a new generation of academics and theatre-goers. In the near 390 years since his death, it is now time for a complete re-evaluation of the work of a man who made a considerable impact on Jacobean theatre and society by producing a vast corpus of about 53 plays that challenged, commented on, and critiqued Renaissance England. By investigating Fletcher’s ideas and ideals, apparent in his work, we can gain a significant understanding of Jacobean theatre practices and politics: his career virtually encompassed the entirety of the reign of James I, under whose patronage he worked as Shakespeare’s successor as the resident dramatist of the King’s Men. In short, to study Fletcher is to study the soul of the age.

After the sessions in Canterbury, the conference will reconvene for a one day event at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Shakespeare Institute Players will perform an unabridged script-in-hand production of one of Fletcher’s plays.