Shakespeare in the Context of his Time

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‘What legacy shall I bequeath to thee?’ – Shakespeare in the Context of his Time

 An Interdisciplinary Graduate and Early Career Symposium Call for Papers

 Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Aberdeen

22nd October 2016

Both universal and a product of his time Shakespeare remains an enigmatic writer. The celebration of the 400th anniversary of his death demonstrates his continued impact on scholarly thought and popular culture. Investigating Shakespeare among his contemporaries in a period of transformations will help to understand his enduring popularity. The symposium ‘Shakespeare in the Context of his Time’ invites proposals which consider the cultural transfer and translation of Shakespearean ideas on his time, but also the influence of the cultural context of the intellectual and cultural world of the sixteenth century on Shakespeare himself. This includes the intellectual exchange between Shakespeare and his contemporaries examined through all aspects of cultural, literary and theatrical influence. Papers are invited from early career scholars and graduate students in all disciplines which touch on Shakespeare’s work. ‘Shakespeare in the Context of his Time’ is organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Please email 250-word abstracts by Sunday the 15th of May to Alison Passe and Julia Kotzur at shakespeareincontext@gmail.com. Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Please include a brief biography (no more than 150 words). Possible topics could include:

– Shakespeare and Europe

– Contemporaneous intellectual sources of Shakespeare’s ideas

– The transfer of ideas between playwrights

– Shakespearean linguistics

– English History Plays

– Influences across multiple genres

– Performance history including Shakespearean theatre and use of his stage

Events This Week

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Only one event this week, for the last week of term:

 

Thursday 10 March

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

5pm, History Faculty, Room 12

Lloyd Bonfield  (New York Law School)

Give me your wealthy: Immigration policy in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England  

The current immigration debate focuses on the admission to residence and citizenship of those fleeing poverty and civil unrest. But there are also pathways to residence and citizenship that seek to attract a very different sort of migrant: the wealthy. The present debate provides an interesting backdrop for previous ones. This paper focuses on the debate over migration c.1700 which culminated in the short-lived “Act for naturalizing Foreign Protestants“. Although partly inspired by the plight of foreign Protestants, the conversation focused primarily on economic, demographic and legal issues, a cluster of concerns that were absent from earlier debates over immigration.

 

Cambridge Society for Neo-Latin Studies Seminar

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Tuesday 1 March, 5.30pm, Junior Parlour, T Blue Boar, Trinity College

Sarah Knight (Leicester)

A fabulis ad veritatem: Latin Tragedy, Truth and Education in Early Modern England

 
In his Ash Wednesday sermon of 1582, Laurence Humphrey, head of Magdalen College, urged his Oxford congregation to make the transition ‘à Cothurno ad Cineres, à prophanis ad sacra, à fabulis ad ipsam veritatis inuestigationem & disciplinam’ (from tragic buskin to ashes, from the profane to the sacred, from stories to that same examination and practice of truth). Humphrey distinguishes between drama and sermon, between being a passive spectator and an active seeker of religious truth, but many authors of Latin tragedies in early modern England expected greater intellectual engagement from those who watched or read their works than Humphrey’s sermon perhaps implies. The context of delivery for Humphrey’s sermon was also the most active site of composition and performance of drama, and so a study of Latin tragedy in early modern England inevitably focuses first on the universities. Some examples taken both from Oxford and Cambridge, such as the work of Thomas Legge and William Alabaster, as well as plays written by its graduates who wrote for continental Catholic institutions, particularly Edmund Campion, show how college and university drama evolved into a rich didactic medium. These plays suggest that the staging and consumption of such drama was not just for entertainment – Humphrey uses the term ‘ludicra’ – in this period, although collective enjoyment could be part of their appeal, and in several cases their authors express concern about the impressionable young minds of the audience and the formative influence of curricular and other institutional activity on the performance of drama.

All are welcome. Wine is served during the discussion of the papers.

For other inquiries, please contact Andrew Taylor at awt24@cam.ac.uk.
More information here.

Events This Week

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Tuesday 1 March

Renaissance Graduate Seminar, GR06/7, 5.15pm

Hester Lees-Jeffries (Cambridge)

Shakespeare’s Tailors

Wednesday 2 March

CRASSH (Re)Constructing the Material World, 12.30pm AR SG1

Religion

Dr Joanne Sear (History,Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge)
Professor Deborah Howard (Architecture & History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Thursday 3 March

Early Modern European History seminar, 1pm, Gonville and Caius Green Room

Irene Cooper (Cambridge)

‘Cose di casa’: The Materiality of Devotion in the Sixteenth-Century Neapolitan Home

 
Please email ab2126 with any events for advertisement.

Teaching & Learning in Early Modern England: Skills & Knowledge in Practice

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A conference to be held at the University of Cambridge, 1st-2nd September 2016

Organisers: Jennifer Bishop & John Gallagher

durer lute

From the workshop to the schoolroom, teaching and learning were everyday activities in early modern England. But who learnt what, from whom, and where? How did knowledge transmission work in practice? And what did it mean to be educated, to be skilful, in a rapidly changing society? This conference aims to bring together scholars working on the transmission of knowledge and skills in order to ask new questions about the educational cultures of early modern England.

What was being taught in early modern England? Scholarship on artisanal and technical knowledge has pointed the way towards a history of education and knowledge transfer not limited by the walls of educational institutions. This history can bring together the studies of literacy and language, of artisanal and technical crafts, of science and medicine, of print, fashion, and commerce.

Where did teaching and learning happen? Outside established educational institutions lay vibrant cultures of knowledge transmission and exchange. This conference is interested in sites where knowledge was transmitted formally or informally, from workshops to schoolrooms and printing houses to coffee houses. What was the role of location, neighbourhood, and community in the circulation of knowledge? How did material environments interact with learning processes?

Who was a teacher? Who were the masters, teachers, tutors, and experts – male and female, English and immigrants – who transmitted knowledge and skills in early modern England? How did masters and teachers establish their technical or pedagogical authority, and how did they advertise or compete with one another? Can we reconstruct networks of knowledge, communities of teachers? Do our historiographies do justice to all those who performed educational labour? This conference hopes to consider ushers, technicians, servants, and labourers alongside masters and tutors.

How were skills and knowledge taught and transmitted? Learning is more than an intellectual experience. What were the physical, oral, and sensory realities of early modern learning? In artisanal and academic situations, how was embodied knowledge taught and transmitted? What was the role of the oral and the verbal in the transmission of knowledge? How can scholars access the experiences of teachers and learners in early modern England?

The deadline for abstracts is 1st April 2016. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to teachingandlearning2016@gmail.com.

Events This Week

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Tuesday 23rd February

Renaissance Graduate Seminar, 5.15pm, English Faculty GR06/7

Dr Anna-Maria Hartmann (University of Oxford)

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

 

Wednesday 24th February

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, 12pm, SG1, English Faculty Board Room
Richard Oosterhoff (CRASSH, Cambridge)

Idiot wit: framing lay knowers in the Northern Renaissance

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall
John Gallagher (Gonville and Caius),
Learning Languages in Early Modern England

 

Friday 26th February

Early Modern French Research Seminar, New Gallery, Whipple Museum, 2pm

Jennifer Oliver (St. John’s College, Oxford):

Congnoistre l’engin de noz ennemys: Machines and Machinations in Rabelais and Beyond

 

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

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

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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.