IN CAMBRIDGE
Renaissance Graduate Seminar
Tuesday 3 May, at 5.15pm in GR06/7.
Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Cambridge)
‘Richard II and the Early Modern Almanac’
In its descriptions of the political world, /Richard II/ makes extensive
use of figurative language drawn from both therapeutics and husbandry.
The pattern of this language underpins the play’s nationalism and its
concern with the cyclical nature of kingship; following it can help
explain why, for instance, Richard is a less successful statesman than
Bolingbroke or why the Gardener can so confidently criticise the king.
There is one genre of early modern popular writing that shares the
play’s linguistic field and its vision of history, nationhood, and
political order: the almanac. This paper positions /Richard II/ in the
culture of almanac use that proliferated in the 1590s and asks how much
the experience of reading and applying almanacs to the body and the soil
might have influenced the play’s language and vision. More broadly, it
asks: To what extent can Shakespeare’s interest in the popular practice
of almanac use explain the development of the new historical genre that
he was bringing to the stage in this decade?
Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Lecturer at Selwyn College,
Cambridge. She is the author of /Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and
Culture/ and is editing /Blood Matters/, a collection of
interdisciplinary essays as part of The Blood Project
(www.thebloodproject.net <http://www.thebloodproject.ne
is part of her current writing on Shakespeare and botany.
EARLY MODERN INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR
Wednesdays 12-1.30pm, SR-24 (Faulty of English)
4th May
Micha Lazarus (Trinity College, Cambridge)
“Nowell’s Little Soldiers: Terence, Seneca, and the God Aesculapius in 1540s Westminster”
Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar
Wednesdays 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall
4 May
Ludmilla Jordanova,
‘Career Reflections: Places, People, Periods, Portraits’
History of Christianity Seminar
4 May, 2:15 PM, Lightfoot Room, Cambridge Divinity Faculty
Mr. Jonathan Reimer (Pembroke College)
‘Reconsidering Recantation: The Case of Thomas Bacon’
IN LONDON
Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (UCL)
Wednesday May 4, 5.15 pm
Senate House , South block, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.
‘The Semiotics of the Body in Medieval Japanese Narratives’
Raj Pandey (Goldsmiths)
This paper suggests that the spirit/ soul/mind/body debates that have been central to Western thought, and that have shaped the core presumptions that have gone into the making of the body as a category, are inadequate for understanding the conception and experience of embodied being in the non-western world. It argues that the mind/body and nature/culture debates have little valence in classical and medieval Japanese texts where both material and mental/emotional processes are seen as central to the constitution of a meaningful body/self. The eleventh century romance narrative The Tale of Genji, for example, suggests an altogether different mode through which the body is imagined and experienced, not as something constituted through flesh, blood, and bones, but rather as an entity that is metonymically linked to robes that are repositories of both the physical and affective attributes of those who wear them.
Venue: Room SH246, 2nd floor, South block, Senate House
There are lots of interesting talks ongoing at the Senate House Library throughout May and June. Anyone interested should check them out here. This week, Professor Gordon McMullan (KCL) will present ‘Shakespeare in 1916: The First World War & the Origins of Global Shakespeare’ on 3 May at 18:30 in the Senate House Library.
Tuesday 3 May, 5.30 pm – History of Libraries research lecture, Warburg Institute
‘Bibliotheca Abscondita’: the Library of Sir Thomas Browne (1604-1682)
Lucy Gwynn, Queen Mary University
Thomas Browne, Norwich physician and one of the great essayists of the seventeenth century, was drawn to the indiscriminate dissolution and ruin brought by the passage of time, as ‘the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy’. His recreation of an impossible wunderkammer – the tract Musaeum clausum et bibliotheca abscondita – catalogued books, objects and artworks that had been lost to time, looting, war, and exile. This paper will compare the narrative of incompleteness and wistful recuperation in Musaeum clausum with my project to reconstruct of the contents of Browne’s own library, now only known to us through the catalogue of its sale in 1711. It will present evidence of Browne’s book ownership and use, and suggest ways in which Browne’s library, its contents, taxonomies and spaces, can be recovered.
Medieval and Tudor London Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (UCL)
Thursday, 5 May, 5.15pm
Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House
‘Medieval London almshouses’
Sarah Lennard-Brown (Birkbeck)
‘Meeting the monks: visitors to the London Charterhouse 1405-1537’
David Harrrap (QMUL)
