Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 15 March 2017, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Death’
Emily Rose (Harvard), John Robb (Cambridge)

 

Ralph Roister Doister

Tuesday, 14 March, 7 PM, Judith Wilson Studio, English Faculty

Presented by the Marlowe Society and the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL)

Ralph Roister Doister thinks Christian Custance loves him madly. Christian Custance thinks Ralph Roister Doister is a twit. Only one of them is correct.

Join the Marlowe Society as we set out on a new venture–exploring the lesser-performed plays of the early modern period through script-in-hand stagings. On March 14, we begin with Nicholas Udall’s 1552 comedy about a dim-witted man convinced of his own importance attempting to force himself on an unwilling woman. Sound like anyone in the news today?

Presented in partnership with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature, the evening will include a panel discussion on the legal issues invoked by the play. Tickets are free and admission is first come first served, but space is limited!
https://www.facebook.com/events/179933412507462/

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

Thursday, 16 March 2017, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Space, Privacy and Gender in the early modern Italian Palace

Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway, University of London)

 

 

IN LONDON

London Shakespeare Seminar

Monday 13 March, 17.15-19.00, Senate Room, Senate House
Gary Taylor, ‘Collaborative History: Parts of Henry VI’

 

Society, Culture & Belief, 1500-1800 (IHR)

Thursday, 16 March, 17:30, John S Cohen Room N203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Making a record of the self: Individual Stories and Collective Histories in the Archives of the London Livery Companies, c. 1540-1660

Jennifer Richards (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge)

 

Tudor & Stuart History (IHR)

Monday, 13 March, 17:15, Montague Room, G26, Ground Floor, Senate House

Mini-colloquium on Lord Burghley

Norman Jones (Utah State University), Simon Healy (History of Parliament), Neil Younger (Open University)

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

 

History of Material Texts Workshop

Monday 6 March, 12.30-2, Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

‘The Medical Book in the Nineteenth Century: From MS Casebooks to Mass Plagiarism’
A workshop led by Sarah Bull, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, HPS

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, 08/03/17, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room GR04

Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania), Enthymeme and Emotion from Aristotle to Hoccleve

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 7 March 2017, 5.15pm, Old Combination Room at Trinity College

Gavin Alexander (University of Cambridge)

“LYRIC POETICS?”

This paper is about lyric poetry’s place in classical and early modern poetics. That place looks less sure than does that of tragedy or epic—which may be Aristotle’s fault, or due to the nature of lyric; it clearly has something to do with the fact that lyric is hard to define and delimit. I question two common myths about lyric’s place in the system of poetic genres: that there has always been a straightforward and accepted tripartition of poetry into epic, dramatic, and lyric; and, conversely, that this tripartition was only a Romantic discovery. I also resist the direction of the “new lyric studies”, which attempts to challenge the usefulness of the category “lyric” to the understanding of various kinds of short poetry. I trace lyric’s presence in less familiar theoretical settings (grammar, rhetoric) in order to ask if we might consider such treatments as a part of the poetics of lyric. And I aim to show how the interplay between the paradigms and taxonomies of rhetoric and poetics contribute to lyric’s vexed (and rich) status in the history of literary theory. Do Sappho, Pindar, Horace, Petrarch, and Shakespeare actually have something in common that might be captured by the term “lyric”; or should ancient lyric can only be grouped with modern lyric of a strictly neoclassical bent? In considering why it has been difficult to agree about both what a lyric poem is and what features of form, content, mode, or method might characterise lyric, I will suggest how theoretical muddle might be contained by a larger clarity.

Gavin Alexander is Reader in Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His publications include Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford, 2006), editions of Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London, 2004) and William Scott’s Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013), and the collection Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007; with Sylvia Adamson and Katrin Ettenhuber).

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 8th March, 12-1:15pm, English Faculty, Board Room

In Collaboration with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL)

Dr Maria Mendes (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa) will present the following paper:

Praise with Purpose: Flattery in Early Modern England

Susceptibility to flattery has long been considered a character flaw, which is the reason those who believe it are usually described as being vain, proud, tyrannical or conceited. I will close-read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so as to question if Caesar’s failure to anticipate the conspirators’ plot is, as is usually thought, an illustration of his proneness to flattery or, as I hope to show, an example of the flatterer’s capacity to mirror one’s own mind. Flatterers might be very able in showing rhetorically what the flattered person’s ideal self would look like, and they might in turn tend to supplement rhetorical suggestion with their own desires and concerns. If this is the case, flattery is central to understanding that Julius Caesar describes a hermeneutic difficulty, and characterises the difficulties of knowing another’s mind.

 

Early Modern French Seminar

Friday, 10 March, 2-4pm, Clare College, Latimer Room

Phillip USHER (New York University)

Exterranean Insurgency in the Humanist Anthropocene

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 8 March, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Alice Soulieux-Evans (Wolfson),
‘“Because thou canst not walk in thy minster’s way”: cathedrals, conformity and the Church of England in the Restoration period’

 

 

IN LONDON

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 March, 17:15, Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘The Print that Binds: official print and personal record keeping in seventeenth-century England’
Frances Maguire (York)

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE:

Embodied Things: Histories of Cognition, Practices, & Theories (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 22 February 2017, 12:30-14:00, Seminar room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Dress’

Rebecca Unsworth (QMUL/V&A), Elizabeth Currie (Central Saints Martins)

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, 22/02/17, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room SR24

Marilynn Desmond (Binghamton University), Chaucer and the Matter of Troy: Reading the Blank Spaces in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61

 

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 21 February 2017, 5.15pm Old Combination Room at Trinity College

Jon Whitman

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“THE SECOND-GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD”

It is sometimes said that the narrative of Scripture is the greatest story ever told. The story that I would like to discuss in my presentation is what might be called the second-greatest story ever told. It is the story of the provocative effort to make the greatest story ever told an even greater story—not just a story that speaks to diverse peoples, but a story spoken by diverse peoples, in diverse tongues, at diverse times—a universal story. It is the intriguing record of how controversial movements in poetics come to align Scripture with a broad realm of imaginative discourse once regarded as largely distinct from Scripture, so that sacred Scripture itself comes recurrently to be considered a form of imaginative literature at large.

Scholarly approaches to this critical change have commonly concentrated on the modern era. Despite important research exploring certain earlier aspects of the transformation, attitudes toward the subject as a whole regularly tend to focus on extensive interpretive and cultural developments after the Reformation that lead by the nineteenth century to a “crisis of faith”—a cumulative process in which the divine authority of canonical texts is increasingly questioned, while, conversely, other texts are invested with a virtually religious aura. Though this general view has its point, it seems to me to be historically inadequate and sometimes misleading. Already before the Reformation, for example, there are far-reaching efforts in the Christian world to align biblical writing with other writing, including the poetic writing of non-Christian peoples. These efforts arise in part from an ecumenical impulse in Christian faith itself that aims to ease distinctions between diverse texts and cultures. In this respect, the inclination to coordinate Scripture with literature arises not from the abdication, but from the amplitude, of Christian belief. In the end, it appears that this very amplitude advances the crisis of faith that it is designed to avert, even while it raises fascinating questions about the foundational concept of “Scripture.”

In my presentation I plan to explore some of the crucial turning points in this multifaceted process from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. My analysis will focus on three formative periods and places: 1) twelfth-century France, 2) fourteenth-century Italy, and 3) sixteenth-century England. Whereas early Christian interpretive theory assigns the Christian Bible a unique historical status, a special figural method, and a singular doctrinal position, a number of striking critical texts in these times and settings show how that assessment is gradually transformed. As prior distinctions—historical, methodological, and conceptual—between Christian Scripture and other kinds of writing are increasingly blurred, poetry at large tends to modulate into a form of Scripture, while Scripture tends to modulate into a form of poetry.

It should be stressed that not everyone—either in the past or in the present, either inside or outside the Christian world—has endorsed the development of the “second-greatest story ever told.” At the close of my presentation I would like to open the question of how the complex issues raised in efforts to align Scripture with literature imply still broader issues about the extent to which beliefs and idioms can be translated from one people or milieu to another. From this perspective, an inquiry into the poetics of Christian Scripture as imaginative literature is more than a study of religious and literary change. It is an exploration of some of the attractions and risks in the very drive for human consensus and community.

Jon Whitman is Professor in the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research explores the interplay between conceptual and literary changes from antiquity to the modern period, and his publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford/Harvard, 1987) and the edited collections Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden, 2000) and Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge, 2015). He is presently conducting a multiyear research project entitled “The Literal Sense: Scriptural Interpretation, Poetics, and Historical Change”.

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 22 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Jens Åklundh (Trinity)
‘“Admett mee again into the church”: individual and communal responses to excommunication in Restoration England’

 

IN LONDON:

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 23 February, 17:15, Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘Conscience, obedience and British royalism’
Calum Wright (Birkbeck)

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 15th February, 12-1:15pm, History Faculty, Room 5

Dr Alex Robinson (Sorbonne)
‘Et le roi prit tant plaisir à la musique’: Royal taste and music in the Renaissance – the case of Henri IV of France  (1589-1610).

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 15 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Elly Robson (Wolfson),
‘“Unles ye bee stronger then wee”: contested justice, sovereignty and violence in seventeenth-century fenland drainage riots’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday, 16th February, 5 PM, Room 9 of the History Faculty

Julie Hardwick (University of Texas at Austin)
Accounting for women: account books, petty commerce and re-thinking the transition to capitalism

In 17th-century France, even small-scale traders used ‘account books’ as instruments of everyday commercial activity. Wives usually kept accounts in small enterprises, producing perhaps the largest surviving corpus of non-elite women’s writing. The ‘books’ were freighted with legal, commercial, cultural and personal meanings. The gendering of financial record keeping is one of the ways in which women were integral in the intensification of market practices.

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

Thursday, 16 February 2017, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

“The Trouble with Community and Diaspora: Ottomans in Vienna and Trieste in the 18th century.”

David Do Paço (Paris, Sciences Po)

 

 

IN LONDON

London Shakespeare Seminar

Monday 13 February, 5:15-7:00 PM, Senate Room, Senate House Library

Katherine Schaap Williams, ‘Unfixing Renaissance Disability’
Simon Smith, ‘Acting Amiss: Pleasure, Judgement and the Early Modern Actor’

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.

 

Courtauld Institute of Art

Monday, 13 February 2017, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Research Forum seminar room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

‘The making of the sixteenth-century interior in England’

Prof. Maurice Howard (University of Sussex)

The physical interiors of early modern England exist now only in fragments or later re-modellings, but piecing together this evidence shows how care for materials, improvisation and a willingness to use painted illusion gave internal spaces a degree of visual cohesion. Three other kinds of evidence offer more to the historian: the documentary sources of commissions and inventories, the small but significant number of representations in paint and print, the descriptions of contemporaries, all of which sometimes complement each other but often tell us more about their various and highly individual modes and conventions of recording than give us a composite understanding.

Maurice Howard is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Sussex. His books include The Early Tudor Country House 1490-1550 (1987), The Tudor Image (1995), and The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (2007). He co-authored The Vyne: A Tudor House Revealed (2003), and co-edited Painting in Britain 1500-1630 (2015). He was Senior Subject Specialist for the Tudor and Stuart sections of the British Galleries at the V&A, and is a former President of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the current President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

 

Wednesday 15 February 2017, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

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

‘Portraits of Art Collectors in Mid-Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century Venice’

Prof. Linda Borean (Università degli Studi di Udine)

In the Cinquecento and Early Seicento, Venetian portraiture developed a sub-genre depicting portraits of art collectors. These, have been generally investigated taking into account the connections between the artist and the patron, since many of them have been executed by the foremost painters and sculptors of the period, including Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Bernardo Strozzi and Tiberio Tinelli. In this paper, I would like to shift the attention from these relationships to focus instead on the way in which portraits shed light on the biographies of the art collectors as we know them from wills, inventories, printed biographies and poetic compositions. This paper explores this topic by examining a series of case studies, including those of Andrea Odoni, Giovanni Paolo Cornaro, Alessandro Vittoria, Bartolomeo dalla Nave, Alvise Molin and Giovan Donato Correggio.

Linda Borean has been Professor of History of Art at the University of Udine since 2001. She is member of the Committee of the Ph.D in Art History. She has been Getty Scholar (2003/2004) and Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2012/2013). Linda Borean’s research, supported by some grants (Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, Royal Society of Edimburgh Grants in Humanities), concerns history of art and art collecting in Venice in early modern age. She has been member of the project Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia supported by the Fondazione di Venezia and by the Getty Research Institute. In this context, she is the co-editor of the volumes Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Seicento (2007) and Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento (2009). She has published essays in international journals (Arte Veneta; The Burlington Magazine) and given papers in international symposiums, universities (University of St. Andrews; Pune, India, Technology Institute; Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence; INHA, Paris) and museums (London, National Gallery; Madrid, Prado; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).

 

Society, Culture & Belief, 1500-1800 Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 16 February, 17:30, John S Cohen Room N203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘The Company of Inmates: Collective Identity and Self-government in the 17th-century London Prison’
Richard Thomas Bell (Stanford University)

 

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar

Monday, 13 February, 17:15, Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

‘Henry VIII, the colonisation of Boulogne and the development of the English Empire’
Neil Murphy (Northumbria University)

‘Ralph Sheldon of Beoley & Weston (1537-1613): No Catholic or no consequences?’
Hilary Turner (Independent scholar)

 

Events This Week

History of Material Texts Workshop

Monday, 6 March, 12.30-2, Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

‘The Medical Book in the Nineteenth Century: From MS Casebooks to Mass Plagiarism’
A workshop led by Sarah Bull, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, HPS

 

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Thursday, 9 November 2016, 12:30-14:00, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Passageways’

Jacqueline Nicholls
Doors, Gates & Curtains
Traditional Jewish texts utilises imagery of different types of entrances, each evoking particular ideas with regard to the relationship between physical reality and the world of the divine. This visual art presentation will focus on drawings that interpret relevant Talmudic texts about doors, gates and curtains as barriers and entrances.
Daniel Jütte
Living Stones: Architecture and Embodiment in Premodern Europe

Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following the call of this year’s seminar convenors—to “investigate human understanding of the world vis-à-vis objects”—the talk will probe the history of one particular idea: the house as a living being. The focus will be on the late medieval and early modern period when human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. I will also address the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.


Bios

Jacqueline Nicholls is a London based visual artist and Jewish educator. She uses her art to engage with traditional Jewish ideas in untraditional ways. She co-ordinates the Art Studio and other Arts & Culture events at JW3, and regularly teaches at the London School of Jewish Studies. Jacqueline’s art has been exhibited in solo shows and significant contemporary Jewish Art group shows in the UK, USA and Israel, and she was recently artist-in-resident in Venice with Beit Venezia. Jacqueline is a regular contributor to BBC R2 Pause for Thought.
Dr Daniel Jütte  is a historian of early modern and modern Europe. He is an associate professor (currently on leave) in the Department of History at New York University. His research interests lie in cultural history, urban history and material culture, history of knowledge and science, and Jewish history. He is currently working on a history of transparency from antiquity to modern times. Jütte is the author of two monographs. His award-winning The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (Yale University Press, 2015; first German ed. 2011) offers a general history of secrecy in the early modern period, with particular attention to the role of secrecy and secret sciences in Jewish-Christian relations. His second book, The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (Yale University Press, 2015), explores how doors, gates, and related technologies such as the key and the lock have shaped notions about security, privacy, and shelter.

Before joining NYU, Jütte taught as lecturer in the History Department at Harvard University as well as at the University of Heidelberg, from which he earned his Ph.D. in 2010. He has also held a number of fellowships: Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2015); Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin (2015–16); and Eurias Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2016–2017). In addition, his work has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung), and the Daimler Benz Foundation. Jütte has been recognized for excellence in teaching, but he also enjoys engaging non-academic audiences and readerships, e.g., as a regular contributor to major European daily newspapers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Welt.

Open to all.  No registration required

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, February 8, 5:15pm, English Faculty Room SR24

Jackie Tasioulas (Cambridge), The Point of Remembrance in Chaucer and Henryson

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday, 7 February 2017, 5.15pm in the Old Combination Room at Trinity College.

Stephen Halliwell (University of St Andrews)

“INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE MIND: THE GREEK POETICS OF INSPIRATION”

The family of ideas usually grouped together under the heading of ‘inspiration’ forms a remarkably long-lasting component of Western poetics. But such ideas constitute a far from harmonious family; their tangled relationships are too often simplified by historians of poetics. This paper will offer some selective and revisionist thoughts on versions of poetic inspiration found in three different ancient Greek contexts: the treatment of the Muses in the earliest surviving Greek poetry (Homer and Hesiod); the notorious series of challenges to poetic authority voiced in several Platonic dialogues; and the treatise On the Sublime by (pseudo-)Longinus. Three main theses will be advanced: first, that an excessively literalist and primitivist tradition of interpretation has obscured the important sense in which the Muses were never a source external to poetry but a symbolic self-image of poetry’s own powers; second, that the scattered remarks on poetic inspiration in Plato accompany a perception of poetry’s resistance to a philosophical demand (which Nietzsche calls ‘aesthetic Socratism’) for cognitive transparency; third, that On the Sublime makes inspiration internal to the self-perpetuating traditions of literature, but thereby imposes on writers a responsibility which Longinus himself recognises as a potential burden of anxiety. If an adequate history of the concept of inspiration were ever (improbably) to be written, it would need to recognise far more complexity in the ancient roots of this concept than current orthodoxies allow for.

Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greek and Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on ancient poetics and aesthetics, especially in relation to the intersection between literary and philosophical traditions of thought. In addition to his monograph Aristotle’s Poetics (1986/1998), he has produced two separate translations of Aristotle’s treatise (one for the Loeb Library, 1995). His other books include Plato Republic Book 10 (1988), The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002), Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (2008), and Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (2011). He is currently working on a commentary on Longinus, On the Sublime, for the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla series, ‘Scrittori greci e latini’.

 

Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe

February 8-11, Cambridge Arts Theatre, presented by the Marlowe Society

Directed by Caroline Steinbeis

On Thursday evening, there will be a post-show talk with Simon Russell Beale (Edward II, RSC)

Son to an impressive father, husband to a passionate queen, King Edward II struggles to find his own voice amidst the clamour of stronger personalities in the English court. Despite the disapproval of his nobles, he finds consolation in his relationship with the low-born Piers Gaveston, often choosing his pleasures with Gaveston over the responsibilities of his position. When his queen and nobles unite against Gaveston, Edward must decide how far he is willing to go to assert his own will in the face of hostile resistance.

Christopher Marlowe’s gripping drama of deceit and responsibility is brought vividly to life by the Marlowe Society, Cambridge University’s leading drama society. The Marlowe return to Cambridge Arts Theatre after their recent acclaimed productions of Measure for Measure and Dr Faustus; it has been responsible for launching the careers of some of Britain’s greatest actors including Ian McKellen, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston and Derek Jacobi.

Tickets available here.

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 8 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Peter Marshall (Warwick),
‘Reformation on Scotland’s northern frontier: kirk and community in early modern Orkney’

 

IN LONDON

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 February, 17:15, Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Finola Finn, Durham University

‘The principle of life, both for naturall and spirituall actions: The heart in nonconformist religious experience, c.1640-1700’

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 31/01/17, 5.15pm in G-R06-07
John Gillies (Essex)
The conversational turn in Shakespeare

 

History of Material Texts Workshops

Monday, 30 January, 12.30-2, Milstein Exhibition Centre/Seminar Room, University Library

A guided tour of the Cambridge University Library exhibition ‘Curious Objects’, in the company of lead curator Jill Whitelock, followed by discussion.

Places are limited–please email jes1003 to reserve.

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 1st February, 12-1:15pm, Little Hall, Sidgwick Site

Dr Hannah Murphy (University of Oxford)
“No day without a line”: calligraphy, perspective and the craft of writing in early modern Nuremberg

 

Cambridge Early Modern French Seminar

Friday, 3 February, 2-4pm, Clare College, Latimer Room

Sophie WAHNICH (CNRS)

Émeutes, émotions: la scène de quel conflit?

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 1 February, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Carys Brown (St John’s), Julie Kelsoe (Clare), and Fred Smith (Clare), ‘Historiography panel: toleration, coexistence and neighbourliness’

 

Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar

Thursday 2nd February, 5pm in Room 9 of the History Faculty

Christof Jeggle (University of Würzburg)
Divergences or varieties in European economic development?

The debate over divergence in early modern Europe sees the Dutch Republic and Great Britain as the core of progressive economic development, and considers that the rest of the continent lagged behind. Using qualitative indicators I will question the notion of divergence in a continental perspective, offering case studies and proposing some reassessments in respect of comparing economic development.

We normally have dinner with the speaker afterwards. All welcome.

 

Early Modern European History Seminar

Thursday, 2 February 2017, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Record-keeping as a tool of female self-formation in Early Modern Tuscany

Emma Nicholls (Cambridge)

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

 

Writing Women in History

Tuesday 31 January, 11am-noon, RFB142 (the media centre)

Our first session of the new year and new ‘Women and the Law’ theme for the term will be focused on an angry woman, Calefurnia, and the depiction of female rage in the Sachsenspiegel, a Germanic law code circulated in the 13th-15th centuries. We will be reading and considering the article ‘Calefurnia’s Rage: Emotions and Gender in Late Medieval Law and Literature’ by Sarah Westphal exploring how how gender and emotion are framed in literary and legal sources from medieval Central Europe.

Email writingwomeninhistory@gmail.com for article.

 

 

IN LONDON

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 30 Jan 2017, 17:15- 19:15, IHR Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

‘Rewriting the figure of the martyr: John Donne and the foundation of Christianity’

Shanyn Altman (Sussex University)

‘Sir Francis Walsingham and Anglo-Scottish politics, c. 1580-90’

Hannah Coates (Leeds University)

 

European History 1500-1800 (IHR)

Monday, 30 January, 5:15pm, IHR Past and Present Room, N202, Second Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

‘A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany’

Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews)

 

 

 

 

Events this Week

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)