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

IN CAMBRIDGE

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 01/11/16, 5.15pm in G-R06-07
Andy Kesson (Roehampton)
‘Peculiar houses: building public theatres in Elizabethan London’

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, November 2, 12-1:15pm
English Faculty, Room GR03

Professor Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham)
Options and Experiments: Defining the ‘Global Middle Ages’

 

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 2 November, 5.15pm
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Sarah Ward (Oxford)
‘“This rebellion against heaven”: the north-east Welsh gentry, royalism, and the Church of England’

 

Early Modern European History

Thursday, November 3, 1-2pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Tom Hamilton (Cambridge)
Sharing Beds: Intimacy and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France

 

Writing Women in History

11am-12pm, 1 November, RFB 142

‘Women entering convent life’

Texts available on the website

 

IN LONDON

 

Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, November 3, 5:15 PM
Room SH246, 2nd floor, South block, Senate House

Niccolò Fattori (Royal Holloway)
With a little help from my friends – Networks of mutual support in the Greek community of Ancona during the sixteenth century

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, November 3, 5:15 PM

Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Bethany Marsh (Nottingham)
The experience of charitable aid in the British and Irish Civil Wars: the reception of Irish Refugees in the English localities, 1641 to 1651

 

 

Events This Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

Things-(Re)constructing the Material World Seminar

‘Bronze’

8 June 2016, 12:00 – 14:00

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Dr Victoria Avery (Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)
Andrew Lacey (Artist and Independent Scholar)

Bronze was used in Renaissance Italy for numerous types of functional objects (artillery, bells, coins, lamps, inkwells) as well as decorative ones (equestrian monuments, statues, busts, medals). Extremely expensive, meaning-laden and complex to produce, works of art cast in bronze were desirable status symbols for Humanist patrons, and proofs of incredible technical mastery by sculptors and casters. Sculpture historian, Vicky Avery, and sculptor-founder, Andrew Lacey, will discuss ‘bronze in Italy c. 1500’ in terms of its meanings, usage and technology, focussing on the enigmatic Rothschild Bronzes, recently attributed to Michelangelo.

Open to all.  No registration required .

 

IN LONDON

Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture

Thursday 9 June 2016, 19.00
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe

Remembering and forgetting Shakespeare (and Cervantes and Jonson and Beaumont), or, what 1616 (and 1916) did for us.’
Professor Gordon McMullan (KCL) gives the 2016 Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture.
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/events/lectures-talks/fellowship

 

All the World’s a stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas

Friday 10 June 2016, 10.30-17.00
Conference Centre, The British Library
This study day brings together leading specialists to explore Shakespeare’s cultural presence in Europe and the Americas.
http://www.bl.uk/events/all-the-worlds-a-stage-shakespeare-in-europe-and-the-americas

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 June, 5.15pm

“His Lands as well as Goods / Sequestered ought to be”: the introduction of sequestration, 1642-3

Charlotte Young (RHUL)

Pollard Room N301, 3rd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar (IHR)

Thursday, 9 June, 5.15pm

Building Henry VII’s Savoy Hospital, 1505-1520

Charlotte A Stanford (Brigham Young University)

Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House

 

Events This Week

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.net>). This paper
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)

 

Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar

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.