Tag Archives: Poetics Before Modernity

Events This Week

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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

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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

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IN CAMBRIDGE

Embodied Things (CRASSH)

Wednesday, 23 November 2016, 12:30-14:00, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Knowledge’

Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)
Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE  (UCL)

Poetics before Modernity

Thursday, 24 November, 5.15pm, Old Combination Room, Trinity College.

Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania)

“AN EMOTIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF STYLE”

How did medieval teaching identify the “literary” or “literature” as a particular quality to be achieved and imitated? What was the role of style in defining the realm of the “literary”? I will begin by considering a relatively modest “anthology” from the thirteenth century, MS Glasgow, Hunterian, MS V.8.15. This teaching collection expresses its interests in terms rather different from what we associate with better known and prestigious poetic anthologies of the same period. The anthology reveals its motives in metaliterary terms: it signals a moment at which medieval rhetoric recognizes itself as the instrument for theorizing literary style as the engine of emotion. This anthology exemplifies the kind of teaching that was to enable a writer like Petrarch to invest style with the power to move emotions and even to compel ethical judgments. I conclude with a rhetorical reading of Petrarch’s Seniles 17.3 to explore how the “lesson” of style has been incorporated and naturalized in literary production.

Rita Copeland is Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests range across ancient and medieval literatures, history and theory of rhetoric, literary theory and exegetical traditions, and medieval learning. She has pursued these themes in various publications, especially Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages; Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Middle Ages; Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with Ineke Sluiter); and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Peter T. Struck). Most recently she has edited the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558. She is also a founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. Her newest project is on rhetoric and the emotions in the long Middle Ages.

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

Wednesday, 23 November, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Laura Sangha (Exeter)
‘“Take care that nothing be printed”: the public and private lives of supernatural narratives in later Stuart England’

 

IN LONDON

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 21 November, 17:15, Room G35, Ground floor, South block, Senate House

Eilish Gregory (UCL)
‘Networks in mid-seventeenth century England: the navigation of the sequestration and compounding process by the Catholic gentry’

 

 

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE:

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

Armour
26 October 2016, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Victoria Bartels (Cambridge)

 

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday, October 26, 5:15 PM

English Faculty Room SR24

Sexuality and dishonour: punishing adultery & other crimes in southern France (c.1150-1320) – John Arnold (Cambridge)

 

Poetics Before Modernity

Tuesday 25th October 2016, 5:15, Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)

“ALLEGORESIS AND ETYMOLOGY”

For many centuries, especially from Late Antiquity until the seventeenth century, European scholars often chose to interpret the foundational texts of their culture—for example, the Bible and the works of Homer and Virgil—by attributing to them more or less systematically coherent meanings that were strikingly at variance with those that uninformed readers would likely have thought they were communicating; and the same scholars often buttressed their interpretations by claiming that some of the words used in those texts had in fact a different, original meaning from the ones that ordinary speakers attached to them in everyday conversation. In so doing, these scholars were applying the procedures of allegoresis to those texts and of etymology to these words. These two scholarly practices also flourished independently of one another in this period; but their complex and intense interaction is one of the features particularly characteristic of the Western Classical tradition. This paper examines their nature, functions, and interrelations during Classical antiquity.

Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, and Heidelberg. He has published books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion, on literary theory and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. Among his most recent publications are the edited collection Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach (with Anthony Grafton; Cambridge UP, 2016), and a nine-volume edition of Early Greek Philosophy in the Loeb Classical Library (with André Laks; Harvard UP, 2016).

 

Early Modern British and Irish History

Wednesday, October 26, 5.15pm
Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall

Stephen Tong (Corpus Christi)
‘John Bale: a Protestant bishop afloat in an Irish see’

 

Economic and Social History

Thursday, 27 October, 5 PM, Lecture Theatre, Trinity Hall
Dr Judy Stephenson (Oxford)
‘Labouring in early modern London’

 

IN LONDON:

Courtauld Institute of Art

Thursday 27 October 2016, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

Caroline Villiers Fellow Lecture

‘Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone: Technical Study of Two Scoto-Jacobean Stranger-Painters’

Caroline Rae: Caroline Villers fellow 2016-17, The Courtauld Institute of Art

The project will use established methods of technical art history in order to examine the materials and techniques of Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone, two Netherlandish artists who worked in Jacobean Scotland. Religious persecution and fortuitous trade relationships led many Protestant Netherlanders to emigrate to Britain in the sixteenth century. Vanson and de Colone are notable amongst this group as they were patronised by the highest echelons of society: Vanson was James VI’s court painter and de Colone was the most prominent painter working in Scotland in the 1620s (who also painted the king). Thomson, whose publications remain a seminal source, constructed their core oeuvres in the 1970s. However, little technical examination has been undertaken on their works to date. The project will focus on the technical examination of paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland collection with the aim of clarifying issues of attribution and identity and illuminating their workshop practices.

Caroline recently completed her Ph.D (jointly hosted by the Department of Conservation and Technology at the Courtauld and the National Portrait Gallery, where she was a member of the Making Art in Tudor Britain team) which focused on issues of workshop practice, authorship and cross-cultural dialogues between native and émigré artists working in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. Previously, Caroline graduated with first class honours in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh/ Edinburgh College of Art and from the Conservation of Easel Paintings course at the Courtauld. Caroline contributes to the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon and has published on de Critz and Fuseli.

The event will also include a presentation by the 2016-17 Associate Fellow, Anna Koopstra, on Investigating Saint Jerome in his study by Hendrik van Steenwijck the Younger.

 

Tudor & Stuart History Seminar (IHR)

Monday, 24 October, 17:15

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

Chris St John-Smith (Oxford)
‘Political management of the law and the implementation of religious policy by the Privy Council during the personal rule of Charles I’