Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Lent Term 2016 programme

26/1/16
G-R06/07
Transvernacular Poetry and the Rise of English Literature in Early Modern Europe
Prof. Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

09/2/16
G-R06/07
Allegorical Poetics in England after 1600: Fishing in the Dead Water
Dr Vladimir Brljak (University of Cambridge)

23/2/16
G-R06/07
Know your Enemy: Stephen Batman, Edmund Spenser, and the Art of Protestant Discernment
Dr Anna Hartmann (University of Oxford)

08/3/16
G-R06/07
Shakespeare’s Tailors
Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries (University of Cambridge)

More information here

Events This Week

Monday 9th November

London Shakespeare Seminar, 5.15pm, Senate Room, Senate House Library              Brett Gamboa (Dartmouth College)                                                              Shakespearean Metadrama, 2.0                                                                                   More information here.

Tuesday 10th November

Renaissance Research Workshop, on Lisa Jardine’s work and disciplinary legacy. 1.05-1.55pm, English Faculty GR-03. All welcome.

Comparative Social and Cultural History Seminar, 5pm, Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius Penny Roberts (Warwick)                                                                                                “To my very great regret”: Adversity and Opportunity in the Huguenot Exile Experience  More information here.

Wednesday 11th November

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar, 5.15pm, Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall Jessica Crown (Clare)
Scholarship and Service in the Career of Richard Croke (1489–1558)                           More information here.

Thursday 12th November

Early Modern European History Seminar, 1pm, Green Room, Gonville and Caius College Aurelia Martín Casares (Granada)                                                                               Female trafficking in the Mediterranean: North African women in early modern Spain  More information here.

History of Material Texts Seminar, 5pm, Milstein Seminar Room, CUL                    Catherine Ansorge (University Library)                                                                             Ink and gold; how the Islamic manuscripts came to Cambridge                                    More information here.

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

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Michaelmas 2015 schedule for the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar, held jointly between the faculties of English and History, in the Glover Room, Memorial Court, Clare College.

21 October, 12-1:30pm                                                                                            Dr Tom Hamilton (Trinity College, Cambridge)                                                Remembering the Wars of Religion: Pierre de L’Estoile and the “Drolleries of the League” from Ephemeral Print to Scrapbook History

4 November,12-1:30pm                                                                                                    Dr Daniel Starza Smith (Lincoln College, Oxford)                                                    Unvolving the Mysteries of the Melbourne Manuscript, or, Editing An Anonymous Stuart Play Fragment

18 November, 12-1:30pm                                                                                                 Dr Lizzie Swann (CRASSH, Cambridge)                                                                   ‘Nothing clearer, nothing darker’: Seeing the Light in Early Modern England

2 December, 12-1:30pm                                                                                                   Dr Ceri Law (Queen Mary, University of London)                                                               Conservative Oxford and Puritan Cambridge?  The Making and Maintaining of a Reformation Legend

All welcome. Any queries please contact ab2126@cam.ac.uk, more information here.

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Michaelmas Term 2015 programme

20/10/15
G-R06/07
Poetry, Anatomy, Presence
Dr Katherine Craik (Oxford Brookes)

03/11/15
G-R06/07
Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition
Dr Raphael Lyne (University of Cambridge)

17/11/15
G-R06/07
Shakespeare, Digital Technologies, and the Ethics of Spectatorship
Prof Pascale Aebischer (Exeter)

01/12/15
G-R06/07
On Not Defending Poetry: The Economics of Sidney’s Golden World
Prof Catherine Bates (Warwick)

More information here

Events This Week

Monday 18 May

Oxford Bibliographical Society                                                                             5.15pm, Taylor Institution:

Jason Scott-Warren (University of Cambridge)                                                                The Archaeology of an Elizabethan Library: Reading Richard Stonley (c. 1520-1600)

Richard Stonley, an Elizabethan exchequer official and the first documented reader of Shakespeare, left two fascinating traces in the archives. The first comprises three volumes of journals covering periods of the 1580s and 1590s; the second is a booklist that was compiled when the contents of Stonleys house on London’s Aldersgate Street were sold off to defray his alleged embezzlements in office in 1597. This paper will dig into both documents in order to contextualize a highly distinctive early modern library.

Tuesday 19 May

 

Crossroads of Knowledge Reading Group                                                            2pm-4pm English Faculty S-R19:   

The reading group will be looking at Thomas Traherne, contact Tim Stuart-Buttle for more information and some pre-circulated reading material: ts630@cam.ac.uk.

Neo-Latin Reading Group                                                                                      King’s College London, 5.15pm B7:

Maya Feile Tomes (University of Cambridge)                                                                   The shield of Aeneas in the hands of Christopher Columbus — again. New thoughts on weaponry ekphrasis in the Neo-Latin Columbus epic corpus.

The Neo-Latin subgenre of the Columbus epic – which, just as it says on the tin, is a small collection of (early modern) Neo-Latin poems on the subject of Christopher Columbus’ voyages to America – has recently increased in size from five known examples to six. By the same token, the previously known instances of the intriguing ekphrastic phenomenon that is the American shield ekphrasis (shields depicting visions or quasi-maps of the newly encountered continent), of which there were formerly thought to be just two, now find themselves joined by a third example: one which, at over 150 lines, is indeed by far the longest of them all (and, for that matter, considerably longer than the Shield of Aeneas itself!) and, in many senses, very intriguing. In my talk, I will introduce the new text and its ekphrasis, considering how its ekphrastic representation of America interacts with precedents both classical and ‘Columbian’.

 

Wednesday 20 May

CRASSH Things That Matter Seminar                                                                           ARB SG1 from 12.15pm – 2pm:                                                                           ‘Reproduced Things’

Professor Helen King (Classical Studies, Open University)
The Material Womb                                                                                                            In the western tradition of thinking about the body, wombs have not only been illustrated in a variety of shapes, but been made in a variety of materials: ancient terracotta ‘votive wombs’ meet today’s brightly coloured, perky knitted wombs, while eighteenth-century glass wombs give way to nineteenth-century rubber wombs. In this paper, as an aspect of a wider project concerning what has been thought to constitute a body ‘part’, I will consider the colours and materials used for wombs. I shall be arguing that something more than factual knowledge guides the visual representation of the womb, and that taking the long view changes the assumptions we now make, and the questions we put to the past.

Professor Michelle O’Malley (Art History, University of Sussex)
Botticelli and Reproduction                                                                                                In the art historical tradition of thinking about Renaissance painting, we conceptualise pictures as ‘autograph’ and ‘workshop’, admiring the former as, say, a Botticelli, and often denigrating the latter as a slavish and dull copy. But these two strands of production were not divergent: both were outputs of the business of a master painter, and both involved, in varying degrees, the input of the master and his assistants. In this paper, I will consider the production of Botticelli’s ‘workshop’ works, drawing particularly on technical analysis to discuss approaches to the manufacture of these material objects created for the Renaissance home. I will argue that ‘workshop’ work—Botticelli’s re-produced things—represent decisions he made about manufacture in the business and that their construction calls into question some of our most fundamental tools for assessing attribution and understanding how Renaissance painters worked.

London Festival of the Arts Lecture, 5.30pm-7.30pm                                                   UCL Roberts G08:

Carole Levin (University of Nebraska)                                                                   Pregnancy, False Pregnancy, and Questionable Heirs: Mary I and her Echoes

London Renaissance Seminar                                                                                   Room G01, 43 Gordon Square:

6pm – 7:25pm Renaissance Ways of Seeing
How did people ‘see’ in the Renaissance? In this panel discussion Joanne Anderson (Birkbeck) will ask who coloured Mary Magdalen and why it matters, looking particularly at early Renaissance artworks produced in Alpine Italy. Paul Taylor (Warburg Institute) will explore the multivalent idea of ‘imitation’ in relation to life and art in the Renaissance. Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck) will explore the visionary ‘seeing’ (or ‘skrying’) of John Dee’s angelic conversations. Gill Woods (Birkbeck) will investigate how characters went invisible on the Renaissance stage, and what that tells us about theatrical seeing.

7:40pm – 9pm Keeping it in the family: Renaissance writing dynasties?
Kingsley and Martin Amis were not the first. In the Renaissance, a remarkable number of writers (and scholars) belonged to a family double act – most often father and son, or brother and brother, but sometimes father and daughter, or mother and daughter. In a culture in which literature and learning earned new kinds of social prestige, transmitting the craft or vocation of writing from one generation to the next could help achieve social ascent. Why did people write together – was the aim to create dynasties, within which writing was a central plank? Join Professor Neil Kenny (All Souls College, Oxford) to explore how in the French and European Renaissance literature and learning did and didn’t make families a new place in the world.

Thursday 21 May

IHR: Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar                                   5.30pm, Seminar Room A, V&A South Kensington Research Department, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2R:

Dr Pamela Long (Independent Scholar)                                                              Engineering, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

 

Birkbeck Early Modern Society Seminar Series

The Birkbeck Early Modern Society seminar schedule, all meetings are at 6.30pm. The first meeting will be held in Room 101, Birkbeck, 30 Russell Square. Later venues to be confirmed. For more information visit the Birkbeck Early Modern Society websitehenry

8 May 2015

Dr Linda Grant, From pornographic sparrows to Nashe’s dildo: exploring the erotic in early modern literature.

5 June 2015

Dr Alixe Bovey, University of Kent, The Guildhall Giants, Lord Mayors Pageants and political dialects 1600-1750.

3 July 2015

Professor Peter Mack, Renaissance Rhetoric as Questions about Literature, with special reference to Hamlet and Tom Jones.

William hole, ‘henry frederick, prince of wales, holding a pike’, c. 1610-12. FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE.