Events this Week

IN CAMBRIDGE

CRASSH: Things That Matter

11 May 2016, 12:00 – 14:00

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

Dr Stella Panayotova (Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge)

History of Material Texts Seminar 

Thursday, 12 May at 5 PM

Ian Gadd (Bath Spa), ‘Errant commas, absent pages, and shifting typos: the strange bibliographical world of Jonathan Swift’s English political works’

Venue: Keynes Room, CUL

Early Modern Economic and Social History

12 May, 5pm in Room 12 of the History Faculty.

Hülya Canbakal (Sabanci University, Istanbul)
(with Alpay Filiztekin, Sabanci)

Slaves and slave ownership in Ottoman Bursa, 1460-1880

Studies of slavery in the Ottoman Empire focus on slavery among and for the official elite in the capital, with an emphasis on the 15th and 16th centuries, on the trade and its abolition in the 19th century, or more recently, on microhistories of slave lives beyond the harems and military households of the official elite. This study builds on the latter two trends. Using probate inventories from the city of Bursa and its hinterland, it examines long-term patterns in slave ownership and employment among commoners as well as the local elite. Probate evidence indicates that slave-holding steadily declined over the four centuries examined and by the time of its abolition, was already a marginal practice in this important provincial city. Price trends reveal a decline from the 18th century onwards, suggesting that declining ownership was due to causes other than supply and prices. We present statistics of ownership and characteristics of the slave body, and examine prices and supply and demand in connection with wages and purchasing power.

Early Modern French Seminar at the Whipple Museum

Friday 13th of May, 2-4pm in the New Gallery, Whipple Museum, Free School Lane.

Raphaële Garrod, CRASSH and Newnham College, Cambridge ‘L’opinion fantastique et trop gaillarde de Copernicque’: on three argument uses of cosmological novelties (Belleforest, Montaigne, Binet)

IN LONDON

Friday 13 May 2016, 12.15-13.45
Playing the Curtain with Dr Lucy Munro
Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road, London
From the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson in the 1590s to those of Dekker, Ford and Rowley in the 1620s, the Curtain was one of the most enduring performance places in early modern London. This talk will explore some highlights of this long history, from Jonson’s humours comedy and Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and histories to the topical story of The Witch of Edmonton and lost plays such as Henry the Unable, The Plantation of Virginia and The Man in the Moon Drinks Claret.
http://www.mola.org.uk/events/playing-curtain-dr-lucy-monroe

Leonardo da Vinci Society annual lecture

‘Art and Anatomy in the 15th and 16th Centuries’

Friday 13 May 2016 – 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

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

Prof. Andrew Gregory: University College London

The developments in art in the 15th and 16th centuries brought with them a new interest in proportion, perspective and the accurate depiction of the human body. How did this affect the science of anatomy? This talk discusses the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Vesalius and Fabricius and looks at how the nature of the new art inspired and shaped a new wave of research into the structure of the human body and how such knowledge was transmitted in visual form. This ultimately led to a revolution in our understanding of anatomy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

 

Institute of Historical Research (UCL)

Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar

Wednesday, 11 May, 5.15 pm

‘Bloody Matters in Early Modern Drama and Culture: The Blood that is Shed, The Blood That is Said, The Blood That is Read’
Stephen Curtis

In it I will examine the various ways in which blood is used, read and interpreted in early modern tragedy paying particular attention to the material and corporeal aspects of its dramatic power. I will consider the religious and sacrificial origins of spectacular bloodshed, the practicalities of staging such sanguinary spectacle and conclude by exploring shifts in the cultural significance of blood in the light of scientific and medical developments in the early seventeenth century. I will argue that blood demands to be read and that understanding its materiality is key to this process of bloody hermeneutics.

Venue: Bloomsbury Room G35, Ground floor, South block, Senate House

Institute of Historical Research (UCL)

British History in the 17th Century Seminar

Thursday, 12 May, 5.15pm

‘E.H.: printer of Marvell and Hobbes’
Martin Dzelzainis (Leicester)

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

Institute of Historical Research (UCL)

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar

Thursday, 12 May, 5.15pm

‘Henry Yevele and the building of the London Bridge Chapel’

Christopher Wilson (UCL)

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

 

Warburg Institute

Wednesday, 11 May 2016, 5:15 PM

Words and Things: Naming the Limits of Reason in Early Modern Culture

Alberto Frigo (University of Reims)
‘The Invention of Connoiseurship’

Richard Scholar (Oriel College, University of Oxford)
‘The Invention of Utopia’

Classroom 1, at the Warburg Institute

 

Senate House Library

Editing Shakespeare

This talk considers how Shakespeare’s text has evolved over the last 400 years. Theories about the purpose of editing and narratives about the origin of Shakespeare’s text and its transmission into print vary over time and editors take great pains to present their rationales as more fitting to the task of representing Shakespeare to their readers than the methods used by their predecessors. However, the impact of editorial theories on the editing of Shakespeare is not always straightforward and, while change occurs, thus suggesting that the editorial tradition is evolutionary and progressive, some editorial practices tend to endure, revealing a recurrent desire to perfect Shakespeare.

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies in the English Department at King’s College London. She has published widely on the history of the transmission of Shakespeare on the stage and on the page, focusing specifically on the evolution of Shakespeare’s texts in print before 1709 and on the appropriation of Shakespeare across different languages, media and cultures in the late 20C and early 21C.

WHEN

Tuesday, 10 May 2016 from 18:30 to 19:30 (BST)

WHERE

Senate House Library – Senate House Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/editing-shakespeare-tickets-21452279345?ref=ebtn

 

Shakespeare’s Common Prayers

The Book of Common Prayer was the most popular book in early modern England; it was also a key source for Shakespeare’s plays of the period 1598-1606, in which the playwright repeatedly borrows the phrases and instructions from church rites and transforms them into dense, precise theatrical moments. When Rosalind pretends to merry Orlando, or when Macbeth considers his terrible guilt, each are really re-phrasing the Book of Common Prayer, and this paper will explore how Shakespeare adapted, stole, and metamorphosed this vital source.

Daniel Swift is the author of Shakespeare’s Common Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Bomber County (Hamish Hamilton, 2010), as well as the editor of the Selected Poems of John Berryman (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014). He is Senior Lecturer in English at the New College of the Humanities.

WHEN

Wednesday, 11 May 2016 from 18:30 to 20:00 (BST)

WHERE

Senate House Library – Senate House Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shakespeares-common-prayers-tickets-21480671266?ref=ebtn

 

 

 

 

 

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)