Tag Archives: UCL

Events This Week

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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

 

 

Welcome Back, and Events This Week

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Welcome to a new year at Cambridge! As ever, we will be posting interesting events, series, publications, or whatever else throughout the term. If you have tips or suggestions, please send them to cam.renresearch@gmail.com. Follow us on twitter @Cam_Renaissance. We have an exciting term ahead, so here are some events this coming week to get you started.

IN CAMBRIDGE:

Middle English Graduate Seminar

Wednesday October 12, 5:15, English Faculty Room SR24

“Piers Plowman” and God’s Thought Experiment – Mishtooni Bose (Oxford)

Overview: These advanced research talks, followed by discussion, are aimed at graduate students, senior members and visiting scholars. The seminar begins at 5.15, but do bring a cup of tea along at 4.15 for an informal get-together (biscuits provided!). This term we will experiment with drinks after questions; we are trying out a new room to see if this makes it more possible for people to circulate. Afterwards all are welcome to come to supper with the speaker.

 

IN LONDON:

Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800  (IHR at UCL)

Thursday, October 13, 17:30

Venue:  John S Cohen Room N203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Chris Kissane (London School of Economics)

Deciphering Early Modern Food Cultures

 

Tudor & Stuart History (IHR at UCL)

Monday, October 10, 17:15

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

Steven Gunn (Oxford)
‘Everyday life and accidental death in sixteenth-century England’

 

Warburg Institute, The E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series on the Classical Tradition 2016

Celestial Aspirations: 17th and 18th Century British Poetry and Painting, and the Classical Tradition

Philip Hardie, Honorary Professor of Latin and Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge

11 October at 17.30 – Visions of apotheosis and glory on painted ceilings: from Rubens’ Banqueting House, Whitehall to Thornhill’s Painted Hall, Greenwich

12 October 2016 at 17:30 – Poetic ascents and flights of the mind: Neoplatonism to Romanticism

13 October at 17.30 – ‘No middle flight’: Miltonic ascents and their reception

Pre-registration is required for these free lectures. Register here.

Events This Week

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IN CAMBRIDGE:

 

Things-(Re)constructing the Material World

25 May 2016, 12:30-2 PM

Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

‘Slaves’

James Poskett (Cambridge), Stefan Hanß (Berlin)

 

Cambridge Bibliographical Society

Wednesday, 25 May, 5 PM

Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library

Tea from 4:30 pm before the lectures.

Dr Kathryn James (Munby Fellow), ‘Loss and the English imagination: writing the dissolution of the monasteries in the early eighteenth century’

 

Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop

Friday 27 May 2016- 2-4 PM

Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor David Ganz: ‘When is a ‘Script’ not Several Scribes?’

 

Early Modern French Seminar at the Whipple Museum

Friday 27 May, 2-4pm

New Gallery, Whipple Museum, Free School Lane.

Katherine Reinhart, CRASSH and King’s College, Cambridge

‘Miscellany and Marginalia: The drawings of the early Académie Royale des Sciences’

 

IN LONDON:

Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar (IRC, UCL)

May 25, 5:15 PM

‘In Pewter two dozen great and small: From quantification to affective qualities in material culture’

Antony Buxton

Much analysis of material culture relies on the evidence of individual affective responses to artefacts, as well as the assumed contemporary perception of the properties of the object itself. This paper will discuss the potential of quantitative evidence to reveal qualitative conclusions.  In a study based on the evidence of early modern probate inventories – in conjunction with contemporary texts and images – the capacity of the relational database to tease out nuanced variations in practice indicated by household furnishings makes possible a practice-based reading of the interrelationship between people and objects, and its indication of a changing social dynamic.

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

 

British History in the 17th Century Seminar (IHR, UCL)

Thursday, May 26, 5:15 PM

‘”Lying, flattering addresses?” Allegiance, popularity and status in loyal addresses 1658-1661’

Ted Vallance (Roehampton)

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

 

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar (IHR, UCL)

Thursday, May 26, 5.15pm

‘The pre-Fire church of St Botolph Billingsgate’

Stephen Freeth

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

 

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IN CAMBRIDGE:

Renaissance Graduate Seminar

Tuesday 17 May, at 5.15pm in GR06/7 in the Faculty of English

Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘New pleasures and old pain: Donne and sensation’.

Throughout his rich and varied corpus, John Donne repeatedly seeks
meaning in the sensations of pleasure and pain. His literary career is
marked by robust avowals of the pleasures of lyric intimacy, as well as
by urgent expositions of the conventional pains of religious suffering.
In this paper, I argue that part of what is distinctive and compelling
about Donne is his careful attention to sensation. While Donne may have
only been partly successful in the attempt to find a lexicon of
suffering that could escape an inherited logic of redemptive pain, he
succeeded admirably in the effort to carve out an emergent discourse of
sanctioned erotic pleasure.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the
University of Michigan, where he has taught since he received his Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He is also a Life
Member of Clare Hall. He is the author of /Prayer and Power: George
Herbert and Renaissance Courtship/ (University of Chicago Press, 1991),
/Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in
Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton/ (Cambridge, 1999) and /The
Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry/ (2010); and editor of
the /Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets/ (2006).He is
currently editing /John Donne in Context/ for Cambridge, working on a
book for Blackwell’s entitled /Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry/, and
researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern
England.

 

Cambridge New Habsburg Studies Network Annual Lecture

‘The Habsburgs and their Eastern Neighbours: Re-evaluating the Religious Landscape of 16th-century Central Europe’

Tuesday, 17th May 2016, Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall, 5pm-6:30pm

Professor Howard Louthan (Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota)

While relations between the Habsburgs and their Valois, Tudor, and Ottoman rivals have been well studied, their connections with their eastern neighbors, the Jagiellonians, have not been examined with the same degree of scrutiny.  The paper will first offer an overview of the complicated web of relationships that developed between the two families.   I will then argue that a fixation with diplomatic and dynastic history has obscured our vision of a common cultural and intellectual landscape the families shared.  We will pay specific attention to a great scandal that occurred in mid-sixteenth century Poland and unpack that incident to explore some of the distinctive features of a multiconfessional religious culture that developed across Central Europe during the Age of Reform.

 

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Seminar

Wednesday, 18 May, 12-1:30 PM

Liesbeth Corens (Jesus College, Cambridge):

‘Witnessing, Mission, and English Catholic Counter-Archives’

SR-24, Faculty of English

 

Cambridge Medieval Paleography Workshop

Friday 20 May 2016, Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library, 2-4 PM.

Dr. Katya Chernakova: Title To Be Announced.

Dr. Eyal Poleg: ‘The Late Medieval Bible’

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

 

 

IN LONDON:

Courtauld Institute of Art

Renaissance Work-in-Progress seminars

‘Titian and the Renaissance Model’

Wednesday 18 May 2016 – 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

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

Dr Joost Keizer: University of Groningen
Titian’s models muddle the boundaries between art and life. They lived in two worlds: in the social world and the world of the artwork. The questions assembled in the model were therefore not just aesthetic; they also redefined art’s relationship to life. How much distance should art take from lived experience? And how much does our perception of reality change when art trespasses the territory of the real? These questions are the subject of this talk.

Dr Joost Keizer (PhD Leiden University ’08) is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. He has written Michelangelo and the Politics of Art (Yale University Press), The Realism of Piero della Francesca: The Life & the Work (Ashgate), and a book on Leonardo da Vinci with illustrations by Christina Christoforou (Laurence King). He has co-edited a volume on The Transformation of the Vernacular in Early Modernity. And he has published articles on Michelangelo, fifteenth-century portraiture, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and the concept of style.

 

Institute of Historical Research (UCL):

Early Modern Material Cultures Seminar

Wednesday, 18 May, 5.15 pm

‘Divers other trifles: the material culture of the sugar banquet in early modern England’

Louise Stewart

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, sweet banquets consisting of preserved fruits, confections such as comfits and lozenges, and sculptures in sugar paste or marzipan were a significant element of aristocratic and gentry sociability.  Indeed, an elite person in early modern England would expect to be entertained with a sweet banquet at every wedding, christening and funeral as well as at other significant social occasions hosted by their peers.  What meanings did the banquet hold that led it to be so closely associated with these important life events?

This paper invites the audience to tour the spaces in which foods for the banquet were prepared and consumed; the banqueting house, the sweetmeat closet, and the child-bed chamber.  Inventories of these spaces, surviving material culture and contemporary descriptions of banqueting provide new insights as to why the sugar banquet was so pervasive in early modern England.  It provided opportunities for participants to demonstrate their refined manners, excellent education, good connections, virtue and inherent nobility.  As a cultural practice which was associated with femininity, did the sugar banquet also provide opportunities for female empowerment and creative expression?

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

 

Medieval and Tudor London Seminar

Thursday, 19 May, 5.15pm

Gogmagog and Corineus: from the West Country to the New Troy 
‘Trojans and giants on the sea-coast of Totnes’
John Clark (Museum of London)

‘Gogmagog come(s) to London’
Alixe Bovey (Courtauld Institute of Art)

 

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

 

Events this Week

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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

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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)

 

Samuel Daniel, Poet and Historian

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DanielSamuel Daniel, Poet and Historian
September 10th – 11th, 2015                 Parry Rooms, Royal College of Music                                                                        This is the first Conference devoted to Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), and it is presented by a consortium of universities—UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, the English Faculty at Oxford University, St John’s College Oxford, and the Royal College of Music.

Samuel Daniel was a very considerable and prolific poet, writer, historian and man of letters. He is however the least studied and least understood of the major Elizabethans. Daniel was taught at Oxford by John Florio, and he did much to introduce Italian sweetness and ease of writing into the bloodstream of English poetry. He was also an impressive historian. He had extensive personal connections with the rich and powerful of the day, and with leading scholars, antiquarians, lawyers and academics. Daniel’s brother, John Danyel (1564-1625), was a musician of the first rank, who wrote songs and lute pieces that by general agreement keep company with Dowland’s finest compositions. The Daniel brothers, who were very close, collaborated fruitfully on several occasions, but their work together has rarely been looked at.

This is the context for this interdisciplinary Conference, which will explore the full range of Daniel’s interests in poetry, history and music, and how these come together in his work. Specific attention will be paid to the influence of the continental Renaissance on his writing, his importance as a student of history, especially medieval history, his achievements as a poet and writer, and his links to the world of music and the arts, through his brother John Danyel and others, Ferrabosco and Inigo Jones among them. Other speakers will consider Daniel’s special place in the history of ethical writing in verse, his high standing among Jacobeans—writers and readers, poets and dons—his masques, his translations, his conversation and his portraits.

There will be a concert of John Danyel’s music, with some poetry from Samuel Daniel, on the Thursday evening, 10 September, at the Britten Theatre. This will be led by Sam Brown of the Royal College of Music. The Conference will include many firsts—including a reading of the prose History, and staged readings at the concert of ‘Ulysses and the Siren’ and selections from Musophilus in association with Globe Education, and performed by the Dolphin’s Back theatre company. There is a programme of seven academic panels in sequence (no parallel sessions) over the two days, with two or three 20-minute papers in each, from 21 speakers.

John Pitcher of St John’s College Oxford and Yasmin Arshad of UCL are the organizers of the conference. Pitcher is the Oxford editor of Daniel and has published a dozen essays and editions of Daniel’s work. Arshad has published on Daniel and mounted the highly successful UCL production of Daniel’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra in 2013.

After the Conference, the papers will be considered in terms of where they might be best published—perhaps some in a special issue of one of the early modern journals, others in a themed book of chapters, ‘Samuel Daniel: the other side of Elizabethan civilized life’, for instance, or ‘Samuel Daniel: the importance of poetry’. Papers on John Danyel will be gathered together as well, where possible in relation to his brother. It is intended to announce at the Conference that the first volumes of the OUP edition of Daniel will be heading to the Press.

Confirmed Speakers include: Warren Boutcher (QMUL); Christopher Goodwin (Lute Society); Karen Hearn (formerly of the Tate, Hon. Professor UCL).

Conference Organizers: John Pitcher (St John’s College, Oxford) & Yasmin Arshad (UCL)

For Conference Registration (which includes lunch and refreshments on both days and the concert ticket) please visit: http://onlinestore.ucl.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=153

Early booking is suggested as space is limited. We have a number of graduate bursaries generously made available by the SRS. Please contact us about this, and with any other queries at danielconference@ucl.ac.uk.

The Concert at the Britten Theatre is also open to members of the public: To book tickets or for more information contact the RCM Box Office on 02075914314, weekdays 10.00am – 4.00pm, or visit http://www.rcm.ac.uk/events/listings/details/?id=743368.

We are grateful for the generous support of: The Society of Renaissance Studies; Globe Education; Oxford English Faculty; St John’s College Oxford; UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges; UCL European Institute; UCL English Department; UCL’s Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies (JFIGS); and the Royal College of Music (RCM).

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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 Stonley’s 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

 

Pregnancy, False Pregnancy, and Questionable Heirs: Mary I and her Echoes

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A lecture taking place at UCL on May 20th:

Pregnancy, False Pregnancy, and Questionable Heirs: Mary I and her Echoes

May 20, 2015 5.30-7.30pm                                                                                                  UCL, Roberts G08

MaryICarole Levin (University of Nebraska)

This illustrated lecture examines beliefs – medical and cultural – about phantom pregnancies in early modern England with specific connections to the political implications of Mary I’s false pregnancies. While historians have often described women who believed they were pregnant when they were not as pathetic or pathological, many medical texts of the period argued it was very difficult to tell a false pregnancy from a real one – or at least this was so until a baby was born or too much time had past.  Mary’s phantom pregnancy not only had great political consequences for her reign, but more than a century later, it was brought up again as Protestants attempted to describe the 1688 pregnancy of Catholic Mary of Modena, wife of James II, as also false.

Carole is a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Nebraska where she is Willa Cather Professor of History. The event is part of UCL’s Festival of the Arts.