Renaissance
LENT TERM 2024
Tuesday 6 February, 5.15, GR 05, English Faculty (please note change of room)
Professor Rosalind Smith (ANU)
‘Scribble: errancy, marginalia, and early modern women’s book use’ The last decade has seen increased critical interest in how early modern women read their books, often traced through the marks and annotations they left in the margins. How women used marginalia has been the subject of debate, with Heidi Brayman arguing that women were largely silent in the margins of their books and rarely engaged with the kinds of public-facing annotation that characterised the male humanist reader. Others have mounted historicised arguments for the marginal annotations of exceptional women writers as performing exactly this public function, particularly in the cases of Lady Anne Clifford, Lady Margaret Hoby, and royal women such as Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart and Katherine Parr. Scant attention has been paid, however, to evidence of women’s reading that is more obscure, confused or illegible, even though such examples are far more commonly encountered in marginal practice than goal-directed humanist annotation. Such marks include traces of book use such as stains and smudges, practices aligned with the acquisition of literacy such as pen trials, letter practice and half-finished signatures, and marginal evidence of reading that ranges from boredom, distraction and discomfort to incomprehension, error and erasure. This paper draws from a database of over two thousand examples of early modern women’s marginalia in order to begin to trace an alternative history of women’s book use through such examples of apparently random, incoherent or illegible reading, writing and drawing. Using the heuristic category of error to reconsider pen trials, practice, doodles, drawings, stains and smudges as evidence of early modern women’s reading, writing and book use, I argue for a broader understanding of who produced marks in books, from the erudite to the illiterate, and of what constitutes marginalia, from purposeful annotation to the press of a dirty sleeve.
20 February, 5.30, GR 05, English Faculty
Professor Katherine Craik, Oxford Brookes
‘Lifelikeness in Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale’
The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s most intense exploration of the capacity of lifelikeness to challenge or disturb ‘real life’. Attention to the problem of lifelike representation in this play has focused mainly on Hermione’s statue, a remarkably complex evocation of the inseparability of aesthetic liveliness from life itself. The statue is however only the culminating episode in a play full of material things which bear, hold and express life including fabric (smocks, coats, gowns, fardels), wrappings (sheaths, pockets, bundles), and vessels (boxes, wombs, graves). Most of the play focuses on things – and people – that are not or not yet thickly realised or rendered, and not yet set in stone. Part of Shakespeare’s wide-ranging consideration of aliveness in The Winter’s Tale focuses on the ways inanimate objects can express intention and agency. It is however the dimensionality of things, particularly their fullness or emptiness, which expresses unforeseen aspects of life. Focusing on the play’s children, both born and unborn, this paper explores how The Winter’s Tale disturbs the fixed realism implied by mimesis, puts pressure on the boundaries between reality and the imagination, and stretches or decomposes our sense of what it is like to live.
5 March
Professor Adrian Streete, University of Glasgow:
‘Admonitory Laughter, Prosopopoeia, and the Promise of Tudor Evangelical Literature’