Forms of Faith: religious change & artistic, literary, and musical culture in c16 Italy

University of Leeds, 30 - 31 March 2007

This symposium will bring together a small number of specialists in the fields of Renaissance literature, music, history and history of art to address the question of the relationship between religious change and artistic form in sixteenth-century Italy. Specific issues to be addressed will include the ways in which religious developments are reflected in changing modes of literary expression (for example, the adoption of different modes of discourse - philosophical, Petrarchan, liturgical - in Christian poetry), techniques in the visual arts, and techniques in musical composition; and the role of changes in artistic form in shaping sixteenth-century religious sensibilities. All speakers will address current work in progress in extended papers of around an hour's duration.

Speakers will include:
Stephen Bowd (School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh)
Chrysa Damianaki (Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione dell'Università di Lecce, Italy)
Iain Fenlon (Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge)
Alexander Nagel (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C.)
Tom Nichols (Department of History of Art, University of Aberdeen)
Noel O'Regan (Department of Music, University of Edinburgh)
Letizia Panizza (Department of Italian, Royal Holloway)
Raymond B. Waddington (Department of English, University of California at Davis)
The conference is organised by Abigail Brundin (Department of Italian, University of Cambridge) and Matthew Treherne (Department of Italian, University of Leeds), and is supported by the British Academy, the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, the MHRA, and the Department of Italian, University of Leeds.

Conference registration will open in late 2006. In the meantime, for further information, please contact Abigail Brundin: asb17@cam.ac.uk, or via Department of Italian, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT.

Republicanism in Britain 1640-1800

20 January 2007, Royal Holloway University of London History Department

The conference will explore, through discussion of pre-circulated papers, themes of republicanism from the civil wars to the 1790s. There are papers and commentaries by: Quentin Skinner, Blair Worden, David Norbrook, Martin Dzelzainis, Justin Champion, Jan Hartman, Ian McBride, Rachel Hemmersley, Iain McDaniel, Mark Philp, John Mee, Gregory Claeys, Iain Hampsher-Monk, John Barrell and David Wootton.

Conference organisers: Professor Blair Worden and Alex Barber

Email: alex.barber@rhul.ac.uk
Department of History, Royal Holloway, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX
Tel: 01784 443639
Fax: 01784 433032

Registration for a conference place: by 30 November.

Archives in Conflict

5 December 2006, Imperial War Museum, London

The British Records Association's Annual Conference 2006 examines the archival preservation in times of conflict and addresses the use of archival resources in researching military history. Speakers include William Spencer of the National Archives, Mark Whitmore and Roger Smither of the Imperial War Museum, Professors Ian Beckett (Northampton), Ann Curry (Southampton) and Annabel Venning (author, Following the Drum). Professor Nicholas Rodger will deliver the Maurice Bond Memorial Lecture. The event is being hosted by the Imperial War Museum. Do join us for an outstanding day.

Conference organisers: Dr. Nat Alcock; Jane James

Email:
britrecassoc@hotmail.com
c/o Finsbury Library, 245 St John Street, London EC1V 4NB
Tel: +44 (0)20 7833 0428
Fax: +44 (0)20 7833 0416
Deadlines: registration for conference place: one week before the conference

2007 Conferences on The French of England

Medieval England presents a historical example of European multilingualism striking for the diversity of "cultural traffic" between the English and French languages and literatures. "The French of England" addresses the sociolinguistic plurality of Frenches in England, their various internal and external interrelations, and their cross-disciplinary importance, especially to Middle English studies (though not neglecting relations with continental French, or the presence of such French in England). Speakers will come from history (including legal history); literature; political science; religion; art history, linguistics. The conferences aim to promote (i) wider scholarly awareness of the French of England as a field and of medieval England as a multilingual society; (ii) a Middle English literary and cultural studies fully inclusive of French; (iii) to explore beyond the traditional subdivisions (Norman French, Anglo-Norman, Anglo-French, continental French/es) toward a more inclusive account of French in England and its interrelations with other relevant languages.

In 2007 there will be a pair of conferences in New York USA and York UK, both envisaged as developments of current scholarly interest in multilingualism in Medieval Studies, designed to call out the research communities in the French of England on both sides of the Atlantic, and to continue and develop research and graduate teaching conversations about how to conceptualize and practice the interrelations of the French of England with its neighbors?continental French, Middle English, Latin. We plan to publish a volume of selected proceedings from these conferences. We welcome papers in all domains and disciplinary affiliations concerned with the French(es) of England.

1. The French of England: Multilingualism in Practice, c.1100-c.1500
31 March -1 April, 2007. 27 th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus, Manhattan, New York.

Call for Papers : Please send an abstract and cover letter with contact information to arrive no later than October 9, 2006 to: The Conference Committee, Center for Medieval Studies, FMH 405B, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458. Fax: (718) 817-3987. Phone: (718) 817-4655. Email: medievals@fordham.edu . Web: www.fordham.edu/mvst.html

2. The French of England: Linguistic Accommodation and Cultural Hybridity, c.1100-c.1500. 13-16 July 2007. University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King?s Manor.

Call for Papers : Please send an abstract and cover letter with contact information to arrive no later than October 9, 2006 to: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King?s Manor, YorkYO1 7EP, UK. Fax: +44 ([0]1904) 43 3918. Phone: +44 ([0]1904) 43 3910. Email: jwb502@york.ac.uk
For information about York and the Centre for Medieval Studies see: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cms/ The French of England conference will continue the model established in ?Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England to 1250? conference at York, 14-17 th July 2006.

Eleventh York Manuscripts Conference
17-20 July 2007

French in English Manuscripts and French Manuscripts in England

The eleventh York Manuscripts Conference will be held at the King's Manor in York from Tuesday the 17 th through Friday the 20 th of July 2007. The theme of the conference will be French influence on manuscripts produced in England in the later Middle Ages. Papers will range over the topics of manuscripts written in England in the French language; French manuscripts and incunables imported into England; French scribes and illuminators working in England or in English manuscripts produced on the continent; French influence on manuscript script and/or illumination, etc.

( The conference is timed to  follow  directly on from  another at York, The French of England : Linguistic Accommodation and Cultural Hybridity, c1100-c1500  (13-16 July, 2007), organized by Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne .)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Please submit proposed titles and brief abstracts of papers for the Eleventh York Manuscripts Conference, French in English Manuscripts and French Manuscripts in England, by the end of November 2006 to

Professor Linne R. Mooney
Centre for Medieval Studies
King's Manor
York YO1 7EP
U.K.

or via email to LRM3@york.ac.uk

Violently Shakespeare

The web page for the 2006 Ohio Shakespeare Conference has been updated. Our theme is "Violently Shakespeare." You can find a full CFP posted on our web page. We are happy to report that our plenary speakers will be Lisa S. Starks (currently working on violence, sexuality and masculinity in the Roman plays) and William Proctor Williams (who will discuss his work as an editor of _Titus_). Email submissions to
joe.sullivan@marietta.edu or mail them to Joseph Sullivan, English Department, Marietta College, Thomas Hall, Marietta , OH 45750. Our web address is: http://www.marietta.edu/~engl/OSC/

Non-Shakespearean drama database (Gabriel Egan)

This is a live database table listing all 710 extant works catalogued in Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online (LION) database as 'drama' first performed between 1567 and 1642. LION's definition of 'drama' includes masks, entertainments, and civic pageants, so these are represented as well as the 500 or so plays.

Go to: http://www.gabrielegan.com/nsdd/index.htm

Ballads

Early Modern Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara: English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800

Dedicated to mounting online extant ballads published in English from 1500-1800, the English Department’s Early Modern Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara has begun by archiving the 1,857 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection.

Details: http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/index.asp

CFP Reconstructing Histories, 1550-1850

22-25 February 2007
Chicago, Illinois, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies

The 14th Annual Conference for the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS) will be held from February 22-25, 2007, in Chicago at the Palmer House Hilton. The theme for this year's conference is Reconstructing Histories, 1550-1850 and is intended to foster discussions about the ways in which perceptions of literary, cultural, social, and economic history have changed during the last decades. We invite papers, panels, discussion groups, and workshops that examine both early modern engagements with the making and unmaking of these histories and those that explore our contemporary understandings of our disciplinary narratives. In defining these historical and metacritical questions broadly, GEMCS provides a forum for innovative inquiries into all aspects of early modern culture and we encourage proposals on all aspects of early modern cultural studies.

GEMCS grew out of a need for a truly interdisciplinary organization that spans the early modern period and provides a forum for scholars to explore how our understandings of class race, gender, the body, sexuality, science, trade, colonialism, and nationalism continue to be reshaped by ongoing work in critical and cultural theory. The rubric "cultural studies" encompasses a variety of disciplinary fields--among them literature, history, art history, political science, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and philosophy--and it allows for a variety of approaches: feminist, materialist, multiculturalist, gay, lesbian, and queer. GEMCS defines the early modern period broadly to include the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and the early nineteenth century, and we remain committed to fostering critical dialogues across traditional boundaries of historical specialization and sociopolitical geography. We are particularly interested in expanding dialogues about the relationships between European national and linguistic cultures and their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

We invite proposals in the following areas for the 2007 conference, but, as always, encourage papers, panels, and discussions on other topics dealing with the period between roughly 1550 and 1850:

Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres
Nation and National Identity
Transcultural Exchanges within Europe and Beyond
Comparative Imperialisms
European Sciences and Indigenous Forms of Knowledge
Trade, Colonialism, and Gender
Women Writers and the Problem of Genre
Beyond the "New Formalism"
Manuscript and Print in the Early Modern Period
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Studies
Biocultures
Technology and the Body
The Problems of Periodicity: Rethinking the "Early Modern"
Rethinking Character, Rethinking Genre
Teaching Early Modern Cultural Studies
The Nature of the Object
Animals and their Companion Species
Transatlantic Exchanges
Things and their Destinies

Panel organizers should reserve half an hour to forty-five minutes for discussions so please ask each speaker to limit his or her presentation to no more than fifteen minutes. Please send abstracts for complete panels (approx. 500 words) or individual papers (approx. 250 words) to ecti@uiuc.edu using the subject line "Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies." Abstracts should include academic addresses for all panel participants and their e-mail addresses.

The deadline for abstracts for individual papers, roundtables (six to eight participants), and paper sessions (three to five participants) is September 15, 2006.

In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions - Exiles and Emigrés

13-15 April, 2007
University of Leicester

From 1995 to 2003, under a Bilateral Agreement to encourage collaborative research, the Universities of Leicester and Pisa hosted an Anglo-Italian colloquium on methodological and ideological issues: Studies in European Cultural Transition, funded for its last three years by the British Academy. From 2004 this was replaced by another British Academy project: In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions.

Four interdisciplinary colloquia – Performing National Identities (Berlin, 31 March – 2 April, 2006), Exiles and Emigrés (Leicester, 2007), Translations and Travels (Paris, 2008), and East/West (Pisa, 2008) – will result in a volume of proceedings for each meeting, and, finally, a comprehensive book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural cross-fertilisation between the two nations.

Exiles and Emigrés

Our subject here will be liminal figures such as John /Giovanni Florio who have mediated between the two cultures. We shall look, for instance, at Italian communities in Britain and British communities in Italy, investigating, for instance, cultural ambassadors and displaced persons, terms that might be interchangeable. We intend to analyse only in this context the work of canonical authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and architects etc. who have moved back and forth between Britain and Italy. Go-betweens – diplomats, politicians, fine art traders, explorers, merchants, servants – will be of particular interest, as will the problems of exile and of assimilation.

If you would like to contribute a twenty-minute paper to this, or to the Paris or Pisa colloquia, please contact:

Prof. Martin Stannard
Department of English
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RH
Tel: (0116) 2522621
Fax: (0116) 2522065
E-mail: maj@le.ac.uk

Shakespeare and the Law: A Conference - A Celebration

9-11 July 2007
University of Warwick

“I am a subject, and challenge law” Richard II, Act II, scene III

The University of Warwick will host an international conference on Shakespeare and the Law from 9-11 July 2007 in association with Warwick Law School and The Capital Centre partnership between The University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The conference will provide a unique forum for scholarly discourse between the major humanities disciplines of law, literature and the performing arts. Confirmed speakers include several leading figures in Shakespearean Scholarship, theatre and the field of law and humanities.

The study of law as a humanities' discipline is concerned with the capacity of human beings to engage with their environment and reform it by the power of imagination expressed through arts which are not scientifically predictable in their operation or susceptible to empirical assessment. In this sense the study of law as a humanities' discipline is distinct from, albeit compatible with, the study of law as a social science. Law and humanities explores the relationship between subjects and the law; “subjects” indicating on the one hand the very human beings subject to the law, and, on the other hand, the humanities disciplines (including literature and drama) through which the human subject has traditionally created and challenged the law. There is no better starting place, or central case, for such a study than the works of William Shakespeare.

Speakers include:

Prof. Jonathan Bate (Warwick)
Gregory Doran (RSC)
Prof. Germaine Greer
Michael Pennington
Prof. Peter Goodrich (Yeshiva University, NYC)
Prof. B. J. Sokol
Dr Mary Sokol

For further information, email the programme organisers:

Paul Raffield: p.raffield@warwick.ac.uk
Gary Watt: gary.watt@warwick.ac.uk

Going Roman

Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, University of Birmingham UK

Third Annual Lecture by Professor Peter Lake (Princeton University), Wednesday 1 November 2006, 5.15pm, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Professor Lake's title is 'Going Roman. Titus Andronicus and the Ideological Crisis of the 1590s'.

Details: http://www.crems.bham.ac.uk/seminars.htm

A World Elsewhere: Orality, Manuscript and Print in Colonial and Post-Colonial Cultures: CFP

An international conference to be held at the Centre for the Book, Cape Town, 2-4 April 2007

Please send abstracts (500 words maximum) or proposals for sessions by 1 September 2006 to Mark Espin, PO Box 15254, Vlaeberg, Cape Town 8018, South Africa; or ideally by e-mail to Mark.Espin@nlsa.ac.za, and cc to j.gouws@ru.ac.za. A preliminary programme should be announced by 1 December 2006.

The conference will address a wide range of questions relating to `the history of the book' in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Relevant topics include:

* national and transnational communities of letters;
* alternative public spheres;
* censorship;
* the history of reading and reading theories;
* reviewing and criticism;
* authorship;
* sociologies of the text;
* text and image;
* the economies of cultural prestige;
* media history;
* the cultures of collecting;
* library history;
* literacy;
* oral cultures;
* orality and print;
* printing and publishing history;
* the marketing and distribution of books;
* the electronic text;
* and the future of the book.

As a sub-theme, it is hoped that the conference will address issues relating to the identification, preservation and dissemination of, and access to, Southern African textual culture, at a time when the heritage of the past is threatened and the outlook for the future is uncertain. The purpose is to bring together all stakeholders: academics working in the fields of Textual Studies, Book and Cultural History, the Media, Anthropology, and new and old technologies of the text, archivists, librarians, educationalists, publishers, public administrators, funding bodies and government. It is hoped that special attention will be given to the development of protocols for recording Southern African orature and performance art. The purpose of the conference is to examine the present and to plan for the future: how do we ensure that future generations have access to our past, present and future textual cultural heritage? We would welcome the participation of international delegates whose experience elsewhere could inform our deliberations.

Through an engagement with questions of identifying and maintaining material resources, and enabling access to the continuing Southern African textual heritage, the conference seeks to investigate a broader set of theoretical themes around texts and textuality. Have particular configurations of South African society produced unique understandings of what texts are and how they might be used? Have there been styles of reading, interpretation and textual use in the past that have dropped from view? (For example, early African Christianity has produced interesting forms of divinely inspired reading and writing.) What kinds of different relationships, institutions and communities have been built up in and through texts, and in what ways are they peculiarly South African? Are there analogues elsewhere? How might we understand such practices, and in what ways should they influence protocols for the maintenance of, and access to, cultural heritages?

THIRD ANNUAL SAINT LOUIS CONFERENCE ON MANUSCRIPT STUDIES, 13-14 OCTOBER, 2006

The Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University is pleased to announce program and registration information for the Thirty-Third Annual Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, 13-14 October, 2006, to be held on the campus of Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. The annual conference features papers on medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies, including such topics as paleography, codicology, illumination, book production, library history, reading & literacy, textual criticism, and manuscript cataloguing.

The guest speaker for 2006 will be Lilian Armstrong (Wellesley College), speaking on:

- Triumphal Processions in Italian Renaissance Book Illumination

Sessions at this year's conference will present papers on:

- Reconstructing Manuscripts: The Work of the Conservator
- Outside the Book of Hours: Alternate Forms of Devotion in Manuscript Illumination ca. 1300
- Fifteenth-Century Italian Illumination
- Script and Scriptoria
- Creating 'Flanders': The Problem of Historiography and Low Countries Manuscript Studies
- New Studies in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts

A special session sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America will present papers on

- The Bible in the Thirteenth Century: Beyond the Paris Bible

Program and registration information for the conference are available on the website of the Vatican Film Library at http://www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl/events.htm.

The Experience of Authority in Early Modern Britain

King's College, Cambridge, UK
14 April 2007

This workshop will explore the nature of authority, popular politics and protest in local society c.1500-1700. Subjects for papers might include: parish politics and local administration; legal rights and uses of the law; popular religious practice; domestic relations, gender and age. We are particularly interested in receiving proposals to speak from graduate students and junior academics. Papers should last no more than twenty minutes: further details available from the organisers. We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Professor Steve Hindle (University of Warwick) and our respondent Dr Andy Wood (University of East Anglia).

Conference organisers: Matthew Clark; Alexander Courtney; Jessica Sharkey

Contact Matthew Clark, mjc76@cam.ac.uk
571 King's College, Cambridge, CB2 1ST
07814087271

Call for papers: proposals of no more than 300 words, with a brief CV, by 1 November 2006; registration for a conference place: this is a free event. Email the organisers no later than 1 March 2007.

Indolence

The ODNB, on James Thomson, poet, and author of the Seasons, who was apparently very lazy:

His indolence was well known. It was said that, at Eastbury, he ate the ripe side of peaches hanging on the tree, without taking his hands from his pockets. Also that, at home in Richmond, he was found in bed one day at 2 p.m. by Charles Burney, the musicologist, who asked him why he was in bed at that hour and received the reply: "I had no motive to rise.'

Fifteenth Annual Conference, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music

University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, Thursday - Sunday, 19-22 April 2007

Call for Papers

The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music will hold its Fifteenth Annual Conference Thursday through Sunday, 19-22 April 2007, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Proposals on all aspects of seventeenth-century music -- instrumental music, vocal music, music theory, etc. -- and its cultural contexts are welcome, including those drawing on other fields as they relate to music. As 2007 marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Buxtehude, proposals relating to his music and cultural milieu are particularly encouraged. Presentations may take a variety of formats, including individual papers 20 minutes in length, lecture-recitals (45 minutes), workshops involving group participation, roundtable discussions, and panel sessions. The Irene Alm memorial Prize will be awarded for the best scholarly presentation given
by a student.

It is the policy of the Society that a presenter cannot give an individual paper at two consecutive meetings. For individual papers, abstracts not exceeding 350 words should clearly represent the title, subject, and argument, and should indicate the significance of the findings. Proposals for presentations in other formats should be of similar length; they should clearly state and justify the intended format, and should indicate the originality and significance of the material to be delivered.

The Program Committee consists of Stewart Carter (chair; Wake Forest University), Kimberlyn Montford (Trinity University), Donald Fader (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University).

Proposals may be sent by e-mail to carter@wfu.edu, with the text of the abstract both pasted into the body of the e-mail and as an attachment in either MSWord or RTF format. Alternatively, five copies of the proposal (four anonymous and one identified with name, address, telephone, fax, and e-mail address) may be sent to:

Stewart Carter
Chair, SSCM Program Committee
Department of Music
Wake Forest University
PO Box 7345 Reynolda Station
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
USA

Abstracts must be submitted by e-mail or postmarked by midnight, 1 October 2006. Students should identify themselves as such on the non-anonymous copy of the abstract or in the covering text of the e-mail message, and participants in lecture-recitals should attach short biographies. Audio or video recordings supporting proposals for lecture-recitals are welcome but
cannot be returned.

EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS 1500 – 1800

26th March, 2007 - 28th March, 2007
The conference will be sponsored by the Society and the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
The organisers are Martin Bell and Paul Schuurman (speakers, topics, papers, schedule) and Bart Leeuwenburgh (registration, accommodation, meals).
The conference venue is the Municipal Central Library in the centre of Rotterdam.
Centrale Bibliotheek Rotterdam
Hoogstraat 110
3011 PV Rotterdam.

Information about the Library (in Dutch and English) is available at: www.bibliotheek.rotterdam.nl

The organisers invite proposals for papers within the theme of the conference, and also welcome suggestions for speakers. There will be a session for papers by post-graduate students, and we welcome offers of papers for this session which need not be restricted to the conference theme. Please send proposals and suggestions by email as soon as possible to Martin Bell or Paul Schuurman.

Contacts
Martin Bell: martinbell1944@yahoo.co.uk
Paul Schuurman: schuurman@fwb.eur.nl
Bart Leeuwenburgh: bart@lee.tte.nl

Further Information
Information about travel, accommodation and other aspects of the conference, together with a schedule of speakers and topics will be added in due course.

Crossing the Divide: Continuity and Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Warfare

Sept. 12th, 2007
University of Reading, UK

Military change in the period 1350-1750, and its effects, are critical to long-standing and on-going debates about the rise of the state; the global ascendancy of the West; and the existence and nature of military revolutions/revolutions in military affairs. However, the history of warfare in this period has generally been approached from either a medieval or an early-modern perspective, leading to substantial confusion over the nature and periodisation of changes (if any). This conference aims to cross the chronological divide between medieval and early-modern, so that elements of continuity and change can be clearly identified. Fourteen scholars from six countries will address nine key thematic areas to assess what changed and what remained the same in the conduct, resourcing and function of warfare between c.1350-1750, in both eastern and western Europe. Speakers include: Matthew Bennett, Clifford Rogers, Louis Sicking, Steven Gunn, Simon Pepper, David Parrott, Rhoads Murphey, Ronald Asch, Jan Glete and John Lynn.

Frank Tallett
University of Reading
Department of History
Whiteknights
Reading RG6 6AA
Phone: ++ (0)118 3788147
Fax: ++ (0)118 3786440
Email: f.tallett@reading.ac.uk

Power

CMRS Conference 2007
Durham University 13th-16th July

How was power exercised, implicitly and explicitly, in the centuries of the medieval and Renaissance eras? How was it displayed and performed, theorised, ritualised, romanticised, codified, sanctified or opposed?

The conference will consider questions such as these in a sequence of interdisciplinary sessions covering the full span of the periods and looking at social contexts ranging from the medieval republic of Iceland to the imperial courts of Renaissance Europe. It will discuss both the typical and the atypical structures of power and ways in which power was embodied in persons and institutions. It will investigate the roles of wealth in the acquisition of power and the maintenance of it. The conference will ask how power was related to knowledge: how it was determined by access to knowledge, how it regulated such access, and how it was challenged by knowledge in its various forms. It will seek to understand the ways in which power was gendered. And it will ask to what extent the realities of power were revealed in literature, historical writing and other cultural products.

Sequential sessions will be organised around five main themes: Representation of Power, Gender and Power, Wealth and Power, Knowledge and Power, Narratives and Power.
If you are interested in contributing to the conference, please send your title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, preferably by attached file, to:

Dr Cathy McClive, CMRS Power Conference 2007
Department of History, University of Durham
43 North Bailey, Durham, DH1 3EX
United Kingdom
cathy.mcclive@durham.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions is 15th September 2006

Renaissance Endings

Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies, Roehampton University
FIFTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE: RENAISSANCE ENDINGS
28 OCTOBER 2006
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: DOMINIC DROMGOOLE

And all our beauty, and our trimme, decayes,
Like courts removing, or like ended playes.
John Donne

Papers are invited for the fifth annual conference of the Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies, Roehampton University, London SW15 5PJ. The conference theme is ‘Renaissance Endings’. Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe and author of Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life (Allen Lane, 2006) will give the Turner Lecture in Renaissance Studies (keynote lecture). Invited speakers will include Christie Carson (Royal Holloway London), Tobias Döring (Ludvig Maximilians University Munich), Gordon McMullan (Kings College London) and Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast).

Papers are invited from academic staff, independent researchers and postgraduate students on the following or related topics:

- Representations of death: epitaphs, funerary arts, relics; Death as spectacle; Death as actor; 'sad stories of the death of kings'

- Textual and theatrical endings: strategies of closure, epilogues, and postscripts; theatrical endings, including final speeches, final silences, final exits; closed and open bodies on the early modern stage

- Avoiding closure: famously unfinished texts; adaptations and sequels; rewriting Shakespearean endings in theatre and film

- Periodicity: 'courts removing'; dynastic endings; the end of the 'Renaissance' (contemporary and modern perspectives)

Interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives will be particularly welcome.

Proposals (250-300 words) for short papers (maximum 2,500 words) should be submitted by 14 August 2006 to Jane Kingsley-Smith (j.kingsley-smith@roehampton.ac.uk). Accepted papers – to be submitted by 18 September – will be circulated by Seminar Chairs before the conference, and participants will be invited to speak briefly to their papers.

For further details including maps and a registration form please go to www.roehampton.ac.uk/renaissance and follow the link to ‘conference’

If you have any queries about the conference or would be interested in chairing a session please write to:
Dr Jane Kingsley-Smith (j.kingsley-smith@roehampton.ac.uk), or
Dr Clare McManus (c.mcmanus@roehampton.ac.uk), or
Professor Robin Headlam Wells (r.headlam_wells@roehampton.ac.uk)

Ethics and the Theory of Comedy in France and Britain, 1660 to 1800

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Atlanta, Georgia, March 22-25, 2007

Three 20-minute papers are sought for a panel on the place of ethics in British and French theories of comedy during the long eighteenth-century. While earlier interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics provided a basis for the period’s discussions of tragedy’s moral force, critics interested in the ethical value of comedy could appeal to no equivalent tradition or founding text. Thus, from the prefaces of Molière and Shadwell, through the polemics of Bossuet and Collier, to the essays of Diderot, Beaumarchais, and Goldsmith, comedy was variously depicted as a corrupter of morality, as an ethically neutral diversion, or as a corrective of ethically questionable behavior. Papers on these critical debates, on individual theoretical positions, or on related theatrical practices are welcome, as are treatments of French, British, and comparative topics.

Please e-mail proposals and brief CVs to Robert Dimit at robert.dimit@nyu.edu no later than September 15. Please include your telephone and fax numbers, and let me know if you will need any audio-visual equipment.

The Society’s rules permit members to present only one paper at the meeting. Members may, in addition to presenting a paper, serve as a session chair, a respondent, or a panel discussant, but they may not present a paper in those sessions they also chair. All participants must be members in good standing of ASECS or a constituent society of ISECS. Membership must be current as of December 1 in order to receive pre-registration materials. Those members of constituent societies of ISECS MUST furnish a snail mail address to asecs@wfu.edu to receive pre-registration materials. For more information, please see http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/2007annualmtg.htm

Dramatic Enactments of Suffering Bodies in Restoration England

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
38th Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia
March 22-25, 2007

Deadline for Submissions: September 15, 2006

This seminar seeks papers that explore dramatic representations of suffering bodies during the period of the Restoration, with a particular focus on the ways in which suffering bodies are situated as martyrs, scapegoats, or victims of political plots. Papers that address theatrical productions including scenes of mutilation or decollation are welcome, in addition to papers about scaffold dramas, public executions, and other forms of public spectacle as performance. Papers that investigate how suffering bodies proved pleasurable sights on either the Restoration stage or in “public” proceedings are especially desired.

One- to two-page proposals and a brief CV should be sent by e-mail to Misty Krueger at mkrueger@utk.edu.

CULTURAL INTERACTIONS: AUSTRALASIA, THE OLD AND NEW WORLDS

The next Conference of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) will be held in Sydney, University of New South Wales, February 5-9, 2007: 'Cultural Interactions: Australasia, the Old and New Worlds'.

Our two early modern plenary speakers, Professor Jean Howard and Professor Jonathan Gil Harris, will also be moderating two sessions each in their areas of research interest: 'Staging Social Struggle' and 'Staging Diseases and Foreign Bodies'. (There are also two plenaries outside the early modern field: Professor Bob Hodge and Professor Deirdre Coleman, who are moderating sessions in their research areas - see website for details.)

Delegates are invited to submit 20-minute papers to these special sessions if they wish, or simply to submit to the open program. For more details on submission and registration details, please go to the AULLA website:
http://aulla.english.arts.unsw.edu.au/

"The Social Spectacle"

Call for Papers

The 28th annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum at Plymouth State University, April 27th and 28th, 2007.

Sessions not necessarily limited to the central topic. Proposals for papers/sessions due Jan. 15, 2007.

For full information, call for papers, registration, see http://www.plymouth.edu/medieval

and/or contact
Dr. Naomi Kline
Art Department MSC 21,
Plymouth State University,
Plymouth, New Hampshire 03264

or e-mail: nkline@mail.plymouth.edu.

John Milton

This panel invites papers on any aspect of the works of John Milton. Send one-page abstracts to Wm Moeck, English Dept., Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY 11530 (or moeckw@ncc.edu)

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. For more information its March 2007 conference in Baltimore, Maryland please visit the following site:

http://www.nemla.org/index.html

Science and Nature in Early Modern Europe - El Escorial, Madrid

International Conference: September 2008

At San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Philip II planned a monument that would perpetuate his glory for centuries. A church for God. A monastery for the Jeronymite order. A palace for the king. A tomb for the Royal Spanish dynasty. A temple for science. It is this last aspect that, unfortunately, has received the least historical attention over the years. This temple of science hosted during the final decades of the sixteenth century some of the most advanced chemical practitioners in Early Modern Europe in its pharmacy and distillation laboratory.

The monastery/palace of El Escorial will serve as a backdrop and co-host of this international conference on science and nature in Early Modern Europe. The conference seeks to bring together Spanish and international scholars of science to discuss several topics, including the role of Alchemy from recent historical perspectives.

... details at http://www.revistaazogue.com/conference/presentation.htm

Renaissance Drama in Action

8-12 November 2006
University of Toronto

Shakespeare Bulletin, a journal for the study of renaissance drama in performance, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is pleased to announce the RENAISSANCE DRAMA IN ACTION conference, to be held November 8-12, 2006 on the University of Toronto campus.

RENAISSANCE DRAMA IN ACTION will give scholars interested in performance an opportunity to grapple with the practical realities of moving from the page to the stage. Conference participants will sign up for a rehearsal-and-performance workshop. Each workshop will focus on a single scene from a play, one which exemplifies particular problems, challenges, and/or rewards involved in staging renaissance drama. Workshop leaders will communicate with workshop participants well in advance of the conference to outline a plan for pre-conference research, and in-conference rehearsal and presentation. Each workshop presentation will be followed by seminar-style discussion. No acting experience is expected or required. Please do not send abstracts: there will be no presentations of scholarly papers outside of the workshops and keynote speeches.

The conference will also feature keynote presentations by Ralph Alan Cohen (Mary Baldwin College and the American Shakespeare Center), Helen Ostovich (McMaster University), and Paul Yachnin (McGill University). It will conclude with a fully staged theatrical production of Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour.
For additional information, please contact Prof. Jeremy Lopez: jeremy.lopez@utoronto.ca

Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene

5–7 October 2006.

"The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Renaissance," sponsored by Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff.

Contact: Anne Scott, Dept. of English, Northern Arizona State Univ., Flagstaff AZ 86011 (Anne.Scott@nau.edu).

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Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association Conference

The 2007 RMMRA Conference will be held in conjunction with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference at Arizona State University, 15-17 February 2007.

ACMRS and RMMRA invite session and paper proposals for their joint annual interdisciplinary conferences to be held 15 - 17 February 2007 at the Fiesta Inn Resort in Tempe, Arizona. We welcome papers that explore any topic related to the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and especially those that focus on this year's theme of masculinities and femininities, both in their literal and metaphorical manifestations.

Selected papers related to the conference theme will be considered for publication in the conference volume of the Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance series, published by Brepols Publishers (Belgium).

The conference keynote speaker will be Valerie Traub, Professor of English and Women's Studies and Director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Among her many publications are Gay Shame, ed. with David Halperin (forthcoming University of Chicago Press), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. with M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge Press, 1992).

Before the conference, ACMRS will host a workshop on manuscript studies to be led by Timothy Graham, Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico. The workshop will be Thursday afternoon, February 15, and the limited number of participants will be determined by the order in which registrations are received. Email acmrs@asu.edu with "conference workshop" as the subject line to be added to the list. The cost of the workshop is $15 and is in addition to the regular conference registration fee.

The conference registration fee is $85 ($45 for students) and includes welcoming and farewell receptions, two days of concurrent sessions (Friday and Saturday), and keynote address. Please note that there will be an opening reception Thursday evening, but there will be no sessions that day.

The deadline for proposals is 5:00 pm Mountain Standard Time on 15 October 2006. Proposals must include audio/visual requirements and any other special requests. Subsequent a/v requests may not be honored without additional charge.

In order to streamline the committee review process, submissions will only be accepted at http://link.library.utoronto.ca/acmrs/conference/ from 28 July through 15 October 2006.

Questions? Call 480-965-9323 or email acmrs@asu.edu.

Representing the Renaissance in Modern Popular Culture

Research Seminar: Shakespeare Association of America, San Diego, CA, April 5-7, 2007
Call for Papers.

Given the proliferation of work on Shakespeare and popular culture in recent years, we might be surprised to discover that relatively little work has been done either on popular engagements of the Renaissance - as an imagined historical period, culture, or concept - popular adaptations of non-Shakespearean Renaissance texts. Rather than focusing on how particular literary texts or characters (Hamlet or Hamlet) are engaged in popular culture, this seminar will encourage participants to think about how the very concept of "Renaissance" is adapted, appropriated, perpetuated, or transformed by modern popular cultural texts of various kinds.

How is sixteenth-century London depicted, for instance, in works as different as Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, or the BBC Rowan Atkinson vehicle, Black Adder, and what does a specific genre or form of media have to do with it? How are largely period-specific concepts such as Reformation or humanism communicated visually or even musically to modern audiences? In what ways have popular adaptations of Shakespeare's plays - say, Zefferelli's comedies or Welles' tragedies - served to inform or infect wider popular ideas about what the Renaissance was actually like? And how have these popular notions about the Renaissance, in turn, affected, limited, or enabled our teaching, and our students' learning, about early modern literature and/or history? Studies are invited that address questions such as these, as well as others that consider how Renaissance is taken up by film, television, pop music, advertising, popular literature, and the popular visual arts.

Seminar Leader: Greg Colon Semenza, University of Connecticut
Format: Registrants in SAA research seminars are expected to complete significant work in advance of the meeting: research papers, common readings, and bibliographic compilation. Seminars are appropriate for college and university faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students in the later stages of their doctoral work.

Register for this seminar and become a member of SAA online at:
http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/

Please email inquiries to semenza@uconn.edu.

Call For Papers: Early Modern Drama and the Middle Ages

Although panels on Shakespeare and the Middle Ages are not new to Kalamazoo, we see a need for a panel that addresses even more extensively the recent investigations of some medievalists and early modernists into the many intersections between the Middle Ages and early modern period. Papers should speak to the way in which early modern drama, including but not limited to Shakespeare, tends to incorporate and deploy conventions from various medieval sources and genres, including drama. Possible areas of interest include the influence of medieval texts and conventions on, for example, Shakespeare's history plays, or on early modern so-called morality plays, such as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. How they and other early modern dramatists speak to and speak about the Middle Ages occasions a discussion of periodization, which is fast becoming a key area of both medieval and early modern scholarship. Papers that examine periodization, as well as focus on more particular investigations of textual relationships, are encouraged.

Please submit abstracts of not more than 250 words via email (in the body of the text) to Robyn Malo-Johnston and Marisa Cull
Email: rmmc.osu_at_gmail.com
Deadline for abstract submission: 18 September, 2006

Call For Papers: Spenser at Kalamazoo

Three sessions on Edmund Spenser
42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

10-13 May 2007

Abstracts may be submitted on any topic dealing with Spenser. Especially welcome this year are papers on Spenser's shorter poems and papers on Spenser and periodization (e.g., Spenser and Elizabethan medievalism, Spenser and the 1590s, etc.). As always, we encourage submissions by newcomers and by established scholars of all ranks.

Reading time for papers should be no more than twenty minutes. According to rules established by the Congress, those submitting abstracts for one session may not submit abstracts for other sessions in the same year. Because Kalamazoo has traditionally encouraged experiment, preliminary exploration, and discussion, papers submitted should not have been read elsewhere nor be scheduled for publication in the near future.

Email submissions are encouraged. Please include home and office phone numbers, complete mailing address, and e-mail address along with your attachment. If you need equipment, let us know now when you submit the abstract.

Minimum length of abstract: 300 words. Maximum length: 750 words.

Deadline: 15 September 2006.

Please direct questions and abstracts to:

David Scott Wilson-Okamura
Department of English
Bate Building 2201
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858

email and phone:
david@virgil.org
252-328-6714 (office)

Organizing Committee for Spenser at Kalamazoo:
Clare Kinney, University of Virginia
William Oram, Smith College
Ted Steinberg, SUNY Fredonia
Beth Quitslund, Ohio University
David Scott Wilson-Okamura, East Carolina University (chair)

For complete conference Call for Papers, see:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

Renaissance England’s Staging of the Middle Ages

Currently seeking papers for this special session for the 42nd International Congress in Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 10-13, 2007).

The influence of the Middle Ages on Renaissance drama has long been recognized, but much of the influential scholarship is overdue for reconsideration, and has overwhelmingly been conducted from the point of view of Renaissance studies. James Simpson’s chapter on drama in his Reform and Cultural Revolution begins to redress the latter concern. Following his lead, this panel will seek studies of the depiction of the medieval world on the Renaissance stage in England, with emphasis on themes of continuity and conscious periodization. Suggested topics will include (but not be limited to) religious, political, social, gender, audience, and performance issues.

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words along with a brief cover letter to:

John P. Sexton
University of Connecticut, Medieval Studies Department
Box U-4025
Storrs, CT 06269
john.sexton@uconn.edu

THE READING EXPERIENCE DATABASE (RED) 1450-1945

RE-LAUNCH

Following a successful AHRC funding bid, the Reading Experience Database (RED) is moving into a new phase of development. We aim, over the next three years, to build up a collection of more than 25,000 sources of reading experience. By this we mean descriptions of reading by actual readers found in sources such as diaries, journals, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, commonplace books, interviews and so on. By the end of the first year (summer, 2007), RED will be live and fully searchable on the internet, covering the period 1450- 1945.

But RED will only ever be as good as the material that goes into it. And this is where the wider community of scholars and researchers comes in. If, in the course of your own research, you come across a description of reading from any historical period between 1450 and 1945 (and this can be as cursory as, for example, finding a simple record of an identifiable reader having read a particular book, or as extensive as finding a whole page of comments by an identifiable reader on the practice of reading, or a whole diary which records a person's thoughts on what they read every day), please make a note of it, and pass on that information to us: Katie Halsey (Katie.Halsey@sas.ac.uk) or Rosalind Crone (R.H.Crone@open.ac.uk).

Even better, please fill in one of our forms yourself with the information. The forms come in two types: short and long. They are on our website: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/, and there are guidelines: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/notes.htm for filling them in. If you would prefer hard copies, please contact Katie or Rosalind (details below).

Anyone interested in working on a particular individual who lived in or visited Britain during the period 1450 -1945 and who left letters, diaries, annotated books, autobiographies etc. which contain references to their reading of English texts should also get in touch with us. RED is looking for volunteers to work their way systematically through such materials in order to record evidence of reading.

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/