'Censorship, Persecution and Resistance in Marian England'

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Newham College, Cambridge, 12-14 April 2007.
DEADLINE: 11 December 2006.

Proposals in the form of a 300 word abstract should be sent to Dr Elizabeth Evenden, Newnham College, Cambridge. CB3 9DF or via email to ee236@cam.ac.uk.

Questioning Renaissance Pieties

Call for Papers

***A Graduate Conference Hosted by Princetonís Renaissance Studies Program***
4th-5th May, 2007

Keynote Speaker: Nigel Smith, Department of English, Princeton University

This conference takes as its theme the various permutations of piety in the early modern period, considering piety not only in a doctrinal but also in a political and/or cultural context. The early modern individual is implicated in a web of complex and often conflicting dutiesóto God, to the sovereign, to parents, neighbors, intellectual communities, and country. Thus, while the conventional deployment of notions of piety seems to invoke a vision of a stable, harmonious order, it also offers a rubric under which that order may ultimately be problematized or subverted.

Thus, we hope to explore the notion of multiple pieties across the disciplines of Renaissance studies, from poetics to theology to political theory. How might ideas of Renaissance piety be complicated by the invocation of classical antiquity? That is, how might pietas manipulate a polysemous existence, operating in a Christian sense while maintaining a relation to antiquity? How does the contested nature of individual piety map onto broader Renaissance debates about the relation between faith and works, body and spirit, liberty and authority, order and disorder? Moreover, how has the relation between such ìpietiesî informed the evolution of the studia humanitatis in the early modern period? We also encourage papers that reflect on the contemporary academic context: how,for instance, might current scholarly and critical practices be shaped by pieties and impieties of our own?

Possible topics include:
* Antiquity in the early modern period; history-writing and changing notions of the past
* Renaissance confessional struggles (e.g. Tridentine censorship, conscience and conformity, resistance theory)
* Transgressive poetics (e.g. debates on Neo-Aristotelianism, canon formation, chivalric romance)
* Canons of representation in the visual arts
* Youth, age and authority; generational relationships and the domestic sphere
* Gender and class roles; hierarchy, deference and decorum
* The legitimation of vernaculars
* Devotional practices and the place of religious ceremony
* History of the book and material culture (Ramism, antiquarianism, censorship and publication practices)
* Neo-Platonism, influences and reactions (e.g. Savonarola)
* Reception of the Renaissance in succeeding centuries
* Critical methodologies, historiography, and disciplinary histories

The conference will combine traditional panel sessions with less structured workshops dedicated to examining particular texts and/or objects. We seek papers of no more than fifteen to twenty minutes employing any of a variety of methodologies, including historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.

Abstracts of not more than 350 words should be submitted via email to renaiss@princeton.edu.

The deadline for all submissions is Friday, January 19th 2007.

Any questions should be directed to Alana Shilling, ashillin@princeton.edu, or Lisa Wilde, lwilde@princeton.edu.

Intercrural Sex

Friday, December 1, CUNY Graduate Center

Will Fisher (English/Lehman College, CUNY), "'Wantoning with the Thighs': Intercrural Sex in Early Modern English Culture"

2:00-4:00pm, Room 5414
Sponsored by the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group

For more information, please contact Professor Martin Elsky, 212-817-8586, MElsky@gc.cuny.edu. The CUNY Graduate Center is located at: 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016.

Seventeenth Century British Culture

CALL FOR PAPERS

This is an open session on Seventeenth Century British Culture at the 2007 RMMLA conference, to be held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The conference will run from 4 October to 6 October 2007. Papers should emphasize the popular culture of the period.

Send a 200 word abstract to Daniel Gustav Anderson at andersdg at uidaho.edu by 1 March 2007 for consideration.

Hard copies of submissions may be sent to:

Anderson
Dept. of English 1102
University of Idaho
Moscow, ID 83844-1102

Details can be found at www.rmmla.org.

Rabelais

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Rabelais

For the series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, the Publications Committee of the MLA has approved development of the title Approaches to Teaching the Works of Rabelais, ed. Floyd Gray and Todd W. Reeser.

As with all the titles in this book series, the MLA would be grateful for responses to a brief questionnaire that focuses on your experience teaching Rabelais in any kind of course, whether in French or in translation. The published volume will acknowledge all respondents. The last section of the survey asks about your possible interest in contributing an essay to the volume.

If you are interested, please email Todd Reeser at reeser@pitt.edu, who will forward you the questionnaire. Questionnaires need to be completed by February 1, 2007.

Seven Weeks in Shakespeare's Life

A talk by by James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, at The Hunter College Graduate English Club, Tuesday, December 12, 7:30 p.m.
8th Floor Faculty Dining Room, Hunter West

1599 was no ordinary year. In the course of these twelve months Elizabethans dispatched an army 16,000-strong to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered a terrifying Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless Queen. It was also the year that the Globe Theater was built, and one in which Shakespeare completed Henry the Fifth, wrote Julius Caesar, and As You Like It in quick succession, then drafted Hamlet.

Professor Shapiro's talk focuses on what Shakespeare did as the year began. In offering this slice of a writerís life, it situates Shakespeare in time and place, exploring the art, books and even sermons that inspired him, the venues at which he performed, and the contemporary preoccupations that fueled his work as he was finishing Henry the Fifth.

Professor Shapiro is author of Shakespeare and the Jews (Columbia UP 1997) and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Harper Collins 2005).

Reception to follow
For an ASL interpreter and to RSVP, please contact Lindy Kosmitis, lkosmit@hunter.cuny.edu

Law, Literature and Philosophy

Beyond Reasonable Doubt‚: Conversations in Law, Literature and Philosophy from the Reformation to the Present Day
7th - 9th September 2007
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Convenors: Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji, Jan-Melissa Schramm

This conference aims to bring scholars of literature, law and philosophy into interdisciplinary conversation. In the course of the last three decades, legal practitioners, literary critics, jurists and philosophers have found in this dialogue an enriched vocabulary for the exploration of their own particular interests. Ambitious and visionary research has been undertaken which has advanced our understanding of topics as disparate as the history of the novel, censorship, blasphemy, plagiarism, hermeneutic theory, and the rhetorical manipulation of narrative within the courtroom.

We are inviting papers on any aspect of the intersection of these discourses, including papers that might address some of the following topics:

- evidence, interpretation, judgment

- the role of doubt and scepticism in critical enquiry

- casuistry, rhetoric, persuasion, ethics

- legal and poetic fictions

- equity

- the role of narrative jurisprudence

- testimony, confession, autobiography

- contract, agency and intentionality

- methodological issues: the value of interdisciplinarity

- censorship, blasphemy, plagiarism and intellectual property

- gender, sexuality, law and ethics

- human, divine and natural law

Recent events in European political and public life have given these sub-themes an enhanced profile which demands further interdisciplinary investigation. ŒBeyond Reasonable Doubt‚ seeks to bring together representatives and practitioners from each of the three disciplines to probe and interrogate such questions as the relationship of text, image and action, and the epistemological and ontological foundations of knowledge and judgment.

Plenary speakers currently include John Bender, Peter Brooks, Leo Damrosch, Kathy Eden, Lorna Hutson, Ian Ward and Luke Wilson.

Call for Papers: Abstracts of no more than 500 words are invited, to be submitted no later than 1 February 2007. Please email abstracts to one of the following:

Yota Batsaki: pb324@cam.ac.uk

Subha Mukherji: sm10014@cam.ac.uk

Jan-Melissa Schramm: js10032@cam.ac.uk

The Art of Dying

London Renaissance Seminar, Saturday 2 December, 2-5 p.m.
(coffee available from 1.30 p.m, drinks after.)
Room 152, Malet Street, Birkbeck College, London WC1

Jenny Mayhew (Oxford Brookes University), Cure for the Fear of Death'? Godly preparations for the Last Combat

Louise Durning (Oxford Brookes University), On the threshold of eternal life: Paratextual strategies in the English renaissance funeral monument

Peter Marshall (Warwick University), Angels at the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in Reformation England

Chair: Ralph Houlbrooke (Reading University)

For further information contact: Michelle O‚Callaghan, m.f.ocallaghan@reading.ac.uk

Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe

Call for Papers: An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara

March 9-10. 2007

What were early modern publics? How were they formed? What needs did they serve for those who participated in them And how did they relate to the emergence of a cultural formation that we recognize as distinctly early modern? These are among the questions we seek to address in this conference.

We invite paper proposals from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives that either examine particular instances of publics and their formation or address the broader, more theoretical issues raised by this wide-spread and under-studied phenomenon. If new media and the markets through which their products were made available led to new forms of voluntary association and identity, as they surely did, how can we best describe the workings of that process and what significance should we ascribe to it? How, in short, did the publics for playgoing, for natural history, for madrigal singing, for
antiquarian scholarship, for amateur drawing, for geographical learning, and for dozens of other voluntary activities come into being? And what does it mean for a society when such groups grow and proliferate?

This conference is being organized in conjunction with the collaborative and interdisciplinary "Making Publics" project centered at McGill University and funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (www.makingpublics.mcgill.ca). The limit dates of the McGill project are 1500-1700. Given the mission of the Early Modern Center at UC Santa Barbara, we are extending the second of those dates to 1800. This not only opens the way for the inclusion of specifically eighteenth-century publics, but also invites consideration of the relation between the multiple publics we examine and the Habermasian "public sphere" that has long been a focus of intense attention in eighteenth-century studies. Is the existence of multiple publics a precondition for the emergence of a public sphere? Or have they some more complex relation to one another?

Keynote speakers include Michael Warner, English, Rutgers University; David Harris Sacks, History, Reed College; Ann Bermingham, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara; and Lesley Cormack, History and Classics, University of Alberta.

Abstracts and c.v.'s should be sent to EMCConference2007@gmail.com by December 1, 2006.We hope to complete the program and notify applicants no later than December 8, 2006.

Proposals for fifteen to twenty-minute papers should be 300 words or less.

Find out more about our conference at
http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/conferences/2006-2007

SHAKESPEARE ON FILM AND TELEVISION

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Send proposal and brief CV by December 1, 2006.

To Complete a Panel: Need papers on "Bollywood Shakespeare" or "Shakespeare
in India" -- possible films include Shakespeare Walla (1965), Kaliyattam
(1997), Maqbool (2003), and Omkara (2006).

New Area Added: A panel on Metatheatrical Shakespeare, to include films in
which the characters put on a Shakespeare play. Examples include: A Double
Life (1947), To Be or Not To Be (1942), Kiss Me Kate (1953), Shakespeare
Walla (1965), Theatre of Blood (1973), Renaissance Man (1994), Dead Poets
Society (1989), A Midwinter's Tale (1995), Shakespeare in Love (1998), The
King is Alive (2000), Get Over It! (2001), and Stage Beauty (2004).

Still Accepting Proposals for: SHAKESPEARE ON FILM AND TELEVISION Proposal
Deadline: December 1, 2006

The Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Associations 28th Annual
Conference Albuquerque, NM, February 14-17, 2007

The 2007 SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference will once again be held in beautiful
Albuquerque, NM, at the Hyatt Regency downtown. We have kept hotel rates
low, and graduate student rates are even lower. Join us this year, as a
returning or first-time participant, as we celebrate a new future on Route
66 at this popular cultural conference. Further details regarding the
conference (listing all areas, hotel, registration, tours, etc.) can be
found at

Proposals are being accepted for the Shakespeare on Film and Television
Areas.
All topics are welcome. Of particular interest are papers on the following
topics:
* What is a Shakespeare Adaptation?
* Shakespeare and the genre film
* Shakespeare set in another time
* Welles and Shakespeare Reconsidered
* Shakespeare and the Auteur
* Acting Shakespeare
* Shakespeare in Foreign Film
* Shakespeare in Silent Film
* Shakespeare in the Sit-com
* Political Shakespeare Adaptations
* Transgressive Shakespeare Adaptations
* Apocalyptic Shakespeare
* Shakespeare and Sexuality
* Shakespeare's Families
* Shakespeare: Additions and Omissions
* But is it Shakespeare?
* The Future of Shakespeare Adaptation

Please send a 250 word proposal and a brief CV by December 1, 2006 to:
Richard Vela, Area Chair
Shakespeare on Film and Television
richard.vela@uncp.edu

REGISTRATION: All participants MUST register online at the SW/TX website as
soon as papers are accepted. Those registering before December 15, 2006 will
receive a reduced early-bird rate. Please note that the absolute deadline
for registration is December 31, 2006. All registration information and
forms are available at

Shakespeare for Children

The Editors of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation are delighted to announce the launch of issue 2.1, Shakespeare for Children, at http://www.borrowers.uga.edu (click the "Current Issue" button on the left-hand menu bar, or go directly to the Table of Contents at http://atropos.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/current_index).

Borrowers and Lenders is a peer-reviewed, online, multimedia Shakespeare journal that was launched in 2005. The journal appears biannually, with a special issue in the Spring/Summer and general issue in the Fall/Winter. B&L is indexed in the MLA Bibliography, World Shakespeare Bibliograpy, and other databases, and belongs to the CELJ. For readers' convenience, we provide .pdf versions of the text of our articles, although copyright and technical restrictions compel us to display multimedia (pictures, film clips, sound clips, PowerPoint presentations, maps, etc.) online only. Our archive is available at http://atropos.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/archive .

Issue 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2006) is a special issue, Shakespeare for Children. It includes Sheila Cavanagh on cognition and crushes in Romeo and Juliet for children; Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Agata Zarzycka on Shakespearean Live-Action Role-Playing Games; Darlene Ciraulo and Daniel Schierenbeck on fraternal and sororal education in the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare and Poetry for Children; Angela Keam on "Shakesteen" movies and the star-body of Claire Danes; Erica Hateley on the mermaid/Miranda metaphor in children's literature; and reviews of the Folger's exhibition on Shakespeare for Children and Georgia Shakespeare's "Boot Camp Shakespeare" for preschoolers. This issue also includes a special review cluster, edited by Alice Dailey, on Quinnopolis vs. Hamlet at the 2006 Shakespeare Association of America, and reviews of books on Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Calls for Papers

The editors of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation welcome original scholarship engaging with the afterlives of Shakespearean texts and their literary, filmic, multimedia, and critical histories. We encourage contributors to use the online format to its best advantage, in particular, by imagining how to enhance, illustrate, or extend their essays with multimedia (screen captures, sound clips, images, and so on).

Currently we solicit essays, book reviews, accounts of Appropriation in Performance, essay-clusters, and new discoveries for upcoming general and special issues. Future special issues include Canadian Shakespeares (2007, guest editor Daniel Fischlin), and Shakespeare and Actors of Color (2008, guest editor Ayanna Thompson). We welcome suggestions for themes for special issues.

We accept submissions for general issues year-round, and are also currently accepting essays for our upcoming special issue, Shakespeare and Actors of Color, B&L 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2008), guest-edited by Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University. This special edition of Borrowers and Lenders seeks to examine the use of actors of color in contemporary Shakespeare productions. We welcome essays that address such questions as: How does Shakespeare's cultural capital inform the desire to employ actors of color in modern productions? How do Shakespearean productions complicate and/or ameliorate anxieties about the significance of race vis--vis color in performance? Is there a relationship between the employment of actors of color and the desire to adapt Shakespeare's plays politically, culturally, and/or socially? Please send essays by electronic mail to ayanna.thompson@asu.edu by May 1, 2007.

MOMENT TO MONUMENT

Renewed Call for Papers

Conference at The English Department of Basel University (Switzerland), May 31-June 2, 2007

Keynote speakers:
Aleida Assmann (Univ. of Konstanz)
Pter Dvidhzi (Lornd Etvs University, Budapest)
David Morley (Goldsmiths College, Univ. of London)
Ann Thompson (King's College, Univ. of London)

MOMENT TO MONUMENT
From the momentary event in time to the seemingly timeless monumental presence and back to oblivion: the ways in which cultural memories are produced, transformed and lost, turning space into time and time into space, have been observed in many areas. Inquiries into literature, architecture, the visual and performing arts, the media and the everyday have frequently focused on the problem of monuments, canons and myths and their legitimization. The need to reform them is increased and complicated by revolutionized communication processes, the global dimensions of mass media and the different meanings which concepts such as 'community', 'identity' and 'belonging' are acquiring through (post)modern transformations of space and time. These shifts raise the interest of research that does not just discuss canons as desirable or undesirable givens, but also the processes by which changes have taken place and can be brought about. William Shakespeare's works and the figure of their author are a particularly striking example.

Questions that need to be addressed include:
How do everyday objects or works of art achieve cultural significance for a community?
How do they lose it? How, for example, can works considered classics disappear from the canon?
What kind of performative practices (ritual or other) are involved in this process?
Why would some works of art lend themselves better to monumentalization than others?
Are there periods in history that stimulate or facilitate monumentalization?
How do writers/artists take into account the phenomenon of monumentalization, resisting or pursuing it?
In how far has the media revolution changed our sense of belonging to places and traditions?
How does mobility affect the relationship between the global and the local?

We are interested in proposals for 20-minute papers that offer case-studies trying to establish general patterns.

The conference convenors:
Ladina Bezzola Lambert
Andrea Ochsner
Regula Hohl Trillini

Proposals, not exceeding 500 words, along with a brief biographical note, should be sent by 1 December 2006 in the body of an email to:

Dr. Regula Hohl Trillini
Department of English, Basel University, Switzerland
Email r.hohl@unibas.ch
www.unibas.ch/anglist

PRISON WRITINGS IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN

CALL FOR PAPERS

Plenary Speakers: Rivkah Zim, Jerome de Groot, Molly Murray and Penry Williams

A conference sponsored by the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies
King’s Manor, University of York
23-24 July 2007

There has been a growing awareness—among scholars of both literature and history—of the close and complex relationship between writing and imprisonment in early modern Britain (from Thomas More to John Bunyan). A surprising number of authors experienced imprisonment of one sort or another, and prisons and prisoners figure prominently in the period’s textual record: prison played a decisive role in the careers of individual authors and in the development of particular genres. There have been some useful case studies of individual texts and authors, but we have barely begun to map the field and compare notes between the disciplines and across the centuries.

We invite proposals for papers of 20 to 30 minutes on any aspect of this broad and neglected subject, and we welcome your participation as we take stock of what is known and set an agenda for future scholarship. Among the questions we hope to explore are:

* Which genres of writing (or compiling, speaking, drawing, etc.) were associated with prison? What kinds of writing survive (diaries, letters both from and to prison, petitions, fictional representations)?
* What were the different kinds of prisons (actual and virtual; foreign and domestic; national and local; those for criminals, debtors, and prisoners of conscience) and did they generate different kinds of writing?
* How did early modern writers figure their experiences—as periods of deprivation and exile? as laborious journeys or painful pilgrimages? as opportunities for regeneration?
* How did early modern writers draw on earlier tropes, genres and paradigms, and what use (if any) do later writers make of the early modern tradition?
* What kinds of essay collections and editions of primary texts would best serve this subject?

Please send proposals to one or both of the conference organisers: William H. Sherman, Department of English (ws505@york.ac.uk), William J. Sheils, Department of History (wjs4@york.ac.uk)

For more information on the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies please see our website (www.york.ac.uk/crems).

Eary Modern Alcohol

FROM: The Independent, 18 November 2006

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/food_and_drink/news/article1993588.ece

*Canary Malmsey set for return after 300 years*
By Cahal Milmo

For decades, the words "Lanzarote" and "alcohol" have conjured up images little more glamorous than British tourists enjoying copious quantities of lager.

Now the government of the Canary Islands is hoping to project a different image of the sun-kissed Spanish outpost by resurrecting the fortunes of a wine whose qualities were once lauded by Shakespeare and reputedly drowned the brother of a medieval English king.

Malmsey (known as "Canary" in Elizabethan England), a sweet fortified wine made on the islands since the 15th century, was the drink of choice on the British Isles for aristocrats, writers and merchants for more than 150 years, until the trade suddenly ended in the 1680s.

The name Malmsey is now associated by most people with Madeira, where it is produced using the same grapes. But a small group of Canary Islands producers are determined to reverse that trend, and gathered this week in London to try to persuade retailers and restaurateurs to once more stock the wine that inspired Shakespeare to write in Henry IV: "You have drunk too much Canaries, and that's a Marvellous searching wine."

Felix Garcia, international director of Proexca, the state-owned Canary Islands' export agency, said: "We have more than five million tourists a year who come here but few leave the islands knowing about Malmsey.

"We have concentrated for a long time as an island on tourism. Now it is time to expand on some of our other strengths. Britain is one of the oldest markets for this wine and we want to restore that link.

"The UK is probably the most sophisticated wine market in the world. Consumers here have a choice of almost every wine and it is very competitive. But we believe we have a very special product that should again be available here and prosper."

Malmsey, which is made from the malvasia grape grown on the slopes surrounding resorts on Lanzarote, La Palma and Tenerife, is thought to have originated in Ancient Greece. It accounts for just 15 per cent of the 14 million litres of wine currently produced on the islands. Its production remains largely artisanal, with small co-operatives and family-owned farms producing 2.7 million bottles a year. By comparison, the annual production of sherry is 120 million bottles.

The Canaries, which are off north-west Africa, managed to carry on producing Malmsey because the islands' isolated position protected vineyards from phylloxera, the lethal fungus which devastated most of mainland Europe's vines in the 19th century.

The wine is thought to have reached British shores in the late 15th century. By legend, George of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, was drowned in a barrel of Malmsey in 1478 after plotting to overthrow the king.

An accident of geography gave towns on Tenerife such as Lanzarote the perfect micro-climate to produce the wine and then export it via trade routes to the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1570, London was importing 20 million litres of Malmsey each year, making the rich dark liquor a favourite in drinking houses and the royal court.

The flourishing Anglo-Spanish trade was brought to an abrupt end in 1666 when islanders rebelled against the dominance of the London-based Canary Island Company, which had a monopoly on exports. When producers expressed their discontent by smashing barrels so that Malmsey flowed in the streets, Britain retaliated by banning the wine and swapped to the Portuguese rival, Madeira.

Clearly the nine Malmsey co-operatives taking part in the scheme are aiming for a discerning clientele. The average price for a bottle of the dessert wine is expected to be about 20.

[Shameless self-promotional plug: see Adam Smyth (ed), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in C17 England (2004) ...]

Sir Thomas Browne

Authority and Authorities in Thomas Browne and His Contemporaries: A Symposium
Call for Papers
Saturday 21st April 2007, University of Leeds

This day-long symposium will examine how early modern writers - especially but not exclusively those involved in natural philosophy - claim, invoke, construe, query or undermine authority and authorities. This is the second session of the 'Thomas Browne Seminar', but papers are by no means confined to Browne's works. In particular, we hope to encourage papers on the following:

* the establishment of 'scientific' authority;
* classical and/or biblical literature as sources of authority - or otherwise;
* the development of an authoritative, 'scientific', style.

Contact: Kevin Killeen (k.j.killeen@leeds.ac.uk) or Karen Edwards (K.L.Edwards@exeter.ac.uk)

For details of the first Thomas Browne Seminar, see www.bbk.ac.uk/english/tbs

Shakespeare in American Education, 1607-1934

How did Shakespeare's plays become an integral component of America's cultural literacy, its moral education, its civic formation? What exemplary Shakespeares have American classrooms created, for what purposes, and at what cross-purposes? Were there different Shakespeares for different students? What are the records that scholars need to tell the history of teaching Shakespeare in America and where are they found?

Please encourage those interested in these questions to attend "Shakespeare in American Education, 1607-1934," a conference to be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library on 16 and 17 March 2007. Thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Barnes & Noble, Simon & Schuster, W.W. Norton, and Mr. Morrison Webb, travel and lodging grants are available by application for faculty, graduate students, educators, independent scholars, and museum and library professionals. The application deadline for these grants is 3 January 2007; registration deadline is 15 February 2007.

Visit www.folger.edu/institute/conference2007 for a conference schedule, speakers' abstracts, and application (and registration) materials. Send any questions to institute@folger.edu.

Romeo and Juliet and Sex

A lecture by Stanley Wells, at 4:30pm on Monday November 20th, in the UCL English department, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT (tel. 020 7679 2567)

Reading the Heroides in the Renaissance

The London Renaissance Seminar will host the second Heroides conference on 18 November 2006 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1. Room 152.

Participants should come to Reception at the Birkbeck Main Building in Malet Street and the seminar will be signed from there.

12.30-1.00pm registration

1.00-2.30pm
James Harmer, Spenser and the Heroides
Raphael Lyne, Intertextuality and Intersubjectivity in and after the Heroides

2.45-3.45
Harriette Andreadis, The Early Modern Afterlife of Ovidian Erotics: Marlowe, Dryden, and the Heroides

Tea

4.15-5.45
Alison Thorne, 'Large complaints in little papers': negotiating Ovidian ideologies of complaint in Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles
Danielle Clarke, 'Ovid's Heroides and the Articulate Feminine'

Drinks

Enquiries to Sue Wiseman, s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk

Queen Elizabeth I

CALL FOR PAPERS: FOUR OPEN SESSIONS Organized by the THE QUEEN ELIZABETH I SOCIETY
Held in Conjunction with Exploring the Renaissance 2007: An International Conference Sponsored by Our Lady of the Lake University

St. Antony Hotel in downtown San Antonio
March 8-10, 2007

Keynote Speakers:
Janel Mueller, "Elizabeth I's Translations"
Retha Warnicke, Elizabeth I and Mary Stewart: Two British Queens Regnant"
Debra Barrett-Graves, "Elizabeth I and Court Display"

Suggested Topics: the art, architecture, history, literature, politics, and music of the court of Elizabeth, particularly as these relate to the Queen.

Deadline: 400-500 word abstract by December 1, 2006.
Agnes Strickland Prize for the best essay.
For more information on QEIS and its activities, visit our website at www.stedwards.edu/hum/klawitter/elizabeth-society/elizabeth.html
Submitting an abstract: All abstracts must be submitted online. Go to the South Central Renaissance Conference website at the address below. Click on "Submit an Abstract." Then check the QEIS box and enter all the required information. Finally, send a brief email giving the title of the paper and the date you submitted the abstract to the President of QEIS, Donald Stump (stump@slu.edu). Papers are limited to minutes reading time. South Central Renaissance Conference website:www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nydam/scrc

Shakespeare in Leather

A talk, next Tuesday, November 14, for the Columbia Early Modern Seminar, by Anston Bosman (Amherst). The Seminar meets from 6.30 to 8pm in 408A Philosophy Hall on Columbia's main campus. All welcome.

Questions: Professor Alan Stewart, ags2105@columbia.edu

THE INTERNATIONAL SPREAD OF SHAKESPEARE

The 7th Triennial Congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa:24-27 June 2007, Rhodes University: Grahamstown

http://www.ru.ac.za/shakespeare OR
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/isea/shake/conference.html

Additional information, please contact me at h.slinger@ru.ac.za

Historiography in Golden Age Spain

Saturday 17th February in the Cruciform Building (opposite the main Gower Street entrance to UCL) Seminar Room 2 from 2 - 5 pm:

Dr Harald Braun (University of Liverpool), Juan de Mariana (1535 - 1624) and his treatise De rege et regis institutione

Professor Jeremy Robbins (Edinburgh), Arts of Perception: The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580-1720

Dr Alexander Samson (UCL), Writing Early Modern Spain: Historiography and Rhetoric in the works of Florián de Ocampo.

THE AUGUSTINE "CONFESSIONS" CONFERENCE

March 30 - 31, 2007, at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto

Featured Speakers:
Sara Byers, Ave Maria University
Catherine Conybeare, Bryn Mawr College
James Farell, University of New Hampshire
Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland
Peter King, University of Toronto
Scott MacDonald, Cornell University
Gareth B. Matthews, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Stephen Menn, McGill University
Oliver O'Donovan, University of Edinburgh
Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia

To find out more and register, please go to: www.utoronto.ca/stmikes/msus-conference or, e-mail msus.registration@utoronto.ca

(Mis)appropriations: Shakespeare and the Politics of Literary Fashion

LSU EGSA Mardi Gras Conference on Language and Literature, Feb. 16-17, 2007
Lod Cook Alumni Center, Baton Rouge, LA

The 17th Annual EGSA Mardi Gras Conference is calling for papers that discuss the various appropriations of Shakespeare in the current literary milieu. Whether one talks about the universal choice of The Tempest by Postcolonial scholars and Atlanticists, or the tendency of Marxist scholars to concentrate on the political "histories," one notices, in literary studies, the privileging of certain texts, always from an ideological center. In accordance with the rules of fashion, moreover, many plays in Shakespeare's canon go unstudied in the university classroom, as other texts take their place.

This panel aims to examine the reasons behind the popularity of certain Shakespearean texts, and the de-privileging of others. More importantly, this panel proposes to examine the notion that certain ideological appropriations have fallen short of the historical context they claim to reestablish—and instead practice a less rigorous "history-lite."

A detailed 250-word abstract should be submitted by November 30, 2006, to Matthew Landers . Papers should be 15 minutes in length. Please submit your abstract in the body of your email. No attachments, please.

In case you were wondering, the Mardi Gras conference takes place during the weekend of Mardi Gras. Baton Rouge is 50 minutes from New Orleans, by car.

Strange Currencies: Dynamic Economies in the Early Modern World

The Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group of the Graduate Center, City University of NY, invites proposals for papers for its third annual conference to be held on February , 2007 in New York City. We encourage scholars of all disciplines to submit papers related to the period inclusive of the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and we especially welcome papers with an interdisciplinary methodology. This conference will focus on Early Modern market representations and modes of exchange in financial, social, and sexual spheres. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:  

Philosophies of Economics
The physical marketplace
Economies of gender & sexuality
Housekeeping and domestic economies
Economics and the Law
Credit, loans & banking
Currency and Coinage
Wealth, Poverty & Charity
Money , exchange & business
Property, Inheritance & Real Estate
Publicity and the cult of celebrity
Advertising and desire
Anti-Semitism & Racism
Banking Families
Usury & Interest
Economic Crimes (counterfeiting, theft, fraud, debt, etc.)
Luxury goods
Imports and exports
Products, Services & Industries
The Guilds
Populuxe
Mercantile Stereotypes
The Slave trade
Professionals & Careers
Consumption & consumers
Taxation & State Finance
Church finance
Pragmatism
Trading spaces; trading bodies
Patronage
Class dynamics
Commodification of genres
The theatre and economics
Commercialism and Literature
Trading Companies (East India et al)

Send 250 word abstracts by December 20th, 2006 to emig.conference@gmail.com, or mail to Balaka Basu (English Department, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016). Please include your name and institutional affiliation, mailing address, email address, and phone number.

Judi Dench to Star at Stratford

http://www.warwicktoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=1192&ArticleID=1863340

Anyone who regards Shakespeare as a stuffy business must have performed something of a double-take when, halfway down the RSC's Complete Works programme, two little words appeared after Merry Wives.

This Christmas, with the Works project in full flow and the traditional festive production ruled out, the company stages only its second-ever 'The Musical'. And in Dame Judi Dench they've roped one of the theatrical world's biggest stars into the fun.

Sir John Falstaff is in need of cash and decides to hedge his bets by courting the wealthy Mistress Ford and Mistress Page at the same time. But when they compare love-letters and see through the plan - with more than a little help from Mistress Quickly (Dench) - the riotous knight gets his just desserts. Along the way, there will be eyebrow-raising twists, liberties taken with the text and at least one hoe down, explained associate director Gregory Doran. For him it all started with a song composer Paul Englishby wrote for a recent production of The Tamer Tamed, a response to The Taming of the Shrew, called The Woman Must Wear the Breeches.

Doran said: "I remember we started to think about other plays where music might play a bigger part. Then we did All's Well that Ends Well with Judi Dench and she loved Paul's music in that, so the germ of the idea appeared. Tamer Tamed became the initial inspiration - a sort of mix of country and western and some softer ballads. Without giving too much away we are hoping the setting will at first seem quite traditional, as in Merrie Olde Englande, but with several anarchic twists."

Doran explained how Merry Wives was the perfect candidate for the makeover. He added: "It was written in two weeks by Shakespeare in response to a request by Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see a play where Falstaff is in love. This meant it has always been seen as entertainment as much as a classic play, and therefore lends itself to 'versions' of all sorts.

"It's also one of the longest comedies and not known for its great poetry - so in this version there are some scenes which are sung through with no dialogue at all, for example the Buck Basket scene. Songs have been added to enhance the comedy or beef up relationships, but whilst adapting I have noticed there is certainly a lot of the original text left."

For trooper Dame Judi, meanwhile, the whole thing is "just the next job, really". It's not as if she can't 'do' song and dance - after all she's been Sally Bowles in Cabaret and was Adriana the last time the RSC went a bit musical, with Trevor Nunn and Guy Woolfenden's The Comedy of Errors in 1976. She added: "That's the life of an actor - you can go from doing Hamlet to a light comedy or musical and it's all in the same spectrum. You still have to be that character and tell that story. I remember Hal Prince, who directed me in Cabaret, saying to me 'you shouldn't have to stop to sing a song in a musical; it should be a logical step that takes you onto the next stage of the story, not embroidered on'. I've never forgotten that - I think it's a really good tip." She felt the unusual version might help hook a younger audience on Shakespeare, adding: "I know that after we did the musical version of Comedy of Errors quite a few came back to see other things at the RSC as a result. It really depends on how well we do it. There is nothing more off-putting to audiences new to theatre than seeing a bad production - so we had better make a good job of it!"

RSC debutant Simon Callow will take over from Desmond Barrit in the role of Falstaff, after the latter suffered a foot injury, it has been announced.

Merry Wives The Musical opens at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on December 2, and runs until February 10. Contact the RSC box office on 0870 609110.

www.rsc.org.uk

THE NETHERLANDISH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND ITS AFTERLIVES

DUKE UNIVERSITY: MARCH 3, 2007
Keynote Speaker: Nigel Smith

Please submit abstracts (500 words) via email to rjl11@duke.edu (place "Netherlands Conference Abstract" in the subject line) by November 30, 2006.

This one-day symposium aims to recuperate the Netherlandish context in order to strengthen and complicate our understanding of philosophy, religion, language, literature, art, history, and political economy - the geopolitical shape of early modernity - with specific reference to the transformations of the United Provinces and attendant territories, in Europe and beyond. The symposium will examine the import of the Netherlands in a moment of greatly significant circum-Atlantic change - a moment which indeed set many of the parameters for culture and politics still with us today. We welcome submissions from a number of disciplines on related topics, which may, but need not, discuss related themes such as:

-The emergence of a modern market economy
-The Dutch Revolt and its iterations in other situations (for instance, in English Republican thought)
-The identification of a "Dutch" cycle of capital accumulation
-Remembering the Netherlandish context across a variety of disciplines (New Amsterdam in American Studies; the Dutch in the East Asian Studies; The Dutch roots of Arminianism, etc.)
-The post-Republic identification of the Dutch with (proto-national) liberation movements against dynastic rule
-The disparities between emergent French Absolutism and Dutch sovereignty
-Publishing and circulation of texts in the Netherlands, or Dutch cultural production and its impact in other European situations
-Netherlandish visual culture and the production and consumption of art; art as cultural identity, or explorations of notions of taste through imagery and economics
-The Revolt of the Netherlands in Spanish literature
-The history of philosophy, including Spinozism, in the Netherlands and beyond
-The Dutch slave trade in light of the Spanish, French and British trades
-The place of the Netherlands in British perpetuations of the Black Legend
-Anglo-Dutch; Spanish-Dutch; Franco-Dutch rivalry in the New World
-Netherlandish humanism

Andrew Marvell

Call for Papers: Andrew Marvell Society at South-Central Renaissance Conference (8-10 March
2007)

Deadline: 1 December 2006

The Andrew Marvell Society welcomes paper proposals by 1 December 2006 for its annual sessions at the South-Central Renaissance Conference, San Antonio, 8-10 March 2007.

Please consult our call for papers at the SCRC website, through which submissions are to be made:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nydam/scrc/cfp_marvell2007.shtml

Proposals are especially encouraged on the following topics:

• Marvell, the metropolis, and the provinces;
• Marvell, intertextuality, and innovation;
• Marvell, Cromwell, and Revolutionary England;
• Marvell and the Arts: Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Annabel Patterson will deliver the annual Louis L. Martz Lecture at the SCRC.

Nicholas von Maltzahn
President, Andrew Marvell Society
English / Arts
University of Ottawa
maltzahn@uottawa.ca

Shakespeare classic in seven languages

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
The Guardian, Wednesday November 1, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1936139,00.html

It had reviews to kill for and was hailed as one of the greatest productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But with only 12 performances in the UK, the question was always, will it be seen again? Today it will be announced that Tim Supple's Indian production of Shakespeare's play, performed in seven languages with only about half in English, will indeed be performed again - at the restored Roundhouse in north London before going on a national tour.

The Guardian's Michael Billington called it the most life-enhancing production of Shakespeare's play since Peter Brook's (a landmark 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production), while the Daily Telegraph predicted it would be talked about for decades. Those plaudits were repeated elsewhere. The evolution of the production was in some ways as remarkable as its execution. Supple was first commissioned by the British Council in India and Sri Lanka to create a theatre production to tour.

After a year travelling India the director brought together 23 dancers, musicians, actors and performers for a seven-week rehearsal period to create a production performed in English, Tamil, Bengali, Hindi, Malaysian, Sinhalese, Marathi and a little Sanskrit. The designers, composers and production team were also found in the subcontinent.

Supple said: "This production arose from the extraordinary artistry and range of contemporary Indian theatre. Only in India does one find 2,000-year-old traditions alive alongside an entirely modern approach to performance."

The original cast has been reassembled and it will play at the Roundhouse for six weeks from March 8 before touring the UK at venues to be announced. It will then play cities in India before a world tour. Supple said the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream - myth and urban reality, the supernatural and spiritual, the trials of lovers and struggles of workers - were all "thrillingly alive in India and Indian theatre today."

*Related reviews*

09.06.2006: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Swan, Stratford
www.guardian.co.uk/Arts/reviews/story/0,,1793835,00.html

Early Modern English Manuscript Studies

The forthcoming autumn term sees the launch of a new regular series of seminars introduced by Dr Peter Beal, Senior Research Fellow, in association with the AHRC-funded CELM (Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700) database project at the Institute of English Studies. The seminars, generally three per term, will allow distinguished invited speakers to discuss aspects of manuscript or archival research in connection with chosen subjects of special interest. They will thus contribute to a growing body of scholarship in an area of early modern cultural studies, whose potential - in relation to literary, textual, palaeographical, bibliographical and historical research -- has been increasingly recognised through a number of major pioneering projects in the past three decades.

2006-07

31 October 2006
(Tuesday)
Venue: Room 273 (ST)
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speakers: Professor Susan Cerasano (Colgate University)
"Revisiting Henslowe's Diary"

Susan Cerasano, Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, New York, is a leading early modern theatre historian and an authority on the archive of the impresario Philip Henslowe (c.1555-1616) and his son-in-law the actor Edward Alleyn (1566-1626).

29 November 2006
(Wednesday)
Venue: ST273 (Stewart House) Time: 17:30 - 19:00 Speakers: Professor David Norbrook, Merton College, Oxford "Poisons and Antidotes: Lucretius, Lucy Hutchinson, and Textual Transmission".

13 December 2006
(Wednesday)
Venue: ST273 (Stewart House) Time: 17:30 - 19:00 Speakers: Professor Germaine Greer "'These fragments I have shored against my ruins': Literary Culture and the New Teechnology"

Germaine Greer, Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Studies at Warwick University, is a well-known and controversial writer and academic, author of numerous books and a frequent broadcaster. Her interests in early modern women writers and in related archives have led, among other things, to a standard poetical anthology and to major editions of Katherine Philips and Ann Wharton.

website: www.sas.ac.uk/events/visitor_events.php?page=ies_seminars&func=results&aoi_id=197

The Art of Dying

London Renaissance Seminar, Saturday 2 December, 2-5 p.m.
(coffee available from 1.30 p.m, drinks after.)

Room 152, Malet Street
Birkbeck College, London WC1

Jenny Mayhew (Oxford Brookes University), 'Cure for the Fear of Death'? Godly preparations for the Last Combat
Louise Durning (Oxford Brookes University), 'On the threshold of eternal life: Paratextual strategies in the English renaissance funeral monument
Peter Marshall (Warwick University), 'Angels at the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in Reformation England
Chair: Ralph Houlbrooke (Reading University)

For further information contact: Michelle O‚Callaghan,  m.f.ocallaghan@reading.ac.uk