Call for Papers: SHARP @ RSA 2008

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) will sponsor several panels at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting in Chicago from 3-5 April 2008. Organized by Steven W. May, Anne Lake Prescott and Michael Ullyot, SHARP @ RSA links the RSA with scholars studying the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print. Since 2001 we have organized 21 panels at RSA meetings.

We will have two themes in 2008 (although more than two panels), and invite submissions that consider English and Continental books and manuscripts from 1350 to 1700 in relation to either of them:

[1] Abridgements, Epitomes, Indexes, and Examples
Roger Ascham called abridgements 'a silie poore kinde of studie.' Why did people abridge texts, and how did people read them? Did abridgements--of the apocrypha, of John Foxe, of legal decisions and political history, &c.--serve or betray their sources and readers? Papers might also address the rhetoric of exemplarity in a range of practices (citing, persuading, condensing, indexing).

[2] Determining Renaissance Authorship
What tests or techniques allow us to add or remove texts, or parts of texts, from an author's canon with confidence? What is the role of attribution in interpretation? What do we owe to printers and publishers? The organizers are particularly interested in non-dramatic collaborative texts.

Please send abstracts (150 words) and one-paragraph CVs to *each* of the three organizers: < michael.ullyot@ell.ox.ac.uk > and and by *Friday, 11 May 2007* (this is earlier than RSA's own deadline).

For more information on the Renaissance Society of America conference, see http://rsa.org/meetings/. All participants must be members of the RSA by August 2007 or they cannot be included in the programme.

SHAKESPEARE AND MODERN POETRY

Half day conference at Bristol University
Wednesday 27th June 2007

PLENARY SPEAKER: NEIL CORCORAN, KING ALFRED PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

Topics for any aspect of the relation between Shakespeare and 20th and 21st century poetry might include Shakespeare and Modernist Poetics; Shakespeare and the poetry of war; Shakespeare and women's verse; the Shakespearean colonial and postcolonial; Shakespeare and modern formalism; and the nature of Shakespearean influence.

Please send proposals (maximum of 300 words) for papers (20 minutes) on aspects of Shakespeare and 20th and 21st century poetry to George.E.Donaldson@bristol.ac.uk or J.M.Lyon@bristol.ac.uk by Monday 7th May 2007

The Gascoigne Seminar

Friday 21st September 2007, Lincoln College, Oxford

George Gascoigne, the most inventive and influential poet of the generation before Spenser and Sidney, died on 7th October 1577. To mark the 430th anniversary of his death and the current revival of interest in his work, an international seminar is being held at Lincoln College, Oxford, on Friday 21st September, 2007.

The chair will be G.W. Pigman, editor of Gascoigne‚s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), published by Oxford University Press, 2000. Other participants will include:

Richard McCoy (Graduate Center, City University of New York)
David Norbrook (University of Oxford)
Lorna Hutson (St Andrew's University)
Elizabeth Heale (Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading)
Jessica Winston (Idaho State University)
Catherine Bates (University of Warwick)
Elizabeth Goldring (University of Warwick)
Katharine Wilson (Oxford Brookes University)
Gillian Austen (University of Bristol)
Stephen Hamrick (Minnesota State University Moorhead)

The day will include a private viewing of a selection of Gascoigne's books at the Bodleian Library, including Gabriel Harvey‚s annotated copy of Gascoigne's The Posies (1575).

An edited collection of the papers will be published in due course.

To book a place Lincoln College was founded in 1427 and is situated in the heart of old Oxford, just by the Bodleian Library. The seminar will be held in the Oakeshott and Beckington rooms and will include a buffet lunch and refreshments.

The cost for the day, including lunch and refreshments, will be £30 (full rate) and £15 for students. To book a place at the seminar, or to make informal enquiries, please email Gillian Austen (g.austen@bristol.ac.uk).

Further information will be available shortly, or please contact either of the organisers, Stephen Hamrick (hamrick@mnstate.edu) and Gillian Austen. The Seminar web site is at: www.mnstate.edu/hamrick/gascoigneseminar.htm

Shakespeare and the visual arts

Shakespeare’s presence in the 18th century—in book form, on the stage, in art—is overwhelming. This session will explore how artists have transformed Shakespeare’s plays in painting or any of the visual arts. By April 30, 2007, please send proposals/abstracts to Chantelle MacPhee, Department of English, University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, Cayey, PR 00736. Email submissions are also welcome: englitgirl@yahoo.com.

Chantelle MacPhee, Ph.D
Assistant Professor
English Department
Antonio R Barcelo Ave.
University of Puerto Rico at Cayey
Cayey, PR 00736

Milton and the Law

A one-day symposium on Milton and the Law will be held at Queen Mary University of London on Friday 29 June 2007.

For details of registration and further information, please email Rosanna Cox (r.cox@qmul.ac.uk) or Chloe Houston (c.r.m.houston@qmul.ac.uk).

Programme
9.30 ˆ 10.00 Registration
10.00 Welcome
10.15                    Keynote Paper: Professor Thomas Corns (The University of Wales Bangor): Brother of the better known John
11.30 Refreshments
12.00                            Panel 1: Free speech and censorship
Professor Joad Raymond (The University of East Anglia): Milton, censorship laws and the explosion of print
Professor David Harris Sacks (Reed College): The Sweet Name of Liberty: The Defense of Free Speech in Early Modern England‚
1.00 Lunch
2.30                              Panel 2: Gender and the law
Dr Lynne Greenberg (CUNY): Milton, Gender and the Law‚
Dr Rosanna Cox (QMUL): Whatever happened to the woman from Timna?: Milton and making the case for divorce‚
3.30 Refreshments
4.00    Panel 3: Legal discourse
Professor Martin Dzelzainis (RHUL): Milton and forensic oratory
Professor Peter C. Herman (San Diego State University): Whose Fault, Whose but his Own?: Paradise Lost, Contributory Negligence, and the Problem of Cause‚
5.00 Close


School of English & Drama
Queen Mary University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS

Life Writing and the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy

James Shapiro, author of the best-selling book on Shakespeare, 1599.
Tuesday, May 1st 16.00
King's Lecture Theatre, South Range, Main Building, Strand (to be renamed the Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre, King's Building, from 8 May)

All welcome. Admission is free. There are no tickets or reservations. The series is supported by the College's Annual Fund.

The Renaissance of Subjectivity

A one-day conference on the "selfe" in Shakespeare's Renaissance and ours
19 June 2007, RHUL, Egham, Surrey.

Graham Holderness, John Lee,
Russ McDonald, Simon Palfrey,
Tiffany Stern, Richard Wilson

Email renaissanceofsubjectivity@googlemail.com for information

Registration deadline is 21 May, 2007

For twenty-five years historicist and materialist critical trends in Shakespeare and Renaissance studies have eclipsed direct considerations of the subjectivity of criticism itself. This conference urges a 'renaissance of subjectivity' in critical thought. Our enquiry is centred first on the subjective investment in current thinking about the Renaissance, and secondly on the interplay between Renaissance and contemporary selfhoods. It is hoped that the conference will ask some of the biggest and often occluded questions concerning the meaning, purpose and form of criticism as such.

Tyndale, More and their circles: Persecution and martyrdom under the Tudors.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom, 3-6 July 2008

This will be an interdisciplinary conference which will bring together scholars interested in the religious history and literature of the Tudor period. Although there will be a focus on lives, works and reputations of Tyndale and More, papers are sought on martyrdom, religious persecution and inter-Christian conflict generally and thus may range in subject from Anne Askew to Edmund Campion.

Principal Speakers:

Prof. Brian Cummings, University of Sussex;
Prof. Eamon Duffy University of Cambridge;
Rev. Dr Ralph S. Werrell, The Tyndale Society.

Proposals for 25 minute papers (including your name, institutional affiliation (where relevant) and title and 300-500 words) or enquiries should be directed by October 1st 2007 to Rev. Matthew Baynham, Hopkins Hall, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool L38QB, UK ( baynham@hope.ac.uk ) or Dr John Flood, Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, UK. (john.flood@balliol.ox.ac.uk )

For updates see www.hope.ac.uk/tyndale-more

Herrick and Conviviality

"Lords of Wine and Oil": Community and Conviviality in the work of Robert Herrick and his contemporaries.

This conference comes halfway through the process of editing The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford UP, 2010) and will be held in July 2008 at Buckfast Abbey, near Herrick's vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devon. The conference will focus on the part played by Community, Conviviality and Friendship not only in Herrick's work, but in all forms of literary discourse of the early Stuart period (c.1600-c.1650). Discussions of writers who, due to rank, gender or conviction, cannot enter or are critical of certain communities or communal identities are also welcome.
Topics will include (but are not limited to):
* studies of individual clubs, coteries or salons and their literary output
* studies of individual writers working within such groups
* the formation, entrance criteria and exclusionary practices of these groups
* the treatment and significance of friendship
* composition and circulation of manuscript verse miscellanies
* the involvement of coteries and salons with wider political and social events
* the exploration or discussion by writers of communal identities
* competition and/or collaboration between writers
* relationships between writers, their patrons and/or their publics
* community, sociability and genre, including the country house poem and non-literary genres such as letters and sermons
* conflicts within and between communities
* the socio-cultural implications of print publication for literary communities
* verse exchanges, dedicatory poems and prefaces in print and manuscript
* relationship between orality, manuscript and print

Please send title and abstract of no more than 300 words by January 18th 2008 to Dr Ruth Connolly, School of English, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom or email: ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk

Research Associate
The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick:
An AHRC-funded project hosted by the University of Newcastle
P: + 44 (0)191 + 2228133
F: + 44 (0)191 + 2228708
W: http://herrick.ncl.ac.uk

Graduate Essay Prize

The editor writes ....

Unique in both range and approach, Literature Compass (http://www.literature-compass.com) is an online-only journal publishing peer-reviewed survey articles from across the entire discipline.

The editors of Literature Compass are now inviting submissions for the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize. Win $200/£100 of free Blackwell books and have your article published in Literature Compass! There will be a prize-winning graduate essay for each of the 9 sections on Literature Compass:

Medieval
Renaissance
Shakespeare
Seventeenth Century
Eighteenth Century
Romanticism
The Victorians
Twentieth Century and Contemporary
American

DEADLINE: 15 October, 2007.

GUIDELINES

The prize is open to all graduate students engaged in study at a college or university after their first degree and having not yet completed their doctorate. Those entering can choose their own topic; however, as with articles already published on Literature Compass, submitted essays should have a survey element, putting the chosen topic in context for the non-specialist. The incorporation of advanced graduate work is strongly encouraged. The upper word limit is 5000 words, INCLUDING endnotes and bibliography. Literature Compass Graduate Essays should be submitted by email as a Word document to: LICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com.

Graduates must specify:

- which section they are entering their essay for
- provide the details of their affiliation
- provide their supervisor's name and email address

Only one entry per person. Winners will be announced at the 2007 MLA conference. For more information, please go to www.literature-compass.com. Good luck!

Kivmars Bowling
Managing Editor, Literature Compass
Blackwell Publishing
9600 Garsington Rd
Oxford
OX4 2DQ
UK

Email: kivmars.bowling@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com
Web: www.literature-compass.com
Blog: http://literaturecompass.wordpress.com

"Art and Life in Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors"

Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University, the Annual English Program Shakespeare Lecture
Friday, April 20, 2007
4:00 - 5:30
Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, New York NY

Hugh Plat, Francis Bacon, and the Social Foundations of the Scientific Revolution

On Thursday, April 26, the Science, Technology, and Society Colloquium will be bringing Professor Deb Harkness to speak on "From the Jewel House to Salomon's House: Hugh Plat, Francis Bacon, and the Social Foundations of the Scientific Revolution." The talk will be held 4:10-6pm, in 520 Mudd Hall, Columbia University, New York. Professor Harkness is a historian of science and specialist in the period from 1400-1700. Her publications include, /John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature /(1999) and numerous articles on the practice of English natural philosophy. Her talk will be drawn from her forthcoming book on practitioners and the investigation of nature in London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Details: Prof. Alan Stewart, ags2105@columbia.edu

Shakespeare

Jonathan Bate in the Guardian on what makes Shakespeare special. Absolutely no surprises, but quite a nice read ...

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2055764,00.html

CFP: Renaissance Studies and New Technologies

Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference
Chicago, 3-5 April 2008

For the past seven years, the RSA program has featured a number of sessions that document innovative ways in which computing technology is being incorporated into the scholarly activity of our community. At the 2008 RSA meeting (Chicago, 3-5 April 2008), several sessions will continue to follow this interest across several key projects, through a number of thematic touchstones, and in several emerging areas.

For these sessions, we seek proposals in the following general areas, and beyond:

a) new technology and research (individual or group projects)
b) new technology and teaching (individual or group projects)
c) new technology and publication (e.g. from the vantage point
of authors, traditional and non-traditional publishers)

Proposals for papers, panels, demonstrations, and/or workshop presentations that focus on these issues and others are welcome. Please send proposals before May 15 to siemens_at_uvic.ca.

Ray Siemens
English, CRC Humanities Computing, University of Victoria
and
William R. Bowen
Chair, Department of Humanities, University of Toronto, Scarborough

Moments of Vision: Venice and the Islamic World

Stefano Carboni, Curator of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator of the Met’s current special exhibition “Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797,” discusses how artistic and cultural ideas from the Near East were absorbed in Venice between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Part II of: “Worlds Apart? Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire,” a conference jointly sponsored by the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program (CUNY Graduate Center); the Medieval and Renaissance Center and the Ottoman Studies Program (NYU), the Ph.D. Program in Art History  and the Office of the Provost (CUNY Graduate Center).

Thursday, April 12, 6:30-8:00pm
The Skylight Room (9100)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btwn 34th & 35th)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
No registration. Please arrive early for a seat. 212-817-2005 / ch@gc.

Taverner, Tallis and Tye: The Glories of the English Renaissance

Featuring: John Taverner (c.1490-1545)
Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas
Thursday, May 3 at 8 o’clock p.m.
Pre-Concert Lecture in Laughlin Hall at 7 o’clock p.m. at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson Street (1 block south of Christopher St.), New York, NY
The Choir of the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields
David Shuler, Director of Music
The final concert of our season features music composed by the great trinity of Tudor composers, Taverner, Tye and Tallis. Tudor music, which against all odds miraculously survived subsequent religious and political upheavals, still evokes the long-forgotten spirit of the Pre-Reformation English Church. This astonishing repertoire occupies a unique place in the canon of Renaissance literature inhabiting space and time unlike any of its continental counterparts. As rebellious as the island for which was written, Tudor polyphony defies Franco-Flemish conventions with its slow moving harmonic rhythm, constructed around an intricate and rhythmically complex inner structure creating deeply affecting and subtle sonorities. The centerpiece of this concert, John Taverner’s spectacular Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, will be performed alongside masterworks by Tallis and Tye. Admission $30; students and seniors $20

For further information, call 212.414.9419
concerts.stlukeinthefields.org

16th & 17th Century Flemish Culture

September 29, 2007, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY
www.nassaumuseum.com
Keynote speaker: Wolfgang Mieder, Ph.D., Professor of German and Folklore, The University of Vermont

Beginning August 26, 2007, The Nassau County Museum of Art will exhibit major works by Pieter Bruegel, the Younger, including some of his most notable pieces: The Netherlandish Proverbs, The Peasant Wedding, Merriment and Seven Deadly Sins. In conjunction with this small but no less significant exhibition, the Nassau County Museum of Art is planning the first in a series of Humanities Symposia on September 29, 2007.

Contributors are encouraged to submit abstracts, no more than 300 words in length, for papers/presentations (10 - 12 minutes) that examine the rich culture that surrounds the work and life of Pieter Bruegel, the Younger. Topics of particular interest in this field include, but are not limited to, genre painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, music, The Eighty Years War and The Reformation. Deadline for submission is July 31, 2007. Send abstracts to ritamack@nassaumuseum.com as .doc attachments only. Panelists will be notified on or before August 15, 2007.

Early Modern Medievalisms

The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production
International Conference at University of Leiden (The Netherlands), 21-23 August 2008
CALL FOR PAPERS

The early modern period was marked by plural discourses on the Middle Ages. Both scholarly work and artistic production created images of the philological Middle Ages, the imagined Middle Ages, the utopian Middle Ages, and even the anti-Middle Ages. Although this plurality was certainly conditioned by the early modern period's relation to Antiquity, it also reflected an interest in the Middle Ages as such. Paradoxically, early modern medievalism can therefore be conceived as a form of classicism as well as anti-classicism, exoticism as well as nationalism.

Emphasizing this diversity, the conference focuses on the interplay and tensions between discourses, continuities and discontinuities, and competing images of the medieval during the early modern period.

We invite papers that address these topics. We are particularly interested in papers that explore one or several of three interrelated questions:
1. The conceptualization of the medieval in early modern scholarship. How was the medieval transformed into an object of study? Which topoi did scholars and collectors use to legitimize their interest in the medieval past? Is it possible to discern a transition, as postulated by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, from appreciation of the medieval past (gendered female) to scholarship (gendered male)?
2. Continuities and discontinuities between the medieval and the early modern. How did different perceptions of time (cyclical time, converging time) and place (the New and the Old World, East and West) provide the contexts for scholars and artists to inscribe themselves in a tradition? How did the Middle Ages and the early modern communicate? How did actual scholarly and artistic work relate to topoi establishing a distance between the medieval and the contemporary?
3. The interplay of medieval studies and artistic production. How did literary and visual images of the Middle Ages influence scholarly practice? And how did scholarship inspire artists, writers and musicians? What were the processes of cultural transmission from one disciplinary context to another? How did medieval traditions move between popular and elite culture, thereby problematizing our view of the early modern public sphere?

The conference will take place from 21 to 23 August 2008. A volume with selected papers is scheduled to appear in 2009, and will be edited by Alicia Montoya, Wim van Anrooij and Sophie van Romburgh. Proposals, about 300 words, should be sent electronically no later than 1 May 2007, to

Alicia C. Montoya (Department of French, University of Leiden): A.C.Montoya@Let.Leidenuniv.nl

The authors of the proposals that have been accepted will be invited to participate in the conference before July 2007.

Renaissance Prose

Purdue University's Renaissance Comparative Prose Conference (deadline: July 15, 2007; conference: November 1-2, 2007)
CALL FOR PAPERS

Held this year at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio

Keynote address: Thomas L. Martin, Florida Atlantic University, "C.S. Lewis as Renaissance Critic"

Papers are invited for a conference exploring any aspect of Renaissance prose. Submissions are encouraged from scholars investigating texts in languages other than English, as well as texts that explore transatlantic connections.

A special session on C.S. Lewis and his role as literary critic of Renaissance literature will be held in conjunction with the keynote topic. Papers that address this aspect of Lewis's career are especially welcome.

Please send 300-350 word abstracts by July 15, 2007, to: scala@purdue.edu

For more information contact Victoria Scala Wood at the above e-mail address.

CFP: Resurrecting the First Five Hundred: The Fathers and Early Modern English Culture, 1500-1660

In his Challenge Sermon delivered at St. Paul's Cross on November 26, 1559, Bishop John Jewel argued that the English divines would assert as foundational the underlying belief that the ancient Fathers were the true architects of Christianity and that the English people would no longer be subjected to the medieval tampering that had led the one true Church astray. The first five hundred years of the church, he would argue, are more worth than the whole thousand that followed afterward. We are seeking papers for a panel that will address the issue of the Church Fathers in early modern English culture at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference (Villanova University, October 19-21, 2007). We particularly encourage papers that attempt to theorize the relevance of the Fathers beyond a mere history of ideas. Topics addressed may include (but will not be limited to) the rhetorical, political, ethical, and material uses of Church Fathers, and the influence of the Church Fathers on education, rhetoric, science, the stage, book production, devotional and polemical writing, women and writing, the body, and the rise of capitalism. Please send 500-word abstracts as Microsoft Word attachments to Mitchell Harris (mharris@gustavus.edu) and Steven Matthews (smatthew@d.umn.edu) by May 1, 2007.

Women, Sexuality and Early Modern Studies

Call for submissions for genre, for an issue on Women, Sexuality and Early Modern Studies. We welcome submissions of papers on a full range of topics addressing writings by and about women and the feminine in the Medieval and Renaissance periods throughout the world, including interchanges between East and West. Papers can be devoted (but not limited) to: Medieval and Early Modern female authors and/or figures, depictions of the feminine in Medieval and Renaissance European and/ or other literatures, contemporary invocations of Medieval femininity, women and hagiography, religious education and women, women and the arts, women in courtly poetry, in Sufi literature, or in Medieval Islam. Papers with comparative topics and methodologies are especially welcome.
Send an explanatory email that includes your institutional affiliation and your full correspondence mailing address to genrejournal@gmail.com and attach the essay (word document or pdf file) you would like to submit to that email. Deadline for receipt of papers is 15 June 2007. MAKE sure you include a 200-word abstract of your submitted paper to be
published along with your paper.genre is an international, interdisciplinary Journal of Literature and the Arts affiliated to the Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University, Long Beach, since the late sixties. It publishes issues pertaining to the theme of the annual departmental conference. For more details, please visit the genre
website at: http://www.csulb.edu/depts/complit/genre/

Submission Guidelines
All papers should follow the MLA (Modern Language Association of America) style and obey the following guidelines:
1- Include parenthetical sources and a works cited but no footnotes orendnotes. IF YOU MUST use endnotes, keep those to a minimum, format them like you do normal text, and place them after the paper and immediately before the works cited.
2- Italicize titles of books and journals.
3- Articles should be between 4000 and 6000 words in length. They should be double-spaced and use 12 point font throughout.
4- All passages not originally in English should be translated into English [and put in square brackets] in the body of the article immediately following the original citation in the language other than English.
5. Make sure you obtain reprint permissions of images you want to include (keep those to a minimum). Otherwise, please do not send them. Timelines: We want to publish the issue in January 2008. When we send you the recommendations, please make sure to effect the changes and return the paper as promptly as possible, within six weeks at the most.
Contributors will receive two free copies of the journal.

Renaissance Virtues

We welcome papers touching on all aspects of virtue in the Renaissance for a panel at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) 2008 meeting in Chicago (April 3-5). Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, and papers touching on some aspect of literature and/or England are especially welcome. Possible questions to examine include:

* What is virtue in the Renaissance?
* In what respects is virtue rooted in religious or theological belief?
* What is the relationship between virtue and Catholicism?
* What is the relationship between virtue and Protestantism?
* In what forms is virtue depicted among heathens, pagans, Moors, Jews, barbarians, and other non-Christian groups inside and outside Europe?
* How is virtue communicated, educated, transmitted, and enforced?
* What is the relationship between virtue and the classics?
* How did the Renaissance think of virtue in terms of ethical or moral beliefs or practices?
* How do Renaissance conceptions of virtue bear on a distinction between knowledge and practice?
* What are the differences between virtues and, to use perhaps a more modern term, values?
* What are the connections between virtue and politics?
* How does virtue fit into structures of class and social hierarchy?
* What is the relationship between virtue and alchemy, astrology, science, magic, and/or knowledge?
* What distinctions are there, if any, during the Renaissance between "being virtuous" and "having virtues"?
* In what respects are virtues found in material objects? What does it mean for an object to have "power" or "virtue"?
* What is the relationship between material virtues and moral, ethical, or religious virtues?
* To what extent is virtue gendered in the Renaissance?
* What is the relationship between virtue and sexuality or chastity?
* In what respects does virtue bear on economic and marketplace practices?
* What connections exist between virtue and skill? What skills might be considered virtues in the Renaissance?
* What bearing does martial prowess have on virtue?
* What is the relationship between virtue and the divine or supernatural?
* In what ways is Virtue personified in the Renaissance?
* What is the relationship between virtue and art? How is it possible to imbue an image or language with virtue, or to convey virtue through images or words?
* What is the relationship between poetic form and the production or subversion of virtues? Are some forms more virtuous/vicious than others? What is the relationship between aesthetics and virtue?
* How do people in the Renaissance balance virtues when they seem to come into conflict with each other? Can we speak of a hierarchy of virtues? If so, how does such a hierarchy manifest itself in literature? If not, how do literary authors figure the conflicts that arise among competing virtues?
* How is virtue represented in specific literary texts or pieces of art?

Please submit a brief c.v. and abstracts of 250 words or less to Aaron Spooner (amspooner@wisc.edu) and Dan Gibbons (drgibbons2@wisc.edu) by no later than April 20, 2007. Selected panelists must become members of RSA
before the conference schedule is finalized.

Encyclopaedism before the Enlightenment

School of Classics, University of St Andrews, 13-15 June 2007

Over recent years there has been increasing scholarly interest in pre-modern intellectual practices and the scientific texts which they generated. Particular attention has been paid to treatises, handbooks and other shorter works. There have also been a series of important studies of Pliny's Natural History and its role as a proto-encyclopaedia. This conference will build on these strands of research to explore the nature and variety of encyclopaedic projects in the age before the work of Diderot and his contemporaries created the modern vision of an encyclopaedia.

We start with no preconceived definition of an encyclopaedia. Instead, we hope that connections, and differences, will emerge from discussion of a range of texts that broadly share the visions and claims to comprehensive and or varied knowledge associated with the modern genre. To this end we are bringing together a group of scholars with wide knowledge of large-scale compilatory and synoptic works of knowledge composed in antiquity and afterwards. Papers will address classical, Byzantine, Islamic, Chinese and early modern encyclopedias and compilations. Our primary aim is to discuss encyclopedic and miscellanistic projects from a comparative perspective. We will examine the social and political worlds in which they were produced, including in some cases the context of empire. The conference will build on ongoing work in the Logos Centre in St Andrews on the compilatory and scientific writing of the ancient world.

The conference will include approximately twenty papers, running from early afternoon on Wednesday 13 June to the afternoon of Friday 15th. Conference programme and list of titles to follow soon. The conference website, including full programme, will be available from the middle of next week-link from http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/conferences/index.shtml.

The conference is generously funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Classical Association and the Hellenic Society.

Speakers include:
Mary Beagon (Manchester), Aude Doody (UCD), Rebecca Flemming (Cambridge), Hugh Kennedy (St Andrews), Teresa Morgan (Oxford), Claire Preston (Cambridge), Neil Rhodes (St Andrews), Christopher Smith (St Andrews), William West (Northwestern), Harriet Zurndorfer (Leiden)

The cost for delegates booking before 15 May is £200, including conference fee, two nights' accommodation, and all meals up to the afternoon of Friday 15th. Prices may rise very slightly after that date, depending on availability of rooms. Additional nights will be available for £40 per night. Prices for shorter stays are available on request. We will organise dinner in a local restaurant on the Friday night for those who are able to stay.

We have a small amount of funding available to help with travel costs for postgraduate delegates: if you would like to be considered for this funding, please contact Jason Koenig (jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk) by 30 April at the latest.

To register, please contact the conference secretary, Mrs Margaret Goudie (mg@st-andrews.ac.uk) with details of accommodation requirements.

For more general queries please contact one of the conference organisers: Jason Koenig (jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk) or Greg Woolf (gdw2@st-andrews.ac.uk).

PATRIARCHALISM

An informal conference at Reading
Saturday June 16 2007: 11.00-18.00

Patriarchalism is the strange belief that the character of authority in households is (other things being equal) the same as that of authority in states. For much of the seventeenth century, this belief was widely accepted among the Anglican clergy, in spite of the fact that it that ignored a structuring principle of virtually all Western social thought - the distinction between the 'public' political and the 'private' household spheres - and that its implications were wildly at variance with English social and political practice (the English did enjoy property rights against their monarch, even if those rights could in some circumstance be over-ridden; English fathers did not execute their children). Questions that may arise include

The relationship between its acceptance and Jacobean political debates The distinctiveness (or otherwise) of Filmer's formulation, especially when contrasted with French thinking The degree of its popularisation in what was probably its heyday: the reign of Charles II Its relationship with the great anti-patriarchalist works of the early 1680s Its challenge to Lockean liberalism The scale of its subsequent persistence (including its influence on American loyalism) The degree to which it shaped perceptions of actual household relations, including relations between
Husbands and wives
Parents and children
Employers and servants
Masters and slaves

There will be two main sessions and a concluding general discussion. Session One ('Polities') will be introduced by Glenn Burgess, Rachel Foxley, and Johann Sommerville. Session Two ('Households') will be introduced by Ralph Houlbrooke, Margaret Sommerville, and Naomi Tadmor.

I anticipate a memorable event that will result in intellectual progress. To reserve a place, please simply reply to this email; to recruit a friend or student who might benefit, please forward it to the person or people concerned and ask them to contact me at this address (a.d.t.cromartie@rdg.ac.uk). A charge of £10 to non-speakers will subsidise lunch; there will also be the customary cheap and cheerful dinner for anyone not in a hurry to get home.

Dr Alan Cromartie
Reader in Politics and Director of Research
School of Sociology, Politics & International Relations
University of Reading
RG6 6AA

Late humanism and political ideology in northern Europe, 1580-1620

10-11 July 2007
University of Cambridge: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and Trinity College

This conference is concerned with the manifestations of what has been called 'late', 'Tacitean', 'pragmatic' and 'neo-stoic' humanism. Speakers will explore its relationship with Ciceronian humanism; its association with politics, pedagogy, literature and visual culture; its impact on natural philosophy and the applied sciences; its role in seventeenth-century state-building, colonialism and religious and civil conflicts. If there was a prevailing intellectual culture of northern Europe, how did local contexts reflect or complicate that prevalence?

Speakers include Daniel Andersson, David Colclough, Anthony Grafton, Harro Hopfl, Jill Kraye, Brian Ogilvie, Markku Peltonen, Jennifer Richards, Richard Serjeantson, Alan Shepard, Jacob Soll and Malcolm Smuts. A final round-table discussion will be led by Warren Boutcher and David Norbrook.

Organizers:
Dr Aysha Pollnitz < aep33@cam.ac.uk >
Dr Michael Ullyot < michael.ullyot@ell.ox.ac.uk >

Conference web site, including provisional programme: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/latehumanism.html

To register for a place, please complete & submit this form (RTF): http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/latehumanismform.rtf

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH); the George Macauley Trevelyan Fund and Trinity College, Cambridge.