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

Rethinking Medieval Art

The International Center for Medieval Art Graduate Student Committee
is sponsoring a session at the International Congress on Medieval
Studies (May 8?11, 2008) in Kalamazoo and would like to encourage
submissions to:

Everything Old Is New Again: Rethinking Medieval Art.

The graduate student committee of the International Center for
Medieval Art is a group that seeks to give a voice to graduate
students in medieval art history. For our third year at the
Medieval Congress, we are proposing a session that investigates new
approaches to the medieval object, explores new methodologies, and
challenges traditional studies of medieval art. As a committee that
addresses the concerns of graduate students, we would like to
cultivate progressive scholarship and especially to encourage
scholars early in their careers to submit paper proposals (a title
and a brief abstract) by September 15 on medieval art of any period
and medium. We would welcome historiographic studies,
interdisciplinary approaches, and papers that expand the notion of
what constitutes medieval art.

We would also like to encourage membership in the committee. To
submit a proposal or to find out about participation in the
committee, please contact:

Laura Cochrane
Art History Department
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Phone: 302-737-7461
Fax; 302-831-8243
Email: lcochrane@gmail.com

For the general call for papers and more about the Kalamazoo
Congress, see http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/sessions.html

THE COLUMBIA EARLY MODERN SEMINAR: FALL 2007 SCHEDULE

Tuesday September 4
Julie Crawford (Columbia)
Lady Anne Clifford's Reading List

Tuesday October 30
Suzanne Trill (Edinburgh)
Royalism and Romance: Re-reading the lives‚ of Anne, Lady Halkett (c.1621/2-99)

Tuesday December 4
Will Fisher (CUNY-Lehman)
Stray[ing] lower where the pleasant fountains lie: Cunnilingus in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

The Columbia Early Modern Seminar is a forum for new and exciting work in early modern studies. Seminars run on Tuesday evenings from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm in 507 Philosophy Hall on Columbia's Morningside campus (please note new meeting place). All welcome.

For more information, or to join our mailing list, please contact Alan Stewart (ags2105@columbia.edu).

EARLY MODERN READING:

BOOKS, COMMUNITIES, CONVERSATIONS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Newcastle University, 11-12 April 2008

Keynote Speakers:

Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge), Cathy Shrank (Sheffield), Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge)

The history of reading has experienced an explosive growth in recent years. Scholars of early modern England have been at the forefront of research in this area, and studies of the reading practices of a number of notable figures, including Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson, and Sir William Drake, have appeared over the last fifteen years. Historians have gleaned from notebooks and marginalia a model of reading as utilitarian; this values the text primarily as a resource to be mined for information or turns of phrase and applied to the life or writings of the reader or their patron. Such work has offered many important insights, but it has perhaps also narrowed our understanding of the practice of reading and its social and political import. It does not give us a model that is flexible enough to explain the relationship between reading and the development of literary‚ form, nor does it recognise the diverse practical, political and social interests which reading may have served.

We invite proposals for conference papers which aim to extend or complicate our understanding of early modern readers and reading practice. This might be understood to include the conversations - or indeed quarrels - which follow particular texts; the act of reading itself as dialogic; readings that Œgo against the grain‚; the sense of literary writings as acts of reading; reading as information gathering and the organization of knowledge; and textual exchange as a form of association, or negotiation, between individuals, communities, and cultures.

Specific subjects which contributors might address include (but are not limited to):

Paratexts and marginalia
Rhetoric and imitation
Translation
Scientific reading
Information management
Book and manuscript circulation
Book ownership
Reading communities
Education and reading
Dialogue and civil conversation
Oppositional reading
Censorship
Reading and politics
Reformation and religious controversy

Please send proposals (100 words) by 7 December 2007 to Fred Schurink (fred.schurink@ncl.ac.uk).

The London Renaissance Seminar 2007-2008

October 13, 2007 Tolerance and Intolerance
Speakers include: Justin Champion, Sue Mendus, Blair Worden
Organiser: Eliane Glaser
2.00pm-5.30 pm, Birkbeck College, Malet Street

Nov 3 Performance
Speakers include: Pascale Aebischer, Bridget Escolme
Organisers: Lucy Munro, Gordon McMullan
2.00pm-5.30 pm, Birkbeck College, Malet Street.

Nov 23-4 Conference: Britain's Icon's: Writing, Images, and other Cultural Signs 1450-1670
Organisers: Tom Healy, Sue Wiseman

January 19, 2008 Colonialism and Travel
Speakers include Susan Castillo, Jesse Edwards, Peter Hulme, Gerald MacLean.
Organisers: Gordon MacMullan, Sue Wiseman
2.00pm-5.30 pm, Birkbeck College, Malet Street.

March 8  Life Writings
Speakers include Marie-Louise Coolahan, Kate Hodgkin, Adam Smyth.
Organiser: Michelle O‚Callaghan.
2.00pm-5.30 pm, Birkbeck College, Malet Street.

May 17 Summer Panel:  The Renaissance in the Twenty-first Century‚
Organiser: Tom Healy.
2.00pm-4.30pm Birkbeck College, Malet St

Hamlet

[this via the SHAKSPER net ..]

Stephen Brown (Cavanagh) writes ...

"I am very pleased to say that "Hamlet", the Derry Film Initiative production of 2005, is now available to view online here:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8957003244474950410

As Derry Film Initiative is a not-for-profit organization, and as everyone who contributed their time and talents to the production did so for nothing, it was decided by the producers and director that, rather than distributing the film commercially, it should be shared free of charge to reflect the spirit in which it was created.

Please forward this link to friends, colleagues, students, and anyone you think may be interested in viewing this production, and please do feel free to rate the film or leave a comment.

Many thanks again to all of you who were in any way involved in getting the production off the ground and seeing it through to completion."

Truth Will Out

Crime, Criminals & Criminality, 1500-1700

Keynote Speakers

Martin Ingram

Claire Jowitt

Mary Polito

Nina Taunton

Sue Wiseman

A 3-day international, inter-disciplinary conference, sponsored by the Royal Historical Society and the Society for Renaissance Studies, which aims to provide a forum for scholars who work on various aspects of crimes, the people who commit them, and how such acts and people are imagined in the early modern period.

Topics include:

Criminals in popular literature - Prison writing - Female crimes and criminals

Crime and the Early Modern State - Crime and the literary canon - Early modern legislation - Patterns and geographical locations of crime - The impact of technological and methodological developments on the study of representations of early modern crime and criminals.

Truth Will Out will be held at Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury, Kent CT1 1QU from 22 to 24 August, 2007.

For further information and registration form, please contact the organisers:

Dr Nadia Bishai (nadia.bishai@canterbury.ac.uk)

Dr Astrid Stilma (astrid.stilma@canterbury.ac.uk)

Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 1QU

The Renaissance of the Northern Renaissance Seminar

[this via the LRS ...] Dear Colleague,

We would like to take this opportunity to announce plans to renew the
Northern Renaissance Seminar Series, having discussed the idea
informally with several of you over the past months. We've taken
'Northern' in a broad sense in this mailing to be inclusive across
borders, as well as vaguely 'north of Watford', but will inevitably
have missed colleagues and postgraduate students, so please forward to
others working in our period.

The NRS is an important forum for postgraduates to offer first papers
and network, as well as for newer and older colleagues to share work
in an atmosphere which encourages the exchange and exploration of
ideas. We wish to continue its tradition as a happy medium between
department-based seminars and large conferences, in which we can
generate new directions for early modern research.
As a starting point, for the academic year 2007-08 we are sponsoring
two day-long seminars at Lancaster University. Plans for 2008-09, we
hope, can be discussed during the second of these meetings.

For 2007-08, therefore, we warmly invite you to participate in the two
seminars to be held on Saturday 10 November 2007 and on Saturday 23
February 2008, and attach a call for papers for each of these.

We look forward to hearing from you with proposals and hope to have
the chance to welcome you, or welcome you back to Lancaster, in the
coming year.

Prof. Alison Findlay
Dr. Robert Appelbaum
Dr. Liz Oakley-Brown
(The Shakespeare Programme, Lancaster Univeristy)

'Everyday Life'
Saturday 10 November
10 a.m - 5.00 p.m

The importance of the everyday for understanding early modern culture and society took its main impetus from the Annales school of historiography in the 1960s and 70s, and it has long since become a main theme of new historicist and related schools of early modern cultural studies since the 1980s. In fact, the everyday has become so common a concern of Renaissance studies that we may well be taking it for granted. What is 'the everyday' in the context of early modern Europe? What is its relation to the exceptional event, the ritual moment, the conduct of political life, or the production of literature and art? How was the everyday vertically and horizontally integrated, or non-integrated, in view of regional affiliations and class and status divisions? How did artists and writers represent it - or for that matter, fail to represent it?

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on these and related questions.

Please send proposals of c.200 words to Liz Oakley-Brown by 25 September 2007

The Idea of Pleasure
10am - 5.00 p.m 
Friday 23 February

Following up on our seminar on 'Everyday Life', we seek papers discussing how pleasure, and the idea of pleasure, contributed to the organisation and representation of the material world in early modern Europe. What beliefs were held about 'pleasure'? What relationships between religion and pleasure are developed (e.g. by Erasmus, More, and Rabelais) and beyond? How was pleasure signified in during the period? What rewards and punishments, or delights and dangers, were associated with it? Was pleasure understood as a single phenomenon, experienced across a spectrum of private and public arenas of life, or were there different kinds of pleasures associated with different kinds of experience? How was pleasure related to penitence, or pain? How was it related to class, gender, and ethnicity?

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on all aspects of the idea of pleasure in the everyday life of early modern Europe, and especially encourage interdisciplinary studies of the questions involved.

Please send proposals c.200 words to Robert Appelbaum by 21 December 2007

The Third Conference of the British Society for Literature and Science

Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited for the third annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science. The conference will be held at Keele University, from 27ˆ29 March 2008. Plenary speakers include Frank Close, OBE (Professor of Physics, Exeter College, Oxford), Steven Connor (Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College, London), and Helen Small (Fellow in English, Pembroke College, Oxford).
Papers may address topics in the interactions of literature and science in any period and any languages. Presenters need not be based in UK institutions. We also invite panel proposals for three papers of 20 minutes or four papers of 15 minutes; members of the panel should be drawn from more than one institution.
Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words and a 100-word biographical note (or in the case of a panel, abstracts and notes for each speaker) to bsls@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk, by 30 November 2007. Please send abstracts in the body of messages; do not use attachments. Alternatively, abstracts and proposals may be posted to Dr Sharon Ruston, School of Humanities, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK.
Please address any queries to Dr Sharon Ruston at the email or postal address above.

Early Modern Reading Group

The next Early Modern Reading Group will rendezvous at 6:30pm on Wednesday 29th August, at The Norfolk Arms, on Leigh Street, off Judd Street, WC1. This time we'll discuss Thomas Dekker's 'The Wonderfull Yeare' (1603).

There is a good text here: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/handle/1794/732

Questions: a.smyth@rdg.ac.uk

International Hakluyt Conference, 2008

"RICHARD HAKLUYT (ca. 1552-1616): LIFE, TIMES, LEGACY"

An international interdisciplinary conference at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 15-17 May, 2008.

Plenary Speakers: Mary Fuller (MIT), Peter Mancall (Univ. of Southern California), Joan-Pau Rubiés (LSE), Sarah Tyacke (Leverulme Emeritus Research Fellow)

This interdisciplinary conference will address the significance of the work of Richard Hakluyt, the prolific collector and editor of first-hand discovery and adventure narratives, and author of The Principall Navigations (1589), expanded as The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 volumes (1598-1600).

This conference will gather together an interdisciplinary group of Hakluyt scholars and experts on Renaissance travel writing from around the world to discuss Hakluyt’s work and legacy in context. It will also establish a consortium interested in preparing a new scholarly edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations for the twenty-first century.

Topics for discussion include Hakluyt’s life and biography; his texts and their influence on Western and Eastern exploration, colonialism and empiricism; his legacy in terms of his immediate successors but also his impact on the ways in which later English explorations and colonial activities were conducted, and the enduring commemoration of his work in The Hakluyt Society, named in his honour and founded in 1846.

If you would like to offer a paper (of 25 minutes' duration) at the conference, please send a title and 250-word abstract before 30 September 2007 to:

Dr Daniel Carey
Department of English, National University of Ireland, Galway
daniel.carey@nuigalway.ie
Or
Professor Claire Jowitt
School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University
claire.jowitt@ntu.ac.uk

Conference web site: www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.21540

Shakespeare, in pod form

High up here in the command centre of Ren Lit, floating above the skies, news reaches us, via Literature Compass, of a Guardian interview with Jonathan Bate on editing Shakespeare’s First Folio, with contributions from the RSC’s director Michael Boyd and Deborah Shaw, director of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. Align your nodes and portals with the following:

http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Books/Books/2007/04/23/Shakespearefinal.mp3

Call for Papers: Renaissance In-Betweenness

Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society Annual Conference
Vancouver, BC
3-5 April 2008

The Annual Conference of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society (PNRS) will be held from April 3-5, 2008 in downtown Vancouver at the Hyatt Regency (room rates: $141.00 CDN per night, single or double). The theme for this year's conference is 'Renaissance In-Betweenness', and our plenary speakers will be Fran Dolan (University of California, Davis) and Elizabeth Harvey (University of Toronto).

We invite papers, panels, discussion groups, and workshops that examine Renaissance engagements with various transitional figures and cultural artifacts. The PNRS program coincides with the annual convention of the Medieval Academy at the Hyatt Regency, and both organizations hope that conference participants will engage in fruitful conversation across a range of historical fields and disciplines.

We invite proposals in the following areas for the 2008 conference:
Liminal Spaces: urban liberties, walls, doors, thresholds, docks, rivers and hedges
Figures of the In-Between: stage devils, panders, bawds, pages, hermaphrodites, messengers, angels, scribes, the noble savage, typesetters, publishers, usurers, translators and children
Religious via media
Generic Conventions and Hybrid Genres: in medias res, interludes, scene changes (jigs and dumbshows) and tragicomedy
Species Boundaries: integuments (skin, bark, pelt) and hybrid creatures
Mixed governments and interregna
Arcane Knowledge: zodiacal cusps, equinoxes and alchemy
Suspended States: sleep, trances and exorcisms
Objects of Exchange: letters, coins, gifts, rings, jewelry, potions, clothes and fabric
Places of Exchange: The Royal Exchange and pawnshops
Periodization and Historiography

Please email individual abstracts (250-words) or panel / workshop proposals to Tiffany Alkan (talkan@sfu.ca) and Vin Nardizzi (nardizzi@interchange.ubc.ca) by September 1, 2007.