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