Manchester University Medieval and Early Modern Literature: MA

The MA in Medieval and Early Modern Literature is now accepting applications for study in 2008-09. This innovative programme regularly attracts and trains the best graduate students in the field with its blend of texts and practical sessions.

The teaching staff, which includes Naomi Baker, Anke Bernau, Jerome de Groot, David Matthews, Gale Owen-Crocker, Jackie Pearson and Alexander Rumble, has an international reputation in a number of the most important themes that are currently stimulating scholarly debate

You will be taught cutting edge, hands-on research techniques as well as key theoretical approaches; you will be able to use a world-class research library; you will be part of a dynamicgraduate community. You may choose to work on interdisciplinary Anglo-Saxon Studies, on Middle English or Early Modern texts, or can choose to select thematically related course-units from across the full scope and date-range of the programme. We regularly have postgraduate masterclasses run by leaders in the field such as Alan Sinfield, Ann Hughes, Catherine Belsey, Stephen Knight and Sharon Achinstein.

What our students say about us: 'I've really enjoyed studying for a PhD at Manchester. The postgraduate community in English and American Studies is very supportive, and my supervisors were excellent. It was also exciting to be involved with an interdisciplinary research environment, with lots of opportunities for interaction with other subject areas.'

Course outline includes:

Material Cultures
Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval Culture and Context
The Anglo-Saxon World: Images of Man, Plant and Beast
Rebellion and Reaction 1300-1450
Early Modern Masculinities
Chaucer, Troilus, and Criticism
Literacy and the Book in England before 1200
Ugliness, Disability and Selfhood 1560-1770
Medievalisms
The writing of religious dissent: Literature in the age of Milton
Magic and Popular Belief, c.1200-c.1500
Early Modern X-Files
    Reconceiving the Renaissance
    War in the Early Modern Imagination

Details at: http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/englishamericanstudies/research/medieval

or email Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk

Early Modern Reading Group

The next meeting will be on Tuesday 11 December, at 6.30pm, in The Skinners Arms, Judd Street, WC1. We'll discuss Walter Ralegh's 'The 21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia'. It's in the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, ed. Woudhuysen, pp. 102-16.

Details: a.smyth@rdg.ac.uk

Eating Culture on Stage: Shakespeare's Food

Shakespeare Jahrbuch 2009
Call for Papers

The Shakespeare Jahrbuch 2009 will be a special issue devoted to 'Eating Culture: Shakespeare's Food'. Food is an integral part of culture, and our social identity is constituted by what, how and with whom we eat. Techniques of food preparation and cooking, table manners, practices of eating and drinking, as well as consumption and fasting construct social meaning and establish social cohesion and cultural belonging. In the early modern age, culinary norms and regimes were defined, challenged and/or performed in medical, moral and religious dietaries; in the seasonal changes between everyday life and the festive seasons; in socially specific eating cultures; as well as in the fundamental religious issues of the time, such as the early modern debate on the Eucharist. Colonial enterprises in the 16th and 17th centuries, the establishment of international trade, and political and economic encounters with non-European cultures had a considerable impact on domestic culinary rites and diets. However, food and eating cultures have always been a means of differentiating between the self and the other with cannibalism as the quintessence of cultural alterity as represented by Shakespeare‚s Caliban. With their numerous scenes of banqueting and feasting, figures of festive excess like Falstaff or Sir Toby, and performances of uncanny culinary arts as in Titus Andronicus or Macbeth, Shakespeare‚s plays investigate the complex social, political, religious and sexual aspects of eating and drinking.

The editorial board invites essays on the following questions:

·         banqueting and the Renaissance stage

·         Shakespeare's revellers

·         revelling, feasting and banqueting in Shakespeare's plays

·         hunger and fasting in Shakespeare‚s plays

·         eating, drinking and religious debates

·         cannibalism and orgies of revenge

·         early modern colonialism and consumption

·         common and exotic food in the early modern age

·         culinary and digestive symbolism

·         early modern body concepts and culinary practices

·         good food ˆ bad food: recipes and dietaries

·         performances of banquets in stage productions, film adaptations, and rewritings of Shakespeare‚s plays

The Shakespeare Jahrbuch, the Yearbook of the German Shakespeare Society, is a peer-reviewed journal. It offers contributions in German and English, scholarly articles, an extensive section of book reviews, and reports on Shakespeare productions in the German-speaking world. It also documents the activities of the Shakespeare Society. Papers to be published in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch should be formatted according to our style sheet, which can be downloaded from our website: http://www.shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en/publications/jahrbuch/note-on-submission.html

Please send your manuscripts (of about 5,000 words) to the editor by March 31, 2008.

Professor Sabine Schülting
Shakespeare Jahrbuch
Institut für Englische Philologie
Freie Universität Berlin
Gosslerstr. 2-4, D-14195 Berlin
e-mail: sabine.schuelting@fu-berlin.de

The London Shakespeare Seminar

Senate House, Room NG16
Russell Sq., London

Monday, 10th Dec, 5.30

Richard Wilson, 'The World's Volume: printer, page, and the literary field'
Adam Smyth, 'Almanacs and Life-Writing in Shakespeare's England'

Details: Sonia Massai, sonia.massai@kcl.ac.uk

Cunnilingus in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

WILL FISHER (CUNY-Lehman), Tuesday December 4, at the Columbia Early Modern Seminar.

Will Fisher is associate professor of English literature at Lehman College, The City University of New York. His first book, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently at work on a book about sexual practices in early modern England that will include chapters on kissing, chin-chucking, intercrural intercourse, cunnilingus, the use of dildos, and flogging.

The Seminar will take place in 507 Philosophy Hall, Columbia campus, from 6.30 to 8pm. All welcome.

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

Shakespearean Histories and the Art of Forgetting

Birkbeck College
School of English and Humanities
Special Lecture

Tobias Doering (University of Munich)
Wednesday, Dec 5, 4:30 pm in Room 503 (5th floor)
School of English and Humanities
30 Russell Sq, London WC1

ALL WELCOME

For further information contact Prof Thomas Healy (t.healy@bbk.ac.uk)

University of Reading Early Modern Research Seminar

Wednesday 5 December

Dr. Phil Withington (Leeds University), ‘An “early modern muddle”?: The history of an historical category’

All enquiries to Michelle O'Callaghan, m.f.ocallaghan@reading.ac.uk

Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar

Meeting at the Columbia University Faculty House
Friday, December 14, 2007
Cocktails 5:00-6:00; Dinner 6:00-7:00; Meeting commences shortly after 7:00

Thomas Cartelli, Professor of English and NEH Professor of Humanities, Muhlenberg College

"Channeling the Ghosts: The Wooster Group Remediation of the 1964 Electronovision Hamlet"

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. Please also indicate if you will attend dinner and if you will be bringing guests.

Details: Adam G. Hooks, agh2108@columbia.edu.

London Seminar for Early Modern Visual Culture

AUTUMN PROGRAMME 2007
Monday 3 December @ 6.00pm, Research Forum South Room
Dr Denis Ribouillault (Courtauld Institute)
Sacred Landscape in Early Modern Rome: The Villa Montalto Reconsidered

Date to be Confirmed @ 6.00 pm
Professor David Solkin (Courtauld Institute) POSTPONED TO SPRING TERM
Turner’s Gleanings

Monday 10 December @ 6.00 pm, Seminar Room 1
Dr Sarah Monks (University of York)
On the Horizon

ALL WELCOME

Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 0RN

Organised jointly by

Denis Ribouillault: denis.ribouillault@courtauld.ac.uk Mechthild Fend: m.fend@ucl.ac.uk

Middleton

Gary Taylor on Middleton's excellence, in Saturday's Guardian ... http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2212452,00.html

Folger Institute: Shakespeare on Screen

Shakespeare on Screen in Theory and Practice

A Spring Semester Folger Institute Seminar directed by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe

The past two decades have witnessed an array of new approaches to the staging of Shakespeare on screen, ranging from Peter Greenaway's genre-bending experiments in "database" cinema to Michael Almereyda's recasting of Hamlet as a devotee of visual technologies as well as to Julie Taymor's postmodern collisions of time and space. The seminar will take stock of this diversity, paying particular attention to the audio-visual idioms these adaptations draw on: from European art film to the conventions of television, documentary, rock video, performance art, computer games, broadband cinema, and other new media. Recent critical approaches to screen Shakespeare have also been synthetic in their methodological and theoretical emphases, drawing on the resources of film and television studies, performance studies, textual studies, and new media studies. The seminar will focus on several of the more cutting-edge developments in screen Shakespeare, welcoming a range of approaches to adaptation, exhibition, and reception. It will seek opportunities to look back from this recent period of experimentation to the long history of Shakespeare on screen, inviting reflection on the place of audio-visual adaptations in academic and classroom practice. Above all, the seminar seeks to identify larger avenues of inquiry as well as the skills and technical resources that will be needed as the field continues to expand.

Directors: Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe are the co-authors of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007).

Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English and NEH Professor of Humanities at Muhlenberg College. In addition to many articles on Shakespeare and various media, he is the author of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991) and Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999).

Katherine Rowe is Professor of English at Bryn Mawr, author of Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (1999), and co-editor of Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004). Her current work focuses on adaptation as a cultural process and on the place of screen media in Shakespeare studies.

Schedule: Fridays, 1 - 4:30 p.m., 1 February through 25 April 2008, except 29 February, 14 March, and 4 April. Additional screenings may occasionally be scheduled on Friday mornings.

Application Deadline: 4 January 2008 for admission. Visit www.folger.edu/institute to access our online application form and
guidelines.

Please contact institute@folger.edu with any questions.

Shakespeare on Silver Street

James Shapiro reviews Charles Nicholl's latest, The Lodger, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2199818,00.html

Performing Renaissance History 1500-1660

[this from the LRS ...]

Filming and Performing Renaissance History 1500-1660 is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Research Networks project. It places in juxtaposition individuals and groups already addressing or interested in exploring representations of Renaissance history across and between genres, cultures and disciplines. Concentrating on all types of filmic and performative examples, the network investigates the corpus of representations of the years between 1500 and 1660 (such as the history film, the television period drama, television history, themed museum exhibition, reenactment experience and historically-situated theatre and opera).

The central aim of the network is to bring together individuals and groups from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (including literary studies, film, television, history, theatre and drama). Conversations will be encouraged between established academic representatives, practitioners (for instance, theatre directors, filmmakers, documentary makers and television commissioning editors) and museum officers and curators. The purpose here is to arrive, through meetings and exchange, at a genuinely interdisciplinary understanding of how the historical phenomenon known as the Renaissance‚ is represented and of how this changes in the light of time, place and mode of expression. In particular, attention will be paid to the contextual and political influences on artists and producers, and to the fluctuating aesthetics of visual interpretation. The network will foster a new interdisciplinary methodology which, pooling multiple perspectives, will work to provide a more generous and nuanced acknowledgement of the ways in which the Renaissance‚ signifies across disciplines and in relation to a whole gamut of events and personalities. Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion will generate a keen awareness not only of the means whereby the early modern period is interpreted in the popular consciousness, but also of the utility of the various disciplines' approaches and methodologies. 

Principal investigator: Professor Mark Thornton Burnett

Events: Symposia

1. 26-27 April 2008. Symposium 1: Players and Personalities‚, Queen‚s, Belfast. A two-day symposium devoted to assessing the significance of the ways in which all types of early modern historical figures and groupings, celebrated and quotidian, emerge into representational visibility. The symposium is envisaged as comprising shorter papers, plenary lectures and workshop sessions. One afternoon, organized by a team of local postgraduates, will be devoted to postgraduate interventions.

2. 20-21 September 2008. Symposium 2: Representing Conflict, Crisis and Nation‚, Queen‚s, Belfast. A complementary two-day symposium devoted to assessing the significance of the ways in which the myriad contests of 1500-1660 have been imaginatively reproduced. The form will be as above, including a designated postgraduate session.

3. 25-26 April 2009. Symposium 3: Temporalities and Materialities‚, Queen‚s, Belfast. A complementary two-day symposium devoted to assessing the significance of the ways in which temporal boundaries and material objects continue to be re-constructed. The form will be as above, including a designated postgraduate session.

4. 5-6 September 2009. Panel / Roundtable Discussions, British Shakespeare Association Conference, London. These will unite the network‚s players with contributors to the conference and comprise a) a panel of three of the most pertinent papers from each of the symposia and b) a roundtable discussion to which all of the project‚s participants will be invited. This will be an opportunity to clarify the final significance of the project and to profile its findings in an international context.

Postgraduate Bursaries Available

Deadline for expressions of interest: 28 February 2008

Contact Professor Mark Thornton Burnett, mark-burnett@qub.ac.uk

Our Other Shakespeare

... Thomas Middleton's Boys (and Girls) Able to Ravish a Man

A lecture by Professor Gary Taylor, Wednesday 21 November 6pm
Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe

The evening hosted by Globe Education and Oxford University Press, celebrates the launch of the eagerly awaited Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. The book brings together, for the first time in a single volume, all the works currently attributed to Thomas Middleton. It is the first edition of Middleton's works since 1886 and is the fruit of the two decades of research by an international team of 75 scholars.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

To ensure a place, please RSVP to Dr Farah Karim-Cooper
farah@shakespearesglobe.com, 0207 902 1439

The second Medieval and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Workshop ...

will take place on Wednesday 14 November, from 5.00 to 7.00 pm, at CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge.

Dr John Marenbon (Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge) will
deliver a paper on 'How Not to Write About Medieval Philosophy.'

There will be ample opportunity for both formal and informal discussion
following the paper, and refreshments will be served. Participants are also
invited to join us for a pay-as-you-go meal at a local restaurant after the
workshop.

Medievalists, early-modernists and interested others from all disciplines
and departments are warmly invited to attend.

***

M&EM is a new, informal, inter-departmental forum based at CRASSH and
supported by the Society for Renaissance Studies. It provides a common
resource and point of contact for all those working on the medieval and
early modern periods, in particular postgraduates and postdoctoral
researchers, with the aim of fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and
offering practical and positive support.

For more information please contact the convenors, Jenny Rampling
(jmr82@cam.ac.uk) and Felicity Green (fmg26@cam.ac.uk).

Britain's Icons: Writing, Images and Cultural Signs 1450-1670

A Conference at Birkbeck College

Programme

Venue:

23rd November Room G01 Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Sq, London WC1.

24 November, Room 101, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, 30 Russell Sq, London WC1.

A map of the area may be found on

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps

Friday, 23 November

10:00-10:30 Registration

10:30-12:30 

Margaret Healy (Sussex), 'Hieroglyphs, Emblems and the Eye of the Mind.'

Susan Wiseman (Birkbeck), Civil War Iconoclasm.

12:30-1:30 lunch (own arrangements)

1:30-3:30

Anthony Bale (Birkbeck), 'Preserving Sacramental Childhood? Boy saints and ritual murder narratives in the Reformation.'

Philip Schwyzer (Exeter) Cast down his Bones! Early Protestant responses to Catholic corpses.‚

3:30-4:00 tea

4:00-6:00

Tom Betteridge (Oxford Brookes), 'How many bloody letters been written in this book': Christ as text in the work of John Fisher, Thomas More and George Herbert.

David Loewenstein (Wisconsin), Burning Heretics and Fashioning Martyrs: Religious Extremism and Violence in John Foxe.

6:00-7:30 drinks reception.

Saturday 24 November

9:00-9:30 coffee

9:30-10:30

Isabel Davis, 'Plastic icons: Picturing the Conjugal Family in the Later Middle Ages.'

10:30-11:00 coffee

11:00-1:00

Richard Williams (Birkbeck), 'The Reformation of an Icon: The 'Portrait' of Christ in Late-Sixteenth-Century England.'

Matthew Dimmock, (Sussex) 'Anti-Icons: Alternative Christs in Post-Reformation England'

1:00-2:00 lunch

2:00-4:00 

Tom Healy (Birkbeck), Elizabeth I and the Spenserian imagination.‚

Alice Hunt (Southampton), Idol ceremony?: James I's Protestant Coronation, 1603.‚

Details from Prof Thomas Healy (t.healy@bbk.ac.uk)

Prof Susan Wiseman (s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk)

Staff/Waged: £20, Students/Unwaged £10.

"SUSPECTED SHAKESPEARES": PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES IN EARLY MODERN ATTRIBUTION STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies is pleased to issue a call for papers for "Suspected Shakespeares", a one-day conference on attribution studies in early modern dramatic literature, to be held Saturday, March 8. Submissions are welcome from all members of the academic community.

"Suspected Shakespeares" will combine paper presentations with staged readings of key scenes from early modern plays in order to explore the critical and innovative scholarly work being conducted in the field of early modern dramatic attribution studies. In particular, the conference will provide a space for the exchange of ideas centering on the study of canon formation, on the question of how and why plays are added to or removed from the body of work attributed to a particular writer, and on the issue of the rhetoric and methodologies employed by attribution scholars in their studies.

Papers that address the above topics, as well as papers that engage with the attribution of a specific early modern dramatic text, part of a text, or group of texts are welcome. Of particular interest are papers that employ, or debate the effectiveness of, critical approaches to attribution study including (but not limited to) computational stylistics, textual analysis and bibliography, affective stylistics, performance and adaptation study, and collaboration study. Presentations are limited to twenty minutes. Papers proposed should represent new work in the field: the ideas and arguments presented should not have been previously professionally presented or published.

To propose a paper, please email an abstract of less than 500 words, accompanied by a summary of the submitter's academic background and work, to the Conference conveners, Matteo Pangallo (mpangall@english.umass.edu) and John Yargo (jyargo@english.umass.edu). Abstracts must be received no later than Saturday, December 1st. Presenters will be notified by Friday, January 4th and will be invited to choose an illustrative scene from the text of their choice for the staged reading portion of the conference.

For more information on the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, visit www.umass.edu/renaissance or contact the director of the Center, Arthur F. Kinney (afkinney@english.umass.edu).

Call for Papers: 'Manuscripts and Miscellaneity, c. 1450-1720'

University of Cambridge, 3-4 July 2008

An international conference organized by Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online.

Speakers to include: Barbara Benedict, Julia Boffey, Victoria Burke, Margaret Connolly, Alexandra Gillespie, Earle Havens, Arthur Marotti, Steven May, Marcy North, Fred Schurink, John Thompson

Commonplace books, collections, miscellanies; collections of lyric verse, extracts from authors, sacred and profane, topographical, heraldic and legal information, estate andhousehold accounts and recipes. How do we describe or classify manuscripts with such miscellaneous contents? What importance did such objects, frequently used for several different purposes over the course of their lives, have in the manuscript culture of the late medieval and early modern periods? And in what ways can recent critical interests in the material history of the book and of the history of reading practices help us to understand them?

In addressing these questions, this conference will bring together literary scholars and cultural historians, codicologists and historians of the book. It will foster discussion of manuscript miscellanies written or compiled between the mid-fifteenth and early-eighteenth centuries: their contents, their material forms, how they were written and read, the ways in which their contents were arranged and disposed (within single books or across sequences of books), who owned them and how they used them, and the places that they might have had in the schoolroom or university, home or library.

It will also question the very concept of miscellaneity, in relation to other kinds of compilation and collection, and to other methods of book-classification - is miscellaneity a helpful critical, methodological or bibliographical term? And how do we view the miscellany differently in this age of digital facsimiles and hypertext?

We have limited space for further papers at the conference, and would like to invite proposals in the following or related areas, though by no means restricted to them:

- Concepts of miscellaneity (as collection, variety, multiplicity)

- The categorizing / classification of miscellaneous manuscripts (within libraries or criticism)

- Manuscript and printed miscellanies and their relation

- Commonplace books

- Poetic miscellanies

- Household miscellanies (and the miscellany in the home)

- Religious miscellanies

- The ownership and circulation of miscellanies

- Female writers and miscellanies

- Education (miscellanies in the school, university, educational theory)

- The materiality of the miscellaneous manuscript (layout or arrangement of books, their material structures and construction)

- Miscellanies as 'literature'

- Contemporary editing or printing of miscellanies

- The manuscript miscellany in the digital age

Please send proposals, or enquiries, to Dr Christopher Burlinson, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge (cmb29@cam.ac.uk) by 31 January 2008.

We hope to be able to arrange accommodation in Cambridge for our speakers and attendees, but cannot guarantee the availability of accommodation to those who register for the conference after 31 January 2008. In order to register for the conference, please contact Dr Christopher Burlinson (cmb29@cam.ac.uk) as soon as possible.