THE POLITICS OF SHAKESPEARE

International Conference
18-20 December 2008: Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

The Centre of Advanced Study. Department of English, Jadavpur University, in association with the Shakespeare Association of America, invites abstracts of papers for an International Conference on 'The Politics of Shakespeare', to be held on 18-20 December 2008. The purpose of the partnership is to open new Shakespearean exchanges between West and East.

The conference will cover both political themes and concerns in Shakespeare's own plays, and the political implications (in the widest sense) of the study, staging and reception of Shakespeare. Abstracts (maximum of 500 words) are invited for presentations in half-hour slots, affording 20 minutes paper-reading time plus ten minutes for questions and discussion.

Details of plenary sessions and a proposed panel discussion will be announced later.

We regret that we cannot offer travel assistance, but will provide hospitality over the days of the conference to a number of participants. The support of the Shakespeare Association of America is gratefully acknowledged.

Email abstracts by 30 August 2008 for responses by 15 September 2008, to the conference directors:

Amlan Das Gupta, amlan04_AT_gmail.com

or

Paromita Chakravarti, chakravarti6_AT_gmail.com

‘B.J.’, The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick

A Reading and a Discussion

The Malone Society is sponsoring this event, which will take place on Saturday, 13th September 2008, in the Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College, Oxford. The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick was published in 1661 but is probably Elizabethan in origin. A facsimile text was edited for the Society by Dr. Helen Moore in 2006. The play has attracted keen interest because of its apparent allusions to Shakespeare in speeches by the Clown, ‘Sparrow’.

10-30- 11.0 Registration and book sale. Malone Society editions of analogous texts will be on sale at favourable prices

11.0-12.45 Staged reading of The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick (Director: Elisabeth Dutton)

12.45-2.15 Sandwich lunch, tea/coffee

2.15 Discussion of various aspects of the text will be led by a panel chaired by Katherine Duncan-Jones, with specific topics introduced by Dr. Helen Moore, Professor Richard Proudfoot, Dr. Martin Wiggins and Dr. Stephen Longstaffe

Tea/coffee will be served from 4.15, and the conference will close at 5.15.

The fee, to cover the cost of catering, is £15.00, reduced to £10.00 for Malone Society members.

To register, please send a cheque for the correct amount made out to Katherine Duncan-Jones and addressed to her at 24 Great Clarendon St., Oxford OX2 6AT, including your email address, so that receipt can be acknowledged. If you are not a member of the Malone Society, and would like to join, email sonia.massai@kcl.ac.uk

[this via Mike Pincombe]

Authority and Authorities

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading

Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies 2009

The next annual meeting of the Reading conference on early modern studies will be held on 6-8 July 2009. The Reading conferences are as broadly based as possible, reflecting the most interesting developments in current research. Accordingly we welcome proposals for either complete sessions or individual papers from scholars in any discipline or any area of early modern studies, including Atlantic, European and imperial perspectives.

The informal theme of the conference in this year of particular significance for the history of monarchy (1509, 1649, 1689) will be Authority and Authorities. Plenary lectures will be arranged around this theme and papers or entire sessions on authority and authorities are particularly welcome. Participants might think of addressing the following themes:

- Literary and visual representations of authority
- The rituals of authority including coronations, progresses, civic entries and civic ceremonial, the punishment of malefactors
- The exercise of authority by monarchy, landlords, urban, rural and colonial governors
- Challenges to authority and authorities: rebellion, resistance, subversion
- Patriarchialism and authority within the household
- Authoritative texts (Classical, scriptural, Patristic, authorised service books and government proclamations): their uses and their circulation, in manuscript and print
- the emergence of new sites of authority in cities, in print, medicine and other spheres
- The basis of authority in the Reformation and post-Reformation churches
- Reformations of manners and the exercise of authority over marginal groups

Proposals for panels should consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of four papers. Each panel proposal should contain the names of the session chair, the names and affiliations of the speakers and short abstracts of the papers.

A proposal for an individual paper should consist simply of a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.

Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email to the chairman of the Conference Committee, Professor Richard Hoyle, by 31 January 2009, r.w.hoyle@reading.ac.uk.

Proposals are especially welcome from postgraduates. The conference hopes to make some money available for postgraduate bursaries. Anyone for whom some financial assistance is a sine qua non for their attendance should mention this when submitting their proposal.

Henry VIII and the Tudor Court 1509-2009

Historic Royal Palaces, Kingston University and Oxford Brookes University
13 – 15 July 2009
Hampton Court Palace

Three day international interdisciplinary conference to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession

Call for papers: The conference will draw on a variety of disciplines, from history, literature, and theology through to textiles, music, art, and architecture. Focussing particularly on the fashioning of the court, it aims to address Henry VIII as the sacral monarch around whom it all revolved, and honour his continuing legacy.

We especially welcome papers (or panels of three papers) on:

Continuities with the Late Medieval past

The ceremony of court

Music and the Reformation

Architecture and the court

Patronage and gift-giving

Painting at the Tudor court

Courtly biography

Display and disorder: using material culture

Measuring Henry VIII’s legacy

The occasion of court

New directions on Henry’s Queens

Royal education

Reformation and the 1540s

Itinerancy and the itinerary of Henry VIII

Thomas More and humanism

A European court?

Gender and power at the Tudor court

Plays and playwrights at the Tudor court

Abstracts may be up to 250 words, designed for 20 minute papers and should be submitted by 15 November 2008 online – follow link at the url below.

Speakers include:

G.W. Bernard, Susan Brigden, Eamon Duffy, Maria Hayward, David Starkey, Greg Walker

And featuring a roundtable on image and iconography led by Dale Hoak with John N. King, Tatiana String and Tanya Cooper

For more information visit www.hrp.org.uk/henryconference2009

Conference organisers:

Suzannah Lipscomb, Research Curator, Hampton Court Palace (suzannah.lipscomb@hrp.org.uk)

Thomas Betteridge, Reader in English Literature, Oxford Brookes University

A Libelous History of England, c. 1570-1688

A Folger Institute Spring Semester Seminar directed by Alastair Bellany

The history of libels–bitter, satirical, defamatory and sometimes obscene texts, in prose or verse, sung or chanted, illicitly printed or circulated in handwritten copies–offers a unique window on the political and literary culture of early modern England. Employing a multi-disciplinary perspective that approaches political history as cultural history, this seminar will explore the various meanings of libelous political discourse from the late Elizabethan era to the Glorious Revolution. Working with the Folger’s rich collections of printed books, news diaries and poetry miscellanies, and making use of the concurrent Folger exhibition on the culture of news in early modern England, participants will explore libels from two broad perspectives: as forms of political media, circulating in the early modern literary underground that constituted a crucial element of the emergent political public sphere; and as dynamic and complex political representations of monarchs and ministers, parliaments and policies, that reveal many of the ideological fissures and tensions that shaped the turbulent history of late Tudor and Stuart England.

Director: Alastair Bellany is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Author of The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1666 (2002), he is also the editor of Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (2005, with Andrew McRae).

Schedule: Fridays, 1 – 4:30 p.m., 23 January through 3 April 2009, except 27 February.

Applications Due: 2 September 2008 for admission (and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute consortium affiliates); 5 January 2009 for admission only. Please visit www.folger.edu/institute for more information, and contact institute@folger.edu with any questions.

Islands of Thought

Early-Modern Mentalities and Politics
An interdisciplinary postgraduate conference
Friday 10th October 2008

‘No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent,
a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by Sea, Europe is the lesse…’
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
Call For Papers
Cardiff University’s Renaissance Seminar is holding a postgraduate one-day conference to discuss island thought as a textual, historical, physical and metaphorical construct. The conference seeks to form some bridges or trade routes between different postgraduate research areas to better understand our own islands of thought on early-modern times. The plenary speakers will include Dr Richard Sugg (Durham University) and Dr Lloyd Bowen
(Cardiff University).

Postgraduate students – from any discipline – are encouraged to give 20 minute papers, and abstracts of about 300 words can be sent to islandsofthought@cf.ac.uk before JULY 31st.

Topics exploring the early-modern era might include, but are not restricted to:
- Island identities and the British Isles
- Institutions as islands
- Visualising communities
- Islands in political and national discourse
- Welsh islands, or Wales as an island
- Ireland
- Legal islands
- Schools of thought, sects and denominations as islands
- Mapping bodies, minds and the globe
- Exile
- Metaphoric, metaphysical and textual islands
- Holy islands, island chains and treasure islands
- Lost, imaginary and phantom islands

The event has been funded by Cardiff University Graduate Schools.
For further information email islandsofthought@cf.ac.uk

Land, Landscape and Environment, 1500-1750

Early Modern Research Centre
THE UNIVERSITY OF READING
14 to 16 July, 2008

details: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/emrc/Land_Conference.htm

or email j.f.cox@rdg.ac.uk

Seminars on Early Modern Preaching: Regional and Parochial Preaching

A One-Day Colloquium
University of Birmingham, Friday 3rd of April, 2009

While awareness of the cultural, religious, and political significance of sermons delivered in elite venues is growing, scholars of early modern preaching still have much to learn about preaching elsewhere: the routine pastoral work carried out in parish churches, and occasional preaching in the provinces. How did the preachers of assize and quarter session sermons engage with communal or regional politics? How did their sermons function as a ‘point of contact’ between national and regional government? Who chose the preachers, and what was their relationship with the community they addressed? Many of the same questions could be asked of parochial preaching: How did preachers address friction or disputes within their parish? How did they act as a conduit for national politics, particularly when obliged to read proclamations from the pulpits? How did they address the rites of passage marked by church liturgies, such as christenings, churchings, weddings and funerals, particularly where those rituals were the subject of theological dispute? How were the preachers’ relations with their parishioners negotiated? In what ways did ministers balance disputes over their benefice with a sense of responsibility towards those for whom they had a ‘cure of souls’?

This colloquium is the second in the Seminars in Early Modern Preaching series, which aims to provide a scholarly forum for those working on all aspects of early modern English sermons. We invite proposals for 30-minute papers. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words. Please e-mail submissions to Dr Mary Morrissey (m.e.morrissey@reading.ac.uk) and Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk).

Due date for submissions: 30 September, 2008.

Teaching Milton and his time

This from Dr Jerome de Groot:

I’ve arranged this conference on ‘Teaching Milton and his time’ with the English Subject Centre on the 7 November: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=192. Speakers include Sharon Achinstein, Gordon Campbell, John Coffey, Tom Corns, Rosanna Cox, Karen Edwards, Thomas Luxon and Marcus Nevitt.

It is free, and should be fun and stimulating. It would be excellent if you could come. Please also let your postgraduate students know.

Dr Jerome de Groot
English and American Studies
S1.16
Samuel Alexander Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk
0161 2753170

Teaching Fellowship

University of Exeter
Teaching Fellow in Renaissance
Department of English
School of Arts, Languages and Literatures
(Ref. R78N1705)

This new full time Teaching Fellowship is available from 1st September 2008
on a fixed term basis until 30th June 2010 to replace two members of staff
during their successive periods of Leverhulme-funded research leave.

The successful candidate will lead seminar groups on a range of BA modules
focusing on the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as
well as Shakespeare and early modern drama, and should expect to deliver up
to 10 lectures per year in these areas. The Teaching Fellow will also
contribute to the first-year "Past and Present" survey course, supervise
final-year dissertations, work with undergraduate personal tutees and
participate fully in the department's vibrant culture of pedagogy and
scholarship. A record of significant Renaissance teaching experience and
research publications relevant to career stage is essential.

The starting salary will be circa £30k per annum on Grade F32.

Application packs are available from
http://www.admin.ex.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/

e-mail N.Kapelan@exeter.ac.uk or quoting reference number R78N1705.

The closing date for completed applications is 17th July 2008 (12 noon).

Interviews will be held in the week commencing 4th August 2008.

See further:

THIRD INTERNATIONAL SRS CONFERENCE

Trinity College, University of Dublin, 10-12th July

The Third International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Society for Renaissance Studies will take place in Trinity College Dublin, 10-12 July 2008. For details of the programme and registration procedures, please contact Dr Sarah Alyn Stacey, French Department/Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Trinity College, Dublin 2;
Email: salynsta@tcd.ie; Telephone: (00 353 1) 896 2686

Alternatively, please consult the Society's webpage:
www.rensoc.org.uk/SRSNationalConference2008.html

“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 from July 18th – 20th 2008 at Buckfast Abbey, near Herrick’s vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devon. One session will also be held in Herrick’s church at Dean Prior. 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).

This conference is organised by the The Herrick Project at Newcastle University and is supported by the School of English at Newcastle, the British Academy, the AHRC, the AMARC, the Society for Renaissance Studies, St. John’s College, Cambridge and the Department of English at the University of Exeter.

All papers will be held in Schiller Hall, Buckfast Abbey Conference Centre, unless otherwise indicated.

Programme:

Friday 18th July:

9-9.30 am Registration and coffee

9.30 – 11.00 Session 1: Conviviality and its Contents

Chair: Ruth Connolly (Newcastle)

Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading), “Those Lyrick Feasts, made at the Sun, the Dog, the triple Tunne”: Going Clubbing with Ben Jonson

Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), Herrick and the Order of the Black Ribband

Philip Withington (Leeds), Company and Cultural Change in Early Modern England

11.0-11.30 Coffee

11.30- 12.45 Session 2: First Plenary

Chair: Professor Rick Rylance (Exeter)

Professor Katharine Eisaman Maus (Virginia), Individuality and Faction in Cavalier Poetry

12.45 -1.45 Lunch

1.45-3.15pm Session 3: Retreat and Resilience

Paul Salzman (La Trobe), Anne Clifford: Writing for Oneself/Writing for Others

John Adrian (Virginia at Wise), Country house “community” in the poetry of Mildmay Fane

Robin Kirschbaum (Newcastle), Community as an Imagined Response in the Royalist Poetic Tradition

3.15-3.30 Tea

3.30– 5.00 Session 4 : Miscellanies and their Communities

Chair: Andrew McRae (Exeter)



John Gouws (North-West University, SA ), Nicholas Oldisworth celebrates the provincial



Mark Nicholls (St. John’s, Cambridge ), 'Resuggesting our fanceys still': William Percy and his 'Singular Booke of Epigrammes'



James Doelman (Western Ontario), An Oxford Circle of Poetic Friendship, ca. 1600

5.00 - 5.45 A Tour of the Abbey

5.45 - 6. 15 Session 5: Lyrical Herrick

Stacey Jocey Houck (Texas Tech), “Touch but thy Lire (my Harrie)”: Henry Lawes and the Mirthful Music of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides

6.15 - 7.30: Wine Reception and Buffet

7.30 - 9.00 pm: “Select Musicall Ayres and Dialogues” ( Buckfast Abbey Church )

Performed by:

Richard Wistreich, Alessandra Testai, Miranda Laurence (singers)

Robin Jeffrey: Theorbo and Guitar

Music by Henry and William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, Girolam Frescobaldi, John Jenkins, Thomas Ravenscroft and Robert Johnson

including settings of Herrick’s and Marvell’s poetry and songs from The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi.

Saturday 19th July

9.15 – 10.45 Session 6: The Classical Influence in Herrick’s Poetry

Stella Achilleos (Nicosia), ‘Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon:’ Robert Herrick’s Anacreontics and the Politics of Conviviality in Hesperides

Syrithe Pugh (Aberdeen), Supping with Ghosts: Imitation and Immortality in Herrick.

Richard Wistreich (Newcastle), "Charon make haste!": the tale of a mid-seventeenth century dialogue song

10.45-11.15 Coffee

11.15 – 12.45 Session 7: Reading Communities

Christopher Burlinson (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Community and Miscellaneity: A Seventeenth-century Oxford manuscript

Nelleke Moser (VU University, Amsterdam), Reading as Trespassing. Private Manuscripts and Social Readership

Garth Bond (Lawrence), “Rare Poems Ask Rare Friends”: Ben Jonson, Coterie Poet in Print

12.45-1.45 Lunch

1.45 – 3.15 Session 8: Personal Herrick

David Landrum (Cornerstone), Constructing Herrick: Friendship as Biography

Philip Major (Birkbeck), ‘Alas Good Browne!’: friendship and formulae in Herrick’s ‘Chorus’

John Creaser (Mansfield College, Oxford), Herrick in History: Some Caveats

3.15-3.45: Coffee

3.45-4.45 Session 9: Herrick’s Canon: the Neglected and the Dubious Poems

Graham Parry (York), Herrick’s Nobler Numbers

Mark Bland (De Montfort), ‘To his False Mistress’: A Manuscript History

5.00 - visit Dean Prior arriving at the Church at 5.15pm for tea at 5.30 at Dean Prior church meeting local residents

6.00-7.15 Session 10: Second Plenary, Dean Prior Church:

Chair: Professor Tom Cain (Newcastle)

Professor Leah Marcus (Vanderbilt), Robert Herrick's Work Ethic or, Herrick and Postmodernism

7.30: Coach to Buckfast Abbey for Conference Dinner at 8.00.

Sunday 20th July:

10.00-11.00 Session 11: Royalists in the Interregnum

Marcus Nevitt (Sheffield), The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert

Marjorie Swann (Kansas), Environment and Community in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30 – 1.00 Session 12: The AMARC panel on manuscript circulation

Chair: Professor Richard Todd (Leiden)

Heather Windram (Dept. of Biochemistry, Cambridge) , The Evolutionary Analysis of Literary Texts

Philip West (Somerville College, Oxford), James Shirley’s Poems (1646): Manuscript into Print

Donald Dickson (Texas A&M), Editing the Satires with Mixed Genealogies for the Donne Variorum

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2-3.30pm Session 13: Group Poetics

Sara Trevisan (Padua), Michael Drayton: Patronage and Politics, 1597-1612

Lionel Faull (North-West University, SA), Robert Herrick: A Twenty-first-Century African Perspective

Line Cottegnies (Univ. Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle ), Leaves of Fame: Katherine Philips and Robert Herrick's Shared Community

3.30- 3.45 tea

3.45- 4.15 pm Summary panel chaired by Professor Patrick Collinson & with Professor Achsah Guibbory

Optional Dinner at Agaric in Ashburton