MEMORY: RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE

The Early Modern Studies in Scotland Seminar and The Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Saturday 1st November 2008
School of English and Scottish Language and Literature
University of Glasgow

Speakers: Kate Chedgzoy (University of Newcastle); Michael Dobson (Birkbeck College London); Ruth Evans (University of Stirling); Andrew Gordon (University of Aberdeen); Andrew Hiscock (University of Bangor); Vicky Price (University of Glasgow)

Under the term 'Renaissance', the early modern period has often been articulated as a process of recovery, rebirth and remembrance – words which invoke their shadowy counterparts, loss, death and forgetting. Shakespeare's plays are just one place where such processes are enacted – 'Awake remembrance of these valiant dead', 'Great thing of us forgot', 'My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain', ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead' – and the preoccupation with the past runs right through the culture, from notions of nationhood to ideas about the body and the self, from antiquarianism to translation as a means of recovering and storing information. The purpose of this one-day colloquium is to think through some of the uses and abuses of memory in and of the period. These may include – this list is suggestive rather than exhaustive – such matters as:

Acts and Monuments, age, amnesia, anecdote, antiquarianism, archives, autobiography, beginnings, childhood, chronicle, classics, collective memory, cultural memory, commemoration, death, decay, depository, discovery, dreams, editing, education, epitaphs, etymology, evidence, example, forgetfulness, forgiveness, foundations, generations, ghosts, glossary, historiography, imagination, inscription, labour, lament, law, learning, Lethe, library, loss, madness, manuscript, martyrdom, melancholy, memoir, monuments, myth, nostalgia, oblivion, obscurity, origins, pardons, past performance, popular memory, posterity, precedent, preservation, publication, rebellion, record, recollection, recovery, reformation, rehearsal, relics, remembrance, repetition, repository, roots, salvation, scripture, speeches, storehouse, texts, time, traces, translation, travel, vision and youth.

For further details, please contact Rob Maslen (r.maslen@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk).