Missing Texts conference, Birkbeck: registration open

A one-day conference on lost manuscripts, excisions, destroyed archives, blanks, fragmented texts, deletion, censorship, scattered pages, imagined originals, virtual disappearance ... Saturday June 2 2012, Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1. Details here To register, email Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk)

Donne

Professor Jeanne Shami (Regina University), currently visiting fellow in the Department of English at UCL, will be speaking on 'Donne's Afterlives' on Thursday 3 May in UCL, Roberts Building 309, 4.30-6 pm. There will be drinks afterwards in the Department.

Revenge and Gender from Classical to Early Modern Literature

CALL FOR PAPERS Female Fury and the Masculine Spirit of Vengeance: Revenge and Gender from Classical to Early Modern Literature

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Professor Alison Findlay Professor Edith Hall 5-6 September 2012, University of Bristol, UK Revenge is often thought of as a quintessentially masculine activity, set in a martial world of blood feuds and patriarchal codes of honour. However, the quest for vengeance can also be portrayed as intensifying passionate feelings traditionally thought of as feminine. In such instances revenge does not confirm a man’s heroic valour, but is a potentially emasculating force, dangerous to his reason, self-mastery, and gender identity. Such alternative ways of viewing revenge are also relevant when the avenger is a woman. To what extent is revenge deemed to be natural or unnatural to a woman, and what is its effect upon her psyche and perceived gender? Does the same impulse which effeminizes a man make a woman dangerously masculine? And how should we view the indirect ways that women influence retribution, such as through mourning, cursing, or goading? Are these an important means of female agency, or do they suggest women’s exclusion from active revenge, reinforcing traditional gender roles? Are certain acts of violence interpreted differently if the perpetrator is a man or woman, father or mother, son or daughter? This conference aims to explore these questions, reevaluating the complex and varied ways that gender impacts the performance and interpretation of revenge. Proposed papers may take up any intersection of revenge and gender in texts from Classical to early modern literature, and can focus on individual texts and periods or take an interdisciplinary or cross-temporal approach. Topics may include, but are not limited to: the ways in which revenge bolsters, threatens or transfigures an individual’s gender identity and/or role within the family; how individual acts of vengeance reinforce or undermine homosocial or female bonds; personifications of revenge; how the relationship between gender and revenge are reconfigured in a text’s translation, reception, and reinterpretation over time; the ethical, cultural and social implications for the ways in which revenge is gendered. We invite proposals (250 words) for papers addressing these questions. Submissions from postgraduate students, and early career researchers are welcomed. Pre-formed panel proposals will also be considered. Abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract. Please send your proposals or any queries to Lesel Dawson: lesel.dawson@bristol.ac.uk Deadline for proposals: 31 May, 2012.

Bonds, Lies, and Circumstances: Discourses of Truth-Telling in the Renaissance

An International and Interdisciplinary Conference
21st - 23rd March, 2013
School of English, University of St Andrews

If a lie had no more faces but one, as truth had, we should be in farre better termes than we are: For whatsoever a lier should say, we would take it in a contrarie sense. But the opposite of truth has many shapes, and an undefinite field.

Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Lyers’ (Florio translation -1603)

Can we say that truth has ‘no more faces than one’? Montaigne implies that human relationships with truth are straightforward, whereas our attitudes towards falsehood are complicated by its multiplicity. But how stable is the notion of ‘truth’? Does truth - like falsehood - appear in many forms, and if so, can we ever take it at face value?

Legal, emotional, and spiritual concerns -- all vital to truth-telling discourses -- are intimately bound in the Renaissance. This conference offers a forum for the exploration of their intersections. The study of legal culture has become increasingly central to the analysis of early modern literary texts, and legal paradigms are inescapable when scholars turn their attention, as many have recently done, to the equivocal power of language to bind people together. We find the legal value of such bonds - in the form of oaths, promises and contracts - going hand in hand with interpersonal relationships and their emotional and spiritual dimensions.

Our objective is to foster debate about the marriage between two clearly connected fields: Law and Literature; and the study of early modern emotion. How do these fields work together? We form bonds; we tell lies; we search for and construct truths: but under what circumstances?

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

- The connections between law, emotion, and obligation, and how the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries engage with these dynamics.

- The formation and evaluation of bonds in the early modern world.

- How public/private spaces affect attitudes towards truth-telling.

- The relationship between faith, truth, and honesty in the Renaissance.

- How belief and trust are generated.

- The binding power of language and rhetoric.

- Transmissions of knowledge, belief, and emotion.



Confirmed keynote speakers are:

John Kerrigan (Cambridge), on Bonds

Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), on Lies

Lorna Hutson (St Andrews), on Circumstances

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include an abstract (of no more than 200 words), 3 keywords, and 3 citations, and should be emailed to earlymodern@st-andrews.ac.uk. We are happy to consider proposals for panels; in the event that we are unable to accommodate the panel, papers will be considered on an individual basis.

All abstracts must be received by July 31st 2012.

We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their careers, working in departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, History, Languages, Law, Theology, and other relevant subject areas. General questions can be directed to the conference organizers - Rachel Holmes and Toria Johnson - at earlymodern@st-andrews.ac.uk.

In conjunction with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL), with generous support from the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Jobs at UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

LECTURER / SENIOR LECTURER / READER / CHAIR IN ENGLISH (2 Positions)
REFERENCE NO : LAN002A

The School of Language & Literature is seeking to make two appointments in English, with one possibly at the level of Chair. English is the largest subject in the School. In RAE2008 65% of the English Language and Literature submission was rated as world leading or internationally excellent and the department was ranked joint 11th in the United Kingdom. English makes a significant contribution to the work of the University’s internationally renowned Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. Much of the discipline’s research activity is constellated round the Centre for the Novel, the Centre for Early Modern Studies and the Walter Scott Research Centre. Interests in literary theory, comparative literature and the relations between literature and other disciplines are explored in the discipline’s interaction with the Centre for Medical Humanities, the Centre for Modern Thought and other research clusters across the University.

As well as carrying out teaching, research and administrative duties as appropriate, the successful candidate will be expected to contribute to one or more of our Masters degrees (MLitts) in English Literary Studies, Early Modern Studies, The Novel and Creative Writing, and to undertake doctoral supervision. Current disciplinary growth points include Early Modern Literature and Creative Writing. Applications from candidates with major interests in Early Modern English and Creative Writing (poetry) will be particularly welcome but we will also consider candidates with expertise in one or more of the following topics: Nineteenth Century Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, and The Development of the Novel. A secondary interest in medieval writing might be an advantage. We are looking for candidates of outstanding achievement or promise in research, and the final disposition of subject area will depend on the specialisms of the successful candidates.

Informal enquiries are welcome and should be made to Professor Patrick Crotty, Head of School (Telephone: +44 (0)1224 272562, Email: p.j.crotty@abdn.ac.uk).

Early Modern Constructions of Europe

Seminar Organisers: Florian Kläger (Münster, Germany) and Gerd Bayer (Erlangen,
Germany)
Proposals are invited for an accepted group section (up to 15 speakers) to meet at the ICLA
conference in Paris, France, July 18-24, 2013. Further information about the conference is
available at: http://icla-ailc-2013.paris-sorbonne.fr/
The early modern period is a time of momentous developments for the European realm, not
least with regard to state formation and the fashioning of collective identities. In this context,
the question after the relationship between the European continent and its literary representations
may be fruitfully asked: how was 'Europe' imagined, how did the idea of Europe
feature in cultural negotiations of collective identities? How did it develop, in the early
modern period, from a notion broadly identical with the medieval communitas Christiana to
the political, legal, social, and economic construct of our day? To a degree, asking questions
of this kind means to consider the relationship between Europe as a geographical region and
as an imagined entity in terms usually reserved for the relationship between Europe and the
Orient. The panel invites speakers to analyse the causes, forms, and functions of constructions
of Europe in early modern literature and culture from 1400 to 1700. 'Literature', in this
context, is used in its widest sense, referring not only to plays, poems, and narrative fiction,
but also to writings on theology, cartography, history, law, natural philosophy, as well as
news reports, travelogues, and political polemics. Phenomena creating a sense of coherence
that resonate with present-day conceptions of Europe might include discourses on religion and
confessions, humanism, neo-Platonism, scepticism, and law (e.g., international treaties), but
also more strictly literary topoi, genres, and rhetorical modes that create a sense of belonging
to a specifically 'European' recipient community. Among the particular dimensions of early
modern 'European-ness' that might be examined are the notion of shared roots in classical
antiquity, the concept of 'civility', and the supposed threat from cultural and religious forces
from outside. We propose to examine the discursive contexts in which various constructions
of Europe do, and do not, arise; to ask what other concepts they attach to; and to question
what they are used for.
Please send a 400-word abstract by 20 May 2012 to and

Invention, Philosophy and Technology in the Seventeenth Century

University of York
Details: kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk

Wednesday 23rd May 2012

Berrick Saul Building – Treehouse and BS/008

9.15 Registration

9.30 Technology and the mysteries of trade (Treehouse)

Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter), The economy and philosophy of manure in Hugh Platt (title tbc)

Paddy Bullard (Kent), Isaac Walton and Joseph Moxon, on technical manuals. (title tbc)

Eleanor Decamp (Oxford), [Keep] sharpe Instruments...as neere as you can, ever hidden from the eyes of the Patient’: the visibility of surgical objects in seventeenth-century literature

10.45 Coffee

11.15 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 1 (Treehouse)

Tullia Giersberg (King’s College, London), Cornelis Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile and the Contested Meanings of Invention in Ben Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1614-15)

Raphael Hallett (Leeds), ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’ and Early Modern Laboratory Culture

12.00 Lunch

1.00-1.45 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 2 (BS/008)

Helen Hills (York), ‘'Inventio and invenzione: from saintly relic to art and back in baroque Italy'

Adam Ganz (Royal Holloway), “Close, naked, natural" How the Lens changed writing

2.00 Making things and the cost of labour (BS/008)

Michael Harrigan (Warwick), Plantation, Labour and Technology in the Early Modern Antilles

Katherine Hunt (London Consortium, University of London) , From procedural to miscellany: how to make a firework in the mid-seventeenth century.



Cesare Pastorino (Sussex), Francis Bacon and the State Promotion of Innovation: the Early Stuart Patent System



3.30 Coffee

4.00 Getting Dirty in Early Modern England: Mines and Drains (BS/008)

Daisy Hildyard (Queen Mary’s), ‘The Workmen could give me very little Account of any thing’: John Locke and Daniel Defoe meet miners.

Will Calvert (Cambridge), "Invention, National Power, and the Limits of the Possible in Early Stuart England."
Claire Preston (Birmingham), 'Big Dig: the poetics of early-modern drainage'.

“Revolutionizing Early Modern Studies”

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2012
University of Oxford
17-18 September 2012

To mark a decade of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP)’s work at the
Bodleian Libraries, producing searchable, full-text transcriptions of
works in Early English Books Online (EEBO), we invite proposals for
research papers and posters reflecting the various ways in which TCP
texts are being used.
Is EEBO-TCP revolutionizing research and teaching in early modern
studies? What features would be desirable but are not yet available?
What improvements could be made in the decade to come?
The TCP is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the
University of Michigan and ProQuest. It is funded internationally by a
consortium of partner institutions, and in the UK through JISC
Collections. TCP editions power full-text searching of ProQuest’s EEBO
database, and contribute to many other projects’ work.
To date, the TCP has produced over 40,000 full-text XML editions of
books printed between 1473 and 1700. Phase I produced over 25,000 texts,
and Phase II, currently underway, will complete the corpus of about
70,000 unique titles in English.
Keynote speakers: Dr John Lavagnino, King’s College London; Dr Emma
Smith, University of Oxford.
For people interested in using TCP texts for research, one-to-one text
clinic sessions are available.
We welcome proposals for papers and posters on:
 Research based on EEBO-TCP
 Methodologies in teaching
 Text editing
 Emerging trends influenced by EEBO-TCP’s availability
 Potential for future research
Proposals for 20-minute papers should be a maximum of 500 words, and for
posters, 250 words.
Deadline for proposals is 7 May 2012.
Invitations to present will be sent by 1 June 2012.
If you would like your paper to appear as part of the conference
proceedings (registration required) in the Oxford University Research
Archive, the deadline for submission of final papers is 29 August 2012.
We welcome proposals from graduate and post-doctoral students as well as
established scholars. If you would like to be considered for a
financially assisted place at the conference, please indicate this when
you submit your proposal.
For further details, see
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/eebotcp2012. For proposal
submission, details of the conference venue, and registration, please
visit the University Stores. For any queries, and to book a text clinic
session, please email Pip Willcox, pip [dot] willcox [at] bodleian [dot]
ox [dot] ac [dot] uk.

The Permissive Archive - Call for papers

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) has
pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the
benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate
this anniversary, in November 2012 we will be holding a conference
examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’.


The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks
presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives - not
only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but
by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new
histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research
will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive
field.


We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival
work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800. Topics may
include, but are not limited to:

· The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation

· The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future

· Alternatives to the permissive archive

· Archival research as discovery or construction

· The archive which challenges or disrupts

· Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it

· New findings

· Success and failure

· Broken or dispersed collections

· The archive and the environment

· The archivist and the historian

· The ethics of the archive

· The comedy of the archive

· Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@hotmail.co.uk.


Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be
holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen
to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as
group sessions, trips or guided walks. Submissions will be
peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

April 13, 2012
Jay Gates (John Jay College)
“Cleaving to God: Sovereignty and the Legal Individual in Cnut’s Laws”
10:00 AM, Philosophy, 408A

April 13, 2012
Anne Lake Prescott (Barnard)
“The Talkative Boar: Some Other Versions of the Venus and Adonis Story”
7:00 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

April 18, 2012
Dorothy Glass (State University of New York at Buffalo)
“The Sculpture of the Baptistery at Parma, Innocent III and the University of Paris”
5:30 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

April 20, 2012
Inter-University Doctoral Consortium Colloquium
8:30 AM, Princeton Club - New York City
See attached flyer for details.

April 24, 2012
Professors Alain Bègue (Poitiers) and Emma Herrán (Amiens)
MIME Session
6:00 PM, 201 Casa Hispanica

April 27, 2012
Conference: "The Reading of Books and the Reading of Literature"
9:00 AM, Butler Library, 523

Maritime Britain

The University of Warwick are pleased to host a one-day interdisciplinary workshop entitled 'Maritime Britain: Histories and Fictions, 1550-1800', organized in cooperation with the Institute of Advanced Study and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance.

From Hakluyt to Cook and Scott, from Conrad to Forester and O'Brian, the maritime life of Britain has engaged national and international audiences for the past five centuries. This workshop will examine the beginnings of this myth-making process; for it was between 1550 and 1800 that the increasingly imperial self-consciousness of Britain began systematically to produce historical and fictional documentation – accounts of voyages real or invented, stories based on history, and history based on stories. Their national and nationalistic power helped to shape people’s perception of Britain’s maritime past, present and future. This mythologization of Britain’s maritime strength was part of a historical process which turned the kingdom into one of the most important and influential cultural and economic centres worldwide. It also often presented the less poetic reasons behind long-range enterprises – trade, exploitation, colonization, war – as heroic deeds in the history of the nation, carried out by men and women whose bravery in the most extreme situations inspired the British people at home.

This blending of history and fiction, of actuality and legend, is a challenging issue with which both historians and literary scholars have long had to contend. The Maritime Britain workshop will host a discussion of such histories and fictions, and present an analysis of past and contemporary perceptions of Britain’s maritime experience.

Programme

9.30-10.15: Registration and Introduction
10.15-11.00: Sir Francis Drake and the Argonauts: Maritime rhetoric
in London city festivals, 1603-1640
(Sara Trevisan, Warwick)
11.00-11.30: Coffee Break
11.30-12.15: Pirates and Family Life, 1680-1730
(Margarette Lincoln, National Maritime Museum)
12.15-13.00: Space, Place and the Early Modern Sea
(Bernhard Klein, Kent)
13.00-14.00: Lunch Break
14.00-14.45: Sailors on Horseback: The representation of seamen
and social space in eighteenth-century British visual culture
(Geoffrey Quilley, Sussex)
14.45-15.30: Singing for the Nation: Balladry, naval recruitment
and the language of patriotism in eighteenth-century Britain
(James Davey, National Maritime Museum)
15.30-16.00: Tea Break
16.00-16.45: Final discussion


The workshop aims to bring together postgraduate students and academics interested in the literary, theatrical, historical and artistic dimensions of Britain's maritime culture. The flyer can be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/prf/2011/trevisan/flyer-maritimebritain.pdf

The workshop will be held on Friday, May 11, 2012, at the Wolfson Research Exchange (seminar room 1), University of Warwick. It is free of charge, and lunch and refreshments will be provided. Please register by emailing Sara Trevisan at s.trevisan@warwick.ac.uk, by May 5, 2012.

Shakespeare and the Book Trade

The Lyell Lectures ,2012, University of Oxford
Lukas Erne (University of Geneva)
TS Eliot Lecture Theatre at Merton College, Oxford, 24 April – 8 May

Tuesday, 24 April

‘Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 1593-1622: An Introduction’



Thursday, 26 April

‘Shakespeare, Publication, and Authorial Misattribution’



Tuesday, 1 May

‘Introducing Shakespeare’s Early Publishers’



Thursday, 3 May

‘Investing in Shakespeare’s Playbooks’



Tuesday, 8 May

‘Investing in Shakespeare’s Poems’

All at 5pm. All welcome.

‘Manuscript Identities and the Transmission of Texts in the English Renaissance’

University of Sheffield, 25-26 May 2012

Panel 1: ‘Medieval texts in renaissance contexts’

Kate McLean (York University): ‘“Reed in bookes olde and wysse”: medieval romance in a renaissance manuscript context’

Carrie Griffin (Queen Mary London): ‘John Russell’s Boke of Nurture: the afterlife of a medieval “practical” verse text’

Jeremy Smith (Glasgow University): ‘Textual afterlives: the recuperation of medieval texts in early modern Scotland’



Panel 2: ‘The social network: Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary I’

Sebastian Ahnert (King’s College, Cambridge), ‘Network analysis and its applications’

Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary London): ‘Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary I’

Thomas Freeman (Essex University): ‘Contextualizing the letters of the Marian martyrs’



Panel 3: ‘Compilation and transmission’

Estelle Stubbs (Sheffield University): ‘Scribal identification and the transmission of texts’

Julia Boffey (Queen Mary London): ‘Fabyan’s Chronicle: compilation and transmission’

Jessica Edmondes (Sheffield University): ‘Poetic exchanges and textual interplay in BL Harl. MS 7392 (2)’



Panel 4: ‘Coteries and identities in sixteenth-century Scotland’

Elizabeth Elliot (Edinburgh University): ‘“The Bannatyne Manuscript” and the construction of familial identity’

Sebastiaan Verweij (Lincoln College, Oxford): ‘Manuscript production and circulation at the court of James VI’

Theo van Heijnsbergen (Glasgow University): ‘The textual community of James VI’



Panel 5: ‘Approaches to manuscript texts’

Steven May (Sheffield University): ‘Textual criticism and scribal culture’

Sylvia Adamson (Sheffield University): ‘The code as context: or why renaissance text editors should go to HEL’

Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge): ‘Scribal publication and textual transmission in the early seventeenth century’



Panel 6: ‘Elizabeth I and her secretaries’

Carlo Bajetta (Université de la Vallée d’Aoste): ‘Who did what?: penning and copying Queen Elizabeth I’s letters in Italian’

Guillaume Coatalen (University of Cergy-Pontoise): ‘Who did what?: penning and copying Queen Elizabeth I’s letters in French’

Angela Andreani (University of Milan): ‘Letters about letters: the in-house correspondence of the Elizabethan secretariat’



Panel 7: ‘Forms of publication: manuscript and print’

Steven Veerapen (Strathclyde University): ‘Punishing poisonous pens: the role of the renaissance law courts in preventing, regulating and punishing slanderous manuscripts’

Sophie Butler (New College, Oxford): ‘“Yett for all this knowe I hold this but as a Paradoxe”: authorial identities in the scribal and printed circulation of Sir William Cornwallis the younger’s Encomium of Richard III’

Tom Charlton (Stirling University): ‘“One sma glasse of sacke”: The “Reliquiae Baxterianae”, manuscript, print and Baxter’s reputation’

Panel 8: ‘Circulation and community’

Hannah Crummé (King’s College and University College London): ‘“Deffensa de la Poesia”: manuscript exchange between the Sidney circle and Spain’

Austen Saunders (Wolfson College, Cambridge): ‘Manuscript additions to a copy of Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata and their circulation’

Arthur Marotti (Wayne State University): ‘Rare manuscript poetry and the sociology of literary transmission in early modern England’



Panel 9: ‘Translation and adaptation’

Edward Smith (Sheffield University): ‘Rivals in Rime: Petrach, Wyatt, and the Haringtons in BL, Add. MS 36529’

Melanie Evans (Birmingham University): ‘Scholarly ambitions: the atypical style of Princess Elizabeth’s translations’

Faith Acker (St Andrews University): ‘“Though the Butler’s dead, the keyes are left behind”: adapting and adopting poetical memories of the butlers of Christ Church, Oxford’



Panel 10: ‘Political and religious identities’

Helen Graham-Matheson (Queen Mary London): ‘“Remember me when you do pray”: the Hever Hours as a representation of English aristocratic identity’

Fred Schurink (Northumbria University): ‘John Osborne’s manuscript translations of Demosthenes and Aeschines (1582-3) and the Elizabethan House of Commons’

Helen Draper (Institute of Historical Research, University of London): ‘Samuel Woodforde’s gift’



Panel 11: ‘Making manuscripts’

Henry Woudhuysen (University College London): ‘Paper books and letter books, manuscripts and vade mecums: Gabriel Harvey and places for writing’

Sajed Chowdhury (Sussex University): ‘Makes her soule and body one’: the metaphysics of ‘making’ in the verse miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler (c. 1630-1660)’

Claire Williams (Sheffield University): ‘“This and the rest Maisters we all may mende”. Collection preoccupations, social and self-awareness in National Art Library MS Dyce 44’



Panel 12: ‘Selection and reception in the seventeenth century’

Mary Morrissey (Reading University): ‘Sermon notes: what they are and what they were for’

Angus Vine (Stirling University): ‘Search and retrieval in seventeenth-century manuscripts: the case of Joseph Hall’s meticulous miscellany’

Simon Moore (Newcastle University): ‘The miscellany of Sir John Pye (MS Osborn b. 52) and nonconformist identity 1640-1689’



Panel 13: ‘Making and reading miscellanies’

Elizabeth Evenden (Brunel University): ‘Selectivity and survival: Matthew Parker and the role of the codex in early modern England’

James Daybell (Plymouth University): ‘The reading and reception of scribally copied letters in early modern England’

Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading University): ‘Collections and coteries: reading verse miscellanies’



Panel 14: ‘Royalists in Manuscript’

Marcus Nevitt (Sheffield University): Out of the Closet by Hand: Thomas Killigrew's Revisions to his Comedies and Tragedies (1664)’

Andrew King (University College Cork): ‘The monument of uncertainty: funereal imaginings in Samuel Sheppard’s “The Faerie King”, Bodleian Library MS Rawl. Poet. 28’

James Loxley (Edinburgh University): ‘Torn halves: John Cleveland in print and manuscript’



Panel 15: ‘Provenance research in manuscript studies’

Alice Eardley (Reading University): ‘Antisocial authorship and the persistent non-advent of print: the provenance of Leeds Brotherton MS Lt q 32 (aka Lady Hester Pulter’s poetry and prose)’

Daniel Starza Smith (Reading University): ‘The curious history of the Conway Papers’

Joel Swann (Keele University): ‘Manuscripts of Richard Farmer at Chetham’s Library, Manchester’



Panel 16: ‘Manuscript afterlives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’

Jessica Malay (Huddersfield University): ‘Identifying Anne Clifford’s “Great Books of Record”’

Nick Fisher (Institute of English Studies, University of London): ‘Manuscripts, Edmund Curll and the earl of Rochester’

Tom Lockwood (Birmingham University): ‘Charles Lamb and early modern miscellany culture’



To register, please visit:

http://onlineshop.shef.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=69&deptid=5&catid=25



For further information, contact c.shrank@shef.ac.uk or a.bryson@shef.ac.uk

Ben Jonson: A Re-assessment

6.00pm - 7.30pm, followed by a drinks reception
Monday, 30 April 2012
Venue: The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Like all Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Ben Jonson has often been overshadowed by the Bard, but this larger-than-life character has variously been described as “Britain’s first literary celebrity” and “the dominant literary figure of his day”.

Two major new studies are helping to reassert the importance of his place amongst the greatest of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. First came a major new biography, Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson – A Life, published by OUP in October, and this will be followed in the early summer by the long awaited Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, edited by Donaldson, David Bevington and Martin Butler – the result of more than 15 years’ detailed research, some of which the British Academy has helped to fund.

This panel discussion brings these authors together from three different continents to reappraise Jonson’s importance in the literary canon in a special event supported by both Oxford and Cambridge University Presses.

Panellists:
Professor Ian Donaldson FBA (University of Melbourne)
Professor Martin Butler (University of Leeds)
Professor David Bevington FBA (University of Chicago)
Chair:
Professor Jonathan Bate FBA (University of Oxford)

Attendance is free, but registration is required for this event. Please visit our website: www.britac.ac.uk/events.

Transforming Early Modern Identities

---- CALL FOR PAPERS ----
Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group,
The City University of New York Graduate Center,
Friday 12th October

London Shakespeare Centre and the Arts and Humanities Festival,
King’s College London,
Saturday 27th October

This conference, hosted over two days in two cities, has a double focus. ‘Transforming Early Modern Identities’ will examine both how the concept of the early modern self is being transformed by recent scholarly works exploring early modern literature and culture, and also how the process of transformation itself was foundational to the ways in which early modern subject positions were negotiated. In the twenty-first century, we remain fascinated with notions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century subjectivity. Whilst past conferences have focused on exploring specific strata of early modern selfhood – in terms of gender, sexuality, race or class – this conference will examine both the ways in which scholarly considerations of the early modern subject have changed in recent years, and also how times of transformation work to shape early modern identities.

Thus, the aims of this conference are twofold: to understand the ways in which early modern scholarship (historical and literary) has transformed our notion of early modern subjectivity in recent years; and to examine the ways in which transformation itself – and the in between times of selfhood it implies – played an important part in defining various early modern subject positions. How has the way scholars examine the early modern self changed in the last twenty years? How reliant are early modern individuals on moments of transformation?

We invite proposals for individual papers (20-25 minutes) on the theme of ‘Transforming Early Modern Identities’. Possible topics may relate to (but are certainly not limited to) the following areas:

§ Changing scholarly approaches to early modern subjectivity

§ Material markers of identity and strata of self

§ Emotional revolution – affect theory and political identity

§ Timing the early modern self – temporality and subjectivity

§ Etymologies, translations, and transformations of meaning

§ Ovidian transformations

§ Either, neither, or – beyond limitations of gender and sex

§ On paper – constructions of identity through diaries, memoirs, letters, and legal documents

§ Cultural geography and the transformation of space

§ Reworking the self – apprenticeships, education, and professional advancement

§ Growing pains – transitions from childhood to adolescence; adolescence to adulthood; and adulthood to retirement

§ Families we choose – changing kinship structures and the formation of social identity

§ Temporary identities – performance, manipulation, disguise, cross-dressing, uniform, costume

§ The unbound self – migration, social movement, pilgrimage, and quests

§ Marital transformations – marriage, divorce, widowhood

§ Physical transformations – pregnancy, disability, illness, aging, and the self

§ Textual transitions – the transformative power of print culture

§ Prophetic inspirations – reshaping the self through prophecy

§ Crossing the aisle – political and religious conversion

Proposals (max. 300 words) are welcome from both established scholars and postgraduates, and should be sent by 30th April to the conference organisers Sarah Lewis and Emily Sherwood, either by email (transformingidentities@gmail.com) or through the conference website: opencuny.org/transformingidentities. Please specify whether you would like your paper considered for New York, London, or either. We very much look forward to receiving your proposal.

‘New Directions in the Renaissance’

Friday 2 November 2012
The University of Edinburgh
CALL FOR PAPERS
The cultural movement known as the Renaissance, and the profound affect
it had on the intellectual and artistic life of early modern Europe,
continues to provide inspiration for new scholars across a wide range of
disciplines. ‘New Directions in the Renaissance’ is an interdisciplinary
conference which aims to provide a forum for those studying the
Renaissance in its birthplace and heartland, Italy, to reflect on the
broad range of topics and themes which characterise study in this field.
Contributors are invited to explore emerging areas of inquiry, new
approaches to existing Renaissance scholarship, and the use of new media
and sources in their research. Participants must be concerned with the
Renaissance in Italy between c.1400-c.1600, but topics are not otherwise
limited.
The conference offers the opportunity for postgraduate students and
early career researchers (whether at PhD, MPhil, or MSc by Research
level) from universities across the UK to present their research in a
constructive, friendly environment. It is expected that funding will be
available for speakers’ travel and accommodation.
Please send proposals of 300 words for papers of 20 minutes, along with
a short biography, to: edinburghnewdirection@gmail.com by Friday 1 June
2012.