ShaLT Project Lectures -- online!

Over the summer of 2013 a series of public talks

by leading theatre historians was given at the

Victoria & Albert Museum in London on various

topics around theatre in Shakespeare's time.

The talks were part of the 'Shakespearean

London Theatres (ShaLT)' project and were audio-

recorded for anyone to download from the ShaLT

website at http://shalt.org.uk/downloads.

The full list of talks you can download is:

* Prof Andrew Gurr 'Why was the Globe Round?'

* Prof Peter Womack 'The People's Tragic Hero'

* Prof Julie Sanders 'Ben Jonson, Bankside and

the Blackfriars'

* Prof Tiffany Stern 'Stuck Up and Down About

the City'

* Prof Joanne Tompkins 'Virtual Reality and London's

Early Stages'

* Prof Jean E. Howard 'Rich City, Poor City'

* Dr Farah Karim-Cooper 'Fashioning the Female Face'

* Prof Martin White 'When Torchlight Made an

Artificial Noon'

* Prof Ralph A. Cohen 'The New Blackfriars'

* Prof Gary Taylor '1+1=3'

* Prof Martin Butler 'Exeunt Players'

The audio files are all offered under a Creative Commons

Attribution ShareAlike licence (CC-BY-SA) that allows

you to do anything with them--including putting them into

your teaching materials, burning them onto a disk and

selling it, adapting them as tap-dances for Broadway--

so long as you acknowledge the speaker and don't attach

a licence more restrictive than this one.

The ShaLT investigators, myself and Andrew Gurr, are

grateful to De Montfort University, the Victoria and

Albert Museum, and the Arts and Humanities Research

Council for financial support that made these talks

possible. We are especially grateful to the speakers

themselves for their contributions.

Gabriel Egan

________________

"The Past and Future of the Book” Symposium

On October 10-11, 2013, the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College will host a free public symposium on “The Past and Future of the Book”:

www.rhodes.edu/book

Thursday, 6:00pm (reception 5:30), UC Theater, University of Memphis:

* Robert Darnton (Harvard University): "Digitize and Democratize: Libraries, Books, and the Digital Future"

Friday, 9:00am (coffee, 8:30am), Blount Auditorium, Rhodes College:

* Lukas Erne (University of Geneva): "Disseminating Printed Shakespeare in Early Modern England"

* Michael Witmore (Folger Shakespeare Library): "Writing Literary and Cultural History at the Level of the Sentence"

* Response by Robert Darnton

Co-sponsored by the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities, the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis, and the Rhodes College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Please contact Scott Newstok (newstoks@rhodes.edu) for further information.

The Lucy Hutchinson Conference

St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Thursday 28 November 2013

Lucy Hutchinson is well known to seventeenth-century historians and literary scholars as the author of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, a classic biography which sets the momentous life of her husband, a committed Puritan, republican and regicide, against the wider backdrop of the English Civil War and Restoration. This work, and a compelling though fragmentary autobiography, have been more or less continually in print since their publication from manuscript in 1806. Only recently, however, has the scale and range of her interests been recognized. Like her contemporary – and political rival – Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Hutchinson aspired to the new European model of the woman intellectual, and translated Lucretius’ De rerum natura, the most passionately anti-religious text of antiquity. From a radically different perspective, she later composed Order and Disorder, a major Biblical poem on a parallel subject to Milton'sParadise Lost. Underpinning her later works was an exceptional engagement with contemporary Latin and English theological writings. Many fundamental questions about her life and writings have yet to be addressed, and this will be the first ever conference to discuss them. It will bring together many scholars who are working on a new edition of her collected works and others with an interest in seventeenth-century literature, politics and women’s writing. Speakers will include Penelope Anderson, Martyn Bennett, Mark Burden, Elizabeth Clarke, Alice Eardley, Jonathan Gibson, Crawford Gribben, Erica Longfellow, David Norbrook, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Blair Worden.

Registration: http://www.cems-oxford.org/conferences/lucy-hutchinson.

 Inquiries: hutchinson.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk

‘I take thee at thy word’: Trust in Renaissance Literature

What qualities compose trust and confidence in the Renaissance?  What signs call it into question?  This seminar seeks to identify points of congruence and contention in sixteenth and seventeenth century notions of trust and how they might be betrayed. From the stage Machiavel who discloses his plans to the audience to the kinsman who pledges his fealty, or the lover who exchanges his faithful vow, how did trust differ across such different domains as religious and political life or familial relations?  It is hoped that papers will cross a range of genres including early modern poetry, prose, and drama, as well as major and minor authors. The intended outcome will be to publish suitable papers in a special issue of Textual Practice.

This seminar will be part of the interdisciplinary MatchPoints Conference 2014 at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, 22-24 May 2014 (www.matchpoints.au.dk).  Plenary speakers include Robert Putnam (Harvard University), Eric Uslaner (University of Maryland), Gerd Achenbach (Lessing-Hochschule zu Berlin, Philosophische Praxis), Mikael Rostila (Stockholm University), Alison Findlay (Lancaster University), Svend Andersen (Aarhus University),Cheryl Mattingly (University of Southern California), Sverre Raffnsøe (Copenhagen Business School).

Organised by Joseph Sterrett

Please send 150 word proposals to engjs [at] hum.au.dk by 15 January 2014.

Romance and its Transformations, 1550-1750

Call for Papers
June 30^th and July 1^st, 2014, Chawton House Library, UK



Keynote Speakers
Professor Ros Ballaster, Oxford University
Professor Emerita Mary Ellen Lamb, Southern Illinois University


With a public keynote by Professor Nandini Das, Liverpool University

As a genre, romance is defined by transformation: it is both a recurrent motif within romance and a characteristic of a form that has itself been transformed over the centuries and in different locations. But romance maintains a degree of formal and thematic integrity, as well as its appeal with different generations of readers and across social and cultural boundaries. This conference will explore the appropriation and transformation of romance in Britain and beyond between 1550 and 1750, as writers adopted and rewrote the motifs, storylines, characters, and formal elements of the genre. In doing so, it will bring into dialogue the different ideas about and critical approaches to the genre that are developing our understanding of the significance of romance within historical periods traditionally considered in isolation from one another, including the Renaissance, the early modern period and the eighteenth century.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of the way romance has been adopted and transformed between 1550 and 1750. Potential areas of investigation include but are not limited to:

Romance and…

commonplace books, conduct books, drama, poetry (including epic), letters, life writing, novels and other forms of prose fiction, political activism, political writing, print and, manuscript culture, scientific writing, social interactions, translation.

The deadline for 500 word abstracts is December 31^st, 2013

Please send abstracts to Alice Eardley: a.eardley@soton.ac.uk or Julie Eckerle: ecker014@morris.umn.edu