CFP: Text & Image in Early Modern Society (Sussex Postgraduate Conference)

A postgraduate conference organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies to be held at the University of Sussex, 9-11 September 2008

Plenary Speakers: Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex), Tom Healy (Birkbeck, University of London), Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle)

New extended deadline for Abstracts:
15th April 2008

Subjects: Theatre and Performance, The Bible, the Inns of Court and law, Music, Art, Printing, popular culture, court and elite culture, food and music, woman writers, politics, gender and sexuality, race and colonialism, others, rhetoric, writing lives, architecture, religion, graffiti and libels, pamphlets and broadsheets, polemic, fables, almanacs, poetry, the epic, satire, the body, erotica, witchcraft and ghosts, philosophical discourse, monsters.

Abstracts will be accepted on diverse topics and do not necessarily have to examine both ‘Text’ and ‘Image’

Costs: £35 conference fee (exclusive of accommodation)
Postgraduate Bursaries available

Abstracts of 200-300 words should be sent electronically to textandimage2008@googlemail.com

Swords from Heaven, and a Comus in Totnes?

Visit the marvelous Early Modern Whale to read of weirdly Miltonic doings “at Totneis in Devonshire,” 1642. 

Postgraduate Research

Take note of the new page on the right, introducing various members of the Exeter early modern studies postgraduate community.  At present the list includes only a sampling of PhD projects based in the Department of English.  All of those listed would be happy to receive relevant inquiries about their current research. 

Renaissance Reading Group: A Voyage to Urania

The next meeting of the Exeter Renaissance Reading Group will take place on Thursday 3 April.  The text for discussion will be Samuel Austin’s poem “Urania” (1629). A copy of the poem will shortly be available for photocopying from outside Karen Edwards’ office in Queen’s, and the poem is also accessible through EEBO.  The Reading Group will meet as usual in the Queen’s SCR at 1pm.

CFP: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England

After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England

Oxford, 16th-18th April 2009

An international conference organised by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, in association with the Bodleian Library, marking the 600th anniversary of the publication of Arundel’s Constitutions.

* Mapping Chronologies
* The dynamics of Orthodox Reform
* Humanism & Intellectual History
* Literary Self-Consciousness & Literary History
* Discerning the Discourse: Language & Spirituality
* Heresy & its Textual Afterlife

Plenary speakers: Sarah Beckwith, Jeremy Catto, Anne Hudson, David Lawton and Miri Rubin.

Please send 500 word abstracts by 31st May 2008 to Vincent Gillespie, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford OX2 6QA.

Writing Wales, 1500-1800

The Department of English, Aberystwyth University, and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Aberystwyth and Bangor) will host a two-day conference on the theme ‘Writing Wales: 1500-1800′ at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 3-4 July, 2008.

The conference aims to explore representations of Wales in historical and literary texts written in either Welsh or English between 1500 and 1800. It provides unprecedented opportunity for scholars across disciplines and conventional period demarcations to engage in a discussion of the different ways Wales was “written” in the early modern, eighteenth-century, and early Romantic periods. The conference will generate discussion concerning the broader continuities and/or discontinuities between different periods and different types of writing. Questions raised by the conference will include the existence of similarities and/or dissimilarities between historical and literary treatments of Wales, the way in which identifiable literary and historical narratives of Welsh national consciousness develop over the period span, points of connection and/or dissension between Welsh-language and Anglophone imaginings of Wales, the contribution of women writers to a Welsh national vision, the ways in which religion informs literary and historical treatments of Wales. The conference will also raise broader methodological questions about the extent to which conventional period descriptors – early modern, eighteenth century, Enlightenment, Romanticism – have shaped scholarly treatments of Wales, asking if we should continue to reinforce such period divisions, or start to reconfigure our approach to Wales’s literary and historical past.

Conference Programme

10.30 – 12.00  WELCOME AND KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Prof. Geraint H. Jenkins. Director, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales

13.00 – 14.30 SESSION 1: WALES IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Thomas Churchyard’s Worthines of Wales (1587)
Dr Liz Oakley-Brown, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University

George Peele’s Edward I (c.1591)
Alex May, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York

Writing Pembrokeshire in William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (1616)
Dr Stewart Mottram, Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Aberystwyth University

15.00 – 16.30  SESSION 2: EARLY MODERN WALES  

The Bible, print, and national identity in early modern Wales
Dr Eryn White, Department of History and Welsh History, Aberystwyth University

‘Prince of Wales by Cambria’s full consent’? The princedom of Wales as political stage
Marisa R. Cull, Department of English, Ohio State University

The anti-imperial rhetoric of Humphrey Llwyd
Grace Jones, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University

16.30 – 17.30  KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Prof. M. Wynn Thomas, English Department, University of Wales, Swansea

17.30 – 18.30 WINE RECEPTION

19.30 – late  CONFERENCE DINNER

Friday 4 July

10.00 – 11.30  SESSION 3: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WALES

The dragon in the room: Expressions of loyalty to the British state in eighteenth-century Welsh writing
B. M. Jenkins, Trinity College, University of Oxford

Eighteenth-century poems of Wales
Dr Sarah Prescott, Department of English, Aberystwyth University

Tra llesiol I bob teulu trwy Gymru: Medical and scientific publishing in Wales
Dr Diana Luft, School of Welsh, Cardiff University

12.00 – 13.00  KEYNOTE ADDRESS 
Prof. Jane Aaron, Department of Humanities and Languages, University of Glamorgan

14.00 – 15.00  SESSION 4: ROMANTIC WALES

Writing and rewriting Wales: Iolo Morganwg’s bardic nation
Dr Cathryn A. Charnell-White, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales

Archaeology of a Text: Edward Jones and The Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards
Dr Karen E. Mura, Department of English, Susquehanna University

15.00-15.30  CLOSING WORDS

SWEM Latest: Defoe Deferred!

The South West Early Modernist Network meeting announced to take place on 10th April will now take place on 17th April instead.

The speaker is Dr Steven Gregg (Bath Spa University) who will be talking about his research on Daniel Defoe: ‘Prigson and Fletumacy: Daniel Defoe and the languages of manliness’.

 Room details to follow.

Thursday: McClive on Measuring Masculinity in Early Modern France

1.00 pm Thursday 13 March, at the Medical History Seminar in Queen’s Room D:

Dr Cathy McClive (University of Durham) will speak on ‘Secret Bodies: Measuring Masculinity in Early Modern France’.

‘Women’s Secrets’ have long been the focus of gender and medical history for the late medieval and early modern periods at the expense of investigation into male corporeality. Indeed, it is only very recently that scholars have begun to turn their attention to masculinity, and to explore the impact of changing ideas of civility and sociability on ideals of manliness. Such interest remains for the most part largely Anglo-centric and, as both Kathleen Long and Katharine Crawford have recently pointed out; little work has been done on masculinity in early modern France. Moreover, investigations into the male body have for the most part presented it as a fixed, stable, but ‘little-defined norm’ against which the leaky, grotesque, mysterious and deceptive female body was mapped. The result of this is the imposition of a single, dominant interpretation of masculinity against which the imperfect female was measured. But was the male body really so much more straightforward and transparent than its female counterpart? Did it really hold no secrets of its own?

This is a paper about the secrets of the male body, about deceptive surfaces and secret interiors, about thresholds, boundaries, orifices and secretions. It is about the practices of bodily secrecy and public methods of disclosure through medical investigations and court cases. This paper investigates the judicial unravelling of the secret male body through a close reading of three cases of alleged hermaphroditism in early modern France. It argues that bodies, and particularly the male body do not cease to be a locus of secrets in the eighteenth century despite shifts in ideas about sexual difference and that the penis could prove as elusive and secretive as the uterus.

Tuesday: Watts on Late Medieval Politics

Next Tuesday at the Centre for Medieval Studies seminar:

Dr John Watts, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICS IN LATER MEDIEVAL EUROPE, c.1300-c.1500

Tuesday 11 March, 4pm, Queen’s LT4.2

John Watts has published extensively on political culture in the later middle ages, including his highly influential Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996) and recent articles on the scope of vernacular politics in the period. He is currently writing the late medieval-early Tudor volume of the New Oxford History of England, and a book related to his talk on Tuesday.

A drinks reception follows the seminar. All welcome.

Remember you your… SWEM: Gilmore on Cues, Monday

A reminder of next week’s SWEM Network meeting, featuring Nikki Gilmore’s presentation on ‘Cued Parts in English Renaissance Drama’. The full title of the presentation is:

‘____________________ [remember] [you] [your] cue’: (William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, III.iii.26): Types of Cue in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy.

The meeting will take place Monday 10th March 2008, at UWE St Matthias Campus, Room MO09, 18.00 start. As usual, there will be refreshments after the paper.