MEMORY: RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE (Glasgow workshop)

Glasgow will be the place to be on the eve of All Soul’s (what better date for a seminar on memory?)

The Early Modern Studies in Scotland Seminar and  The Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies present a Workshop:

MEMORY: RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE

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).

Place, Writing and Voice: Conference at Plymouth, 5-6 September

Place, Writing and Voice Conference

5 – 6 September 2008

School of Humanities, University of Plymouth and the Cornwall Audio Visual Archive

Speakers include: Tony Lopez, Nick Groom, Tim Fulford, Richard Kerridge, Heike Roms, Mike Pearson, Brycchan Carey, Philip Schwyzer

This conference presents a series of talks about ‘the local’, through consideration of the written and spoken word. It will consider a range of localities in South West Britain, Italy, Alaska, and India, for example, exploring connections between the local, national, and global environment, as well as between the written and oral.

It will bring together scholars from various areas of research, including: English literature, performance studies, oral history, geography, environmental studies, architecture, and music. This conference will also feature a poetry reading by Tony Lopez from his new work.

Further details with the full conference programme are available on the conference website.

Relics and Remains: Exeter Conference, September 10-12

‘Relics and Remains’
Sponsored by Past and Present and the British Academy
10 – 12 September 2008
Institute of Arab & Islamic studies, University of Exeter

The conference brings together a body of scholars working on a wide range of periods and past societies to explore the relic as a religious and cultural phenomenon and to set it in a broad comparative perspective. The aim is to foster dialogue about the ways in which the bodies and belongings of holy or famous persons have become the objects of worship or reverence in a series of different cultures and eras stretching from antiquity to the twenty-first century, and from Western Europe to Africa, Latin America, Australasia and the Far East.

Papers of particular interest to early modernists will include Howard Louthan, ‘Tongues, Toes and Bones: Remembering Saints in Early Modern Bohemia’; Alex Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation’; John Strong, ‘The Portuguese Capture and Destruction of the Buddha’s Tooth Relic, Goa, 1561′.

Visit the conference site for further details and full programme.

‘That all the world may wonder!’ Exeter Conference on the Palatine Wedding

‘That all the world may wonder!’
The Palatine Wedding of 1613, its Celebration and Significance

An International Interdisciplinary Conference  to be held at the University of Exeter, UK, and with the kind permission of the National Trust, at Montacute House, Somerset

7-10 September 2008

Conference organizers: Mara Wade (Illinois) and Sara Smart (Exeter).

Speakers include: Nadine Akkerman (Leiden), Anne Daye (London), Doris Gerstl (Nürnberg), Christof Ginzel (Bonn), Hanns Hubach (Zürich), Marika Keblusek (Leiden), James Knowles (University College, Cork), Ann Kronbergs (Brussels), Margret Lemberg (Marburg), Jerzy Limon (Gdansk), Iain McClure (London), Margaret McGowan (Sussex), Maureen Meikle (Sunderland), Wolfgang Metzger (Weimar), Jaroslav Miller (Palacký), Marco Neumaier (Heidelberg), Matthew O’Brien (Rutgers), Ann Marie Ross (California), Magnus Rüde (Berlin), Arne Spohr (Köln), Klaus Winkler (Eberbach)

The wedding in 1613 of Elizabeth Stuart, the only daughter of James VI/I, to Friedrich V, Elector of the Palatinate, was an event of major political, religious and cultural significance. Celebrated with lavish and sophisticated festivities in London and Heidelberg, the marriage took place against a backdrop of mounting confessional tension in Europe. It was understood by the radical Protestant states of the Empire, led by the Calvinist Palatinate, to be a signal of James’s readiness to support them in their struggle with the Catholic imperialists. However, when this tension finally came to a head in 1618 with the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War and Friedrich’s acceptance of the crown of Bohemia, James was prepared neither to engage militarily for the Protestant cause nor to endorse Friedrich’s position as king. Yet in spite of the disappointment of Protestant political hopes, the marriage had substantial consequences, not least in its cultural impact on the Heidelberg court and beyond.

This international conference is bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines – Art History, Dance, English, French, German, History and Music – to explore the marriage from different perspectives. In broad terms, the areas and themes covered in the papers include:

– the phenomenon of pan-Protestantism, its mythology and iconography, and their expression in court festivities and occasional writing;
– the interconnection between confessional and dynastic politics and the arts, including theatre, music, dance and poetry, painting, architecture and garden design;
– cultural agency and transfer in the relationship between Britain, France, the Netherlands and the Empire in the early modern period;
– Protestant and Catholic propaganda as reflected in the stylization of the Palatine couple both as the triumphant leaders of Protestantism and as the fugitive Winter King and Queen.

The conference programme will be organized in three sections:

1. The political, diplomatic and confessional context of and response to the marriage;
2. The diverse wedding festivities held in London and Heidelberg, as well as those staged on Elizabeth’s journey through the Netherlands to the Palatinate;
3. The cultural and political impact of the match on the Protestant courts of the Empire, particularly Heidelberg and its traditions of architecture and garden architecture, theatre and dance.

We hope that the conference will lead to new insights into the interrelationship between artistic expression and political ambition in the early modern period and that it will increase our understanding of Protestant culture, its ideals and self-definition in this key period in confessional history. We hope, too, that the dynastic and cultural focus will enhance our knowledge of relations between the Jacobean court and the Protestant Empire.

For enquiries relating to registration and hospitality, please contact Amanda Edmondson +44(0)1392 264261.

Visit the conference site for registration details and the full programme.