CFP: Vengeful Women at Bristol

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.

Deadline for proposals: 31 May, 2012.

CFP: Time, Space and Vision (King’s, Postgrad)

London Shakespeare Centre

Time, Space and Vision in Early Modern Culture

Anatomy Theatre and Museum, King’s College London

Saturday 27th February 2010

Keynote speaker: Professor François Laroque, Université de Paris III

The London Shakespeare Centre, King’s College London, and the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle, are co-hosting an international postgraduate colloquium on ‘Time, Space and Vision in Early Modern Culture’. The event will take place on the afternoon of Saturday 27th February 2010 at the newly renovated Anatomy Theatre and Museum at King’s College London, Strand Campus (for further details of the venue please see www.kcl.ac.uk/english/events/timespace).

As well as postgraduate papers on temporal and spatial issues in early modern poetry, drama and culture, we expect there to be a live video panel discussion with members of the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, comparing the experience of pursuing doctoral research in early modern English literature and culture in the UK, the US and France.

The afternoon will conclude with a keynote address from François Laroque entitled ‘‘Infinite riches in a little room’: Time and space in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Richard II’.

This will be followed by a drinks reception. A detailed schedule will be published on the colloquium web page shortly (www.kcl.ac.uk/english/events/timespace).

If you would like to attend please RSVP to mailto: timespace@kcl.ac.uk, stating your name, institutional affiliation, and contact details. There is a £10 attendance fee for all those registering who are not affiliated to King’s College London. Details of how to make this payment will be emailed to you once you have registered.

CFP: Teutonic Philosophy at Oxford

‘TEUTONIC PHILOSOPHY’:

Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) in context, his life and the reception of his writings

A conference to be held at the University of Oxford

16-18 September 2010

The theosophical works of Jacob Boehme [or Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624), the ‘inspired cobbler’ of Görlitz, have influenced Western culture in complex and profound ways, from the radical sects of the English Civil Wars to twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theology. This interdisciplinary conference will draw on the insights of literary, philosophical, theological and historical scholarship to illuminate Boehme’s thought and trace the reception of his writings over four centuries.

We would particularly welcome papers on the legacy of the Radical Reformation and the sixteenth-century anticlerical tradition, alchemy, Hermeticism, medicine, mysticism, radical religious ideas during the English Revolution, John Pordage, the Philadelphian Society, Pietism, William Law, Emanuel Swedenborg and the Swedenborgians, William Blake, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Martin Heidegger, American Transcendentalism and Eastern Orthodox Sophiology.

Confirmed speakers include: Vittoria Feola, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Ariel Hessayon, Glenn Magee, George Pattison, Marsha Keith Schuchard, Jane Shaw, Nigel Smith, Arthur Versluis, and Andrew Weeks.

Proposals for papers (maximum 300 words) are invited, and should be sent by 15 January 2010 to:

Ariel Hessayon, Department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London

OR

Sarah Apetrei, Keble College, University of Oxford

 

CFP: Ritual and Ceremony at Birkbeck

From Coronation to Chari-Vari: The Many Uses of Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World

A One Day Colloquium at Birkbeck, University of London

Friday 24 September, 2010

Call For Papers

As part of Birkbeck’s thriving research culture, this event will bring together scholars to discuss the purpose and reception of ritual and ceremony in the early modern period. Professor Jeroen Duindam, Groningen University, will give a key-note address on Thursday evening, 23 September. Researchers from all disciplines are cordially invited to submit proposals for 25 minute papers for this colloquium in central London on 24 September 2010.

Early modern life was shaped by ritual and ceremony. These rites had many functions, such as marking time, denoting power, place and order, and defining the sacred. Ritual could provide a temporary release from the hierarchically ordered world or mark an attempt to assert and confirm social categories which were otherwise potentially unstable.

How do we define a ritual, and is this different from the early modern definition? How does ritual differ from ceremony? To what extent did rituals remain static despite their rapidly changing social, cultural and intellectual contexts? How, when, why, and by whom were ceremonies changed? Did contemporaries notice similarities between rites practised in disparate social or cultural contexts? How was the success or failure of a ceremony measured? Could ordinary people affect the performance of rituals which were practiced by the elite, and vice versa? Preference will be given to papers which tease out issues such as these and seek to engage afresh with the historiography.

We are interested in hearing about ritual in the broadest sense and from all areas of the early modern world, including the royal courts, the church, universities, corporations, fraternities, sororoties, and guilds, and everyday customs, both rural and urban, as well as special and exceptional occasions. Papers could address themes such as authority and subversion, order and disorder, reception and perception, and so draw attention to what degree rituals were formal or spontaneous, solemn or riotous, conservative or revolutionary.

Please send abstracts of 250 words maximum together with a brief CV to the organisers, Stephen Brogan and Anne Byrne, at ritualandceremony@googlemail.com. Please send any other enquiries to this address too. The deadline for submission is 22 January 2010.

CFP: Early Modern to Postmodern Medievalisms (Exeter, 9/2010)

Recasting the Past: Early Modern to Postmodern Medievalisms

A Conference at the University of Exeter

1-2 September 2010

In 1649, the radical Digger movement called on the people of England to ‘throw down that Norman yoke’; in 1849, at the launch of the periodical the Anglo-Saxon, its British readers were addressed as ‘Anglo-Saxons all’; and in 2009, a cover story for Harpers magazine accused American soldiers in Afghanistan of acting ‘exactly like the crusaders of 1096′.

This conference will draw together research examining how, from the Renaissance to the present, historical narratives about Britain’s ‘medieval’ past have been drawn on to foster communal identities; to fuel, legitimate or oppose social and political change; and to resist or moderate the forces of modernity. Confirmed speakers include Rosemary Hill, author of God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) and Bruce Holsinger, author of The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005).

Proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes or 3-paper panels are invited. Possible topics might include:

The formation of regional and national identities

The politics of Pre-Raphaelitism

Gothic architecture

The reception of historical medieval figures – King Alfred, Richard III, the Black Prince, etc

The social/political agendas of translation and editing projects

The uses of chivalry, monasticism, feudalism, etc in post-medieval thought and praxis

The establishment of medieval-inspired institutions and associations

The social uses of King Arthur, Robin Hood and other medieval myths/legends/folklore

Please send proposals of 200-300 words to Dr Joanne Parker, Dr Philip Schwyzer, and Dr Corinna Wagner at medievalisms@exeter.ac.uk by 31st January 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS: MEMORY – RECOLLECTIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE (Journal issue)

 The Journal of the Northern Renaissance invites submissions for our second issue on the theme of memory and the Northern Renaissance.

Under the term ‘Renaissance’, the early modern period has often been described in terms of a process of recovery, rebirth and remembrance – words which invoke their shadowy counterparts, loss, death and forgetting. 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. We would welcome submissions thinking through the uses and abuses of memory in and of the period, and as ever would be especially interested in articles exploring the temporal and geographical boundaries of the Renaissance in the North.

Themes may include 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.

Submissions should be sent to the journal by *1st September 2009*. Potential contributors are advised to consult the submissions page of our website for details of the submissions procedure and style guidelines.

CFP: English Manuscript Culture (Southampton)

Music, Literature, Illustration: Collaboration and networks in English manuscript culture, c1500 – c1700

A postgraduate and post-doctoral conference, hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton

Chawton House Library, 16-17 February 2010

Keynote speaker: Dr Peter Beal FBA (Institute of English Studies, University of London)

This two-day conference will bring together postgraduate and early career researchers working on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English manuscript sources. Many of the sources from this period are multi-authored and contain strikingly disparate materials, posing a serious challenge to scholars working within traditionally defined disciplinary boundaries.

The primary aim of the conference is to address this challenge: to provide an opportunity for genuine interdisciplinary discussion, and to create new networks between researchers which will enable them to share both theoretical perspectives and practical approaches to working with early modern manuscript materials.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers that address any aspect of the conference theme but, in particular, those focused in the following areas:

· Studies of individual manuscripts that contain a range of diverse materials

· Manuscripts as emblems of social bonds (e.g. family, friendship, or patronage-based networks)

· Manuscripts as spaces for private reflection

· Manuscripts as objects for public display

· Manuscripts as commodities in a gift economy

· The relationships between manuscript and print culture

· The role of new technologies in manuscript studies, including:

– Project reports and/or practical demonstrations of existing electronic resources

– Conceptual and theoretical models – how can emerging technologies shape the future of manuscript studies?

– Representing non-textual material in electronic editions

A conference webpage will appear shortly on the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Culture website:

300 word abstracts for proposed papers should be sent by email to both conference organisers by October 16th 2009:

Michael Gale and Louise Rayment

Please include contact details and indicate your institutional affiliation and professional status (i.e. doctoral candidate, post-doctoral researcher etc.) in your submission.

CFP: Early Modern Dis/Locations at Northumbria

Early Modern Dis/Locations: An Interdisciplinary Conference,

Northumbria University, 15-16 January 2010

On 15-16 January 2010, Northumbria University in Newcastle (UK) will host an interdisciplinary conference on Early Modern Dis/Locations.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers include:

Tim Cresswell (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Patricia Fumerton (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University)

Bernhard Klein (University of Kent)

Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh)

The organisers invite scholars and students working in literary and cultural studies, history, geography, philosophy, and related disciplines to submit 200 word abstracts for 20-25 minute papers relating to any of the following themes and questions by September 30th 2009 (please note this is an extended deadline). Contributors are free to interpret and address these as broadly as they deem appropriate:

• What were the significant locations for and of early modern cultures, and why? How might we re-think and problematise constructions of court, city (or particular cities, real and imagined), ‘suburbs’, ‘country’, the ‘nation’, the ‘home’, ‘private’, ‘public’, the marketplace, the streets, ‘landscape’, colonies and plantations?

• To what extent were locations conceived and constructed as gendered, rank-specific, desirable, or disgusting?

• How were all such locations experienced (and by whom), and represented in literature, art, and philosophy?

• In what ways did locations condition, inhibit, or compel political agency and cultural production and consumption?

• How were locations demarcated, policed, transgressed and jeopardised in the period?

• How was dislocation caused, theorized and represented in the period? What were the realities and representations of placelessness, homelessness, and dispossession? Where, how and why did ‘mobilities’ occur, and in what forms?

• How have early modern cultural products and locations – like The Globe –been relocated into and appropriated by later historical and cultural positions?

• How can modern theories of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘placelessness’ develop our understanding of early modern locations and dislocations?

Please submit 200 word abstracts for 20-25 minute papers by email to Dr Adam Hansen by September 30th 2009. Please note this is an extended deadline.

If you have any questions please contact Dr Hansen by email or at this address:

Division of English and Creative Writing

126, Lipman Building

CFP: Society for Renaissance Studies National Conference 2010

University of York, 16-18 July 2010

Call for Papers

The 4th National Conference of the Society for Renaissance Studies will be held in the historic city of York on 16-18 July 2010. The conference will follow immediately after the Leeds Medieval Congress and will coincide with the final weekend of the York Early Music Festival–which will feature The Sixteen performing the music of Tallis and others in the York Minster, a major new performance of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, and a partial performance of the York Mystery Plays in the streets of the city. Participants will be offered tickets for all of these events along with tours of the city and outings to historic sites. The conference will also feature workshops on publishing and research funding (including a presentation by Shearer West, Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Confirmed plenary speakers include Iain Fenlon (Cambridge) and Penelope Gouk (Manchester).

We now invite proposals for panels (max. 90 minutes) on any aspect of Renaissance history, art, literature or culture, and for individual papers (max. 25 minutes) on one of the following themes: *Rethinking the Medieval/Renaissance Divide *At the Boundaries of Science *Soundscapes and Landscapes, Environments and Ecologies *Possessions and Collections *Between Spirituality and Materiality *Cultural Encounters

Proposals (max. 400 words) are welcome from both established scholars and postgraduates and they should be sent by Friday 25 September 2009 to the conference organizer: Prof William Sherman, Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, University of York,  Heslington YO10 5DD, United Kingdom

Further details (e.g. full programme, registration forms and information about accommodation) will be posted as they become available. Please note that speakers should normally be members of the Society and that we are particularly keen to encourage postgraduates to offer papers, and we will be able to offer generous bursaries to cover travel, registration and accommodation expenses. Also note that the SRS has come to an agreement with the Renaissance Society of America: RSA members will not have to join the SRS to participate in this conference.

CFP: Universal Reformation at Oxford (September, 2010) — UPDATED: note change of date

Universal Reformation: Intellectual Networks in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670

An International Conference at the University of Oxford

St Anne’s College, 21-23 September 2010

Call for Papers

http://www.culturesofknowledge.org

For decades before the Thirty Years War, Protestant communities in Poland-Lithuania, the Czech lands, and Hungary-Transylvania, lacking fully functional local universities responsive to their needs, sent their sons westward to study in Germany’s numerous universities and academies. The resulting contact and reciprocal influence knit the intellectual histories of these regions together in inextricable ways. The three decades of war which followed disrupted many of these institutions and replaced these patterns of academic travel with fresh waves of intellectual refugees fleeing in all directions: not only to Transylvania, western Poland, and Polish Prussia, but also to Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and the British Isles. At the same time, the trauma of displacement transformed long-nurtured aspirations toward ecclesiastical reunification, political pacification, pedagogical improvement, and philosophical reform into an all-embracing programme of universal reformation. As formulated above all by the exiled Moravian pedagogue and pansophist Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), this vision was disseminated in England by the circle around the displaced ‘intelligencer’ from Polish Prussia, Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-62).

For much of the twentieth century, the intrinsic difficulty of surveying this vast network was exacerbated by profound national rivalries and ideological divisions. Following the revolutions of 1989 and the expansion of the European Union in 2004, however, transformed political conditions allow an unprecedented assault on this problem. With this in mind, this conference invites both emerging and established scholars to contribute their perspectives on this huge system and the unfamiliar intellectual traditions exchanged within it. Discussions are intended to range outward chronologically from the wartime period to earlier and immediately following developments connected with it, and geographically from central Europe in all directions. Intellectual traditions to be explored include the following:

–  Universal education: institutional networks and intellectual exchange

– Universal wisdom: encyclopaedia and pansophia

– Universal communication: the early modern European media revolution

– Universal communion: ecclesiastical reconciliation in central Europe

– Universal history: millenarianism, prophecy, and propaganda

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the ‘Cultures  of Knowledge’ Project Director, Professor Howard Hotson, at cofk@humanities.ox.ac.uk by 31 December 2009