Blog

As another term comes to a close, why not celebrate with some Early Modern seminars (and one postgraduate conference)? Over the vacation, we will be continuing to announce upcoming events on this blog and on our Twitter (@OxfordCEMS). Please do get in touch with any seminar schedules and announcements for Trinity term, and particularly if you'd like to write a short blog post on your research or an upcoming event/publication!

Monday 6 March

• Bodleian Master Classes in Early Modern Manuscripts

2.15pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (Level 1) 

Daniel Smith (KCL): 'A manuscript of John Donne's 'Goodfriday' from the collection of Robert S. Pirie – poor memorial reconstruction, or authorial early version?

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Jim Harris (Ashmolean Museum), Peter Dent (University of Bristol, Dept of Art History): ‘Ghiberti’s Commentarii: A Guide to Looking’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room

Jill Kraye (Warburg Institute, London): ‘What does Renaissance humanism have to do with Renaissance philosophy?’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5pm Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Laurence Brockliss (University of Oxford): ‘The Lure of Paris: The Republic of Letters and Eighteenth-Century Speed-Dating’

• Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar

5:15pm, Old Library, Hertford College

Professor Abigail Williams (St Peter's College): 'Reading and Sociability in the Eighteenth-Century Home'

• Oxford Bibliographic Society

​5.15pm, Weston Library, Lecture Theatre

Emma Smith: 'Marital Marginalia: The Books of Thomas and Isabella Hervey (ca 1675–1694)'

Tuesday 7 March

• Early Modern Catholicism Seminar

​5pm, Wolfson College, Seminar Room 3

John Hunt (Utah Valley): 'Wagering on the Red Hat: Gambling on the Promotion of Cardinals in Sixteenth-Century Rome'

• Early Modern Graduate Forum

5.15pm, St Cross Building, History of the Book Room

Deborah Ramkhelawan: "'Dear Sister Moll': Reading Mary Evelyn’s Childhood Correspondence"
Emily Jennings: "'Balaam's Asse': Apocalypse, Treason, and the Politics of Interpretation in Mid-Jacobean Britain"

Wednesday 8 March

• Early Modern German Culture: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

2pm, Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty (followed by afternoon tea).  

Jan Zdichynec (Charles University, Prague): ‘Abbesses – Nuns – Monks. Disciplining, Communication and Culture in the Cistercian nunneries of Early Modern Upper Lusatia’

Petr Hrachovec (Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic): ‘Parish, Piety and Providence. The Case of Early Modern Zittau’

Thursday 9 March

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Graduate student presentations:

Chloe Ingersent (Oriel), '(En)Gendering violence in sixteenth-century England'

Joseph Newall (St Cross), ‘A Greate Offendor in His Kind of Writinge': Archbishop Laud and the Prosecution of William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix, 1633–4’

Thomas Pert (Lincoln), 'The Palatine Family c. 1632-48: Experiences of exile in the Thirty Years' War'

William White (St Anne’s), 'Politics and Religion in the Sermons of the Royalist Clergy, 1642-1662'

Micheline Astley-Boden (Christ Church), ‘Religious Violence During the English Civil War’

Hayley Ross (St John’s),"'Popery' and Conscience in Late Seventeenth-Century Anti-Catholic Texts’

• Thomas Middleton, 'A Trick to Catch the Old One'

​4pm, English Faculty

Lectures by Harry McCarthy and Laurie Maguire.

7:30pm, Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall

Performance by Edward's Boys: tickets available here.

Friday 10 March

• Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe

​Two-day conference (10-11 March), Ertegun House

See the conference website for programme and more information. Free registration is open until 8 March. 

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Professor Rodolfo Savelli, Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, Università di Genova: 'Printing the Corpus iuris civilis in the Sixteenth Century'

In other news:

The abstract deadline for our upcoming conference, "Mimesis on Trial" is 15 March; abstracts for "Cultures of Collecting, 1550-1700" will be accepted until 10 April. Please see the Conferences page for more information on both.

Next week, 13-14 March, the Oxford Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy is hosting a free two-day conference on "Philosophy of/and Education": programme and registration information here.

Registration is also open for the conference 'After Chichele: Intellectual and Cultural Dynamics of the English Church, 1443 to 1517' taking place at St. Anne's College 28-30 June. 

Finally, enjoy the springtime and don't forget to go outside once in a while...

Along with the regular schedule of seminars and events, there are a number of announcements and calls for papers this week - see below!

Monday 27 February

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Marco Gentile (Università degli Studi di Parma, Dept of History): ‘The Count’s Funeral. Rural Lordship and the City in Fifteenth-Century Lombardy’ 

• E.A. Lowe Lectures in Palaeography 3: 'The Fox and the Bees; the First Century of the Library of Corpus Christi College' 

5pm, MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College

Professor Rod Thomson, 'The Library They Produced'

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room 

Mara van der Lugt (Göttingen): ‘The good, the bad, and the ugly: the problem of evil in early modern philosophy’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5 p.m. Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Andrew Kahn (University of Oxford): ‘The Enlightenment Radicalism of Alexander Radishchev’ 

• Oxford Bibliographic Society

​5.15pm, Weston Library, Lecture Theatre

Adam Smyth: "‘Tatters allegoricall’: reading and not reading printed waste in early modern books"

Tuesday 28 February

• Early Modern Catholicism Seminar

​5pm, Wolfson College, Seminar Room 3

John Hunt (Utah Valley): 'Wagering on the Red Hat: Gambling on the Promotion of Cardinals in Sixteenth-Century Rome'

• Early Modern Literature Seminar

5.15pm, Ertegun House

Sophie Read (Cambridge), “Spiceworld: God & the Metaphysics of Scent in some Seventeenth-Century Poetry"

Wednesday 1 March

• Engaging with the Humanities

​12.15pm, Saïd Business School, Park End Street

Professor Ben Morgan, 'Shakespeare's Conviviality'

Registration is required for this event; see here for more information.

Thursday 2 March

• Democracy and its Discontents: Rousseau, Robespierre, Paine

12.15pm, TORCH, Radcliffe Humanities Building

Olivier Tonneau (University of Cambridge): 'Justice as prudence: Robespierre's struggle to prevent terror (1789-1792)'

Yannick Bosc (Rouen): 'Thomas Paine and Robespierre: the Terror of the Rights of Man'

Daniel Thévenon (University of Cambridge): 'Rousseau, Freedom and the French Revolution'

See here for more information.

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

Thomas Roebuck (University of East Anglia): "Thomas Smith (1638-1710) and His Journey to the Levant: Continuities and Transformations in Oriental Scholarship"

• Key Words in Early Modern French Culture Seminar

3.30pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

Jean-Alexandre Perras (Jesus College): “Génie” 

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Graduate student presentations:

Emily Glassford (Lincoln), ‘Excess, Corruption, and Sin: Cultural Stereotypes of Strangers in London and at the English Court, c. 1450-1558'

Joel Butler (Wadham), 'The Levant Company and Anglo-Ottoman Diplomacy in the sixteenth century: Re-Orienting Perspectives’

Christopher Gausden (Jesus), ‘The English View of the Scottish Court, 1594: The Baptism of Prince Henry’

Michael Heimos (St Cross), ‘In the night the heart doeth wander…’ – Koheleth and Expression, Practical Divinity, and Community in England, 1585 – 1603’

Matthew Ward (Kellogg), 'The political and religious thought of John Vesey: a chapter in the Anglo-Irish reception of Thomas Hobbes'

• Early Modern French Seminar

5.15pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

David LaGuardia (Dartmouth College): 'On the Practices of Memory: The Case of Jeanne d’Albret and Catherine de Médicis'

​

Friday 3 March

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Dr Paul Needham, Scheide Library, Princeton University Library: 'The Gutenberg Bible in the Context of Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Bibles'

• Getting Your Hands Dirty With the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit

​3-5pm, Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library

Spaces are limited and advance registration is required; see here for more information.

In other news: 

CEMS has launched a Call for Papers for another one-day conference, titled "Cultures of Collecting, 1500-1750" (14 June 2017, CFP deadline 10 April). We are also still accepting abstracts for "Mimesis on Trial" (20 May 2017), with the deadline coming up 15 March -- please see here for more information on both and email your abstracts to natasha.simonova@ell.ox.ac.uk .

The Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar is looking for DPhil students and postdocs to present posters about their research: details can be found here; the deadline for expressions of interest is 11 March, coinciding with the TORCH humanities poster competition.

Registration is now open for the Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe conference taking place at Ertegun House 10-11 March. 

Registration also is open for a conference on The Book Index (22-23 June 2017) hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book.

As well as the first two E.A. Lowe Lectures in Palaeography at Corpus Christi College (whose founder enjoined its scholars to be like "ingenious bees" creating wax and honey day and night), this week features all manner of seminars for the cross-pollination of ideas.

Monday 20 February​​

• Bodleian Master Classes in Early Modern Manuscripts

2.15pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (Level 1) 

Justin Begley (Oxford): 'Margaret Cavendish in the Bodleian: Gifts, Corrections, and Annotations'

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

James Shaw (University of Sheffield, Dept of History): ‘Women as creditors, debtors and intermediaries: the informal economy of credit in seventeenth-century Venice’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room

Catherine Wilson (York and All Souls College, Oxford): ‘The image of man in the Comte de Buffon’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5pm Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Kate Marsh (University of Liverpool): ‘Enlightenment from India? France, India and Global Exchanges, c. 1721-99’ 

• Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar

5:15pm, Old Library, Hertford College

Dr Aaron Hanlon (Colby College): 'Fanny Hill and the Enlightenment History of Pain'

Tuesday 21 February

• Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Legalism Seminar

4.30pm, Wolfson College

Martin Ingram  (Faculty of History, University of Oxford) 'Manners and Morals: Codes of Civility in Early Modern England'

• Early Modern Catholicism Seminar

​5pm, Wolfson College, Seminar Room 3

Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes): 'Cleaning the streets: the changing place of prostitution and piety in Renaissance Genoa'

• Early Modern Graduate Forum

5.15pm, St Cross Building, History of the Book Room

Christopher Gausden: "Laelius: Sir Henry Lee (1533-1611), Literature and Politics"
Andrea Davidson: "Women Against Redemptive Suffering: Transverberation and the Nightingale in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"

Wednesday 22 February​

Thursday 23 February

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Sir John Holt: Courts, Corporations and the Crafting of the Constitutional Landscape after 1688 
Preparatory reading: P. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns 1650-1730 (1998), esp. ch. 8; H. Nenner, By Colour of Law, Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660-1689 (1977); P. Hamburger, ‘Revolution and Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt's Opinion in City of London v. Wood’, Columbia Law Review, 94 (1994), 2091-2153. 
George Artley (University of Oxford)

• ​Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music

​5-7pm, All Souls, Wharton Room

Uri Smilansky (King’s College, London): 'Drugs, Sex, Medieval Cultural Politics and the Learned Musicians of 18th Century Paris: Surviving the Centuries as a Machaut Manuscript'

Friday 24 February

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Dr David Speranzi, Firenze, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento: 'Greek Script and Type in the Fifteenth century. Demetrius Damilas between Milan and Florence'

• E.A. Lowe Lectures in Palaeography 2: 'The Fox and the Bees; the First Century of the Library of Corpus Christi College' 

5pm, MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College

Professor Rod Thomson, 'The First President as Fox's Instrument: John Claymond's Donations'

As we pass the halfway point of term, escape the cold and the Week 5 blues with Early Modern seminars across a wide range of disciplines:

Monday 13 February

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Julian Gardner (University of Warwick, Dept of Art History): ‘Moving Pictures: Cardinals in Copes’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room (access is via the entrance to the College on the High Street – please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at www.asc.ox.ac.uk/visiting-the-college).

Theodor Dunkelgrun (CRASSH, Cambridge): 'Two concepts of purity: limpieza de sangre and hebraica veritas in Renaissance Spain’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5 p.m. Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford): Discussion of Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, ed. by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson (OUP, 2016) 

Tuesday 14 February

• Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Legalism Seminar

4.30pm, Wolfson College

Jan Lorenz (Department of Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University): 'Within the law: The ethical and legal aspects of Polish conversions to Judaism'

• Early Modern Literature Seminar

5.15pm, Ertegun House

Simon Smith (Birmingham), “Playgoing, Pleasure and Judgement in Early Modern England”

Wednesday 15 February

• 'Senses and Sensations' Graduate Study Group 

12pm, Chough Room, St Edmund Hall

How do texts convey sounds or smells, shock or shame? How are the most subjective of bodily experiences, from sweet tastes to bitter pain, expressed in literature? There’s nothing to read in advance: just turn up ready to see, hear, and share ideas from across all time periods. (Please feel free to bring your lunch, to eat while we discuss!) All welcome. 

Week 5 discussion: 'Sight and the early modern stage' 

• 'Reading Images' Workshops at the Ashmolean Museum

​1pm, New Douce Room, Ashmolean

Alice Little (DPhil Music, University of Oxford): 'Collecting Places: John Malchair’s drawings of eighteenth-century Oxford in the context of his music collecting'

• Early Modern German Culture: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

2pm, Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty (followed by afternoon tea).  

Allison Stielau (UCL), ‘Souvenir of Siege: The Early Modern Notklippe’

Hannah Murphy (KCL), ‘The Arts of Measurement in Early Modern Germany’

Thursday 16 February​

• ‘What’s so early modern about the Early Modern World?’, a round-table discussion with opening reflections by John Darwin (Nuffield), Christopher Markiewicz (Exeter), Christine Woodhead (Durham), and John-Paul Ghobrial (Balliol).

11:15am, in the Old Common Room, Balliol College. 

Pre-circulated readings can be obtained from john-paul.ghobrial@history.ox.ac.uk:

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern” World’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41.3 (1998), 249-284.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (July 1997), 735-762.

• Key Words in Early Modern French Culture Seminar

3.30pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

Edward Nye (Lincoln College): “Pre-Romanticism” 

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Loyalist Catholicism Reconsidered: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan regime in the 1580s 
Preparatory reading:S. Kaushik, 'Resistance, loyalty and recusant politics: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan state’ , Midland History 21 (1996), 37-72; E. Rose, Cases of Conscience: alternatives open to recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I (1975) esp. ch. 4; G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: a scholarly Life (2015), esp. chs. 6, 9, & 11. 
Katie McKeogh (University of Oxford)

• Early Modern French Seminar

5.15pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

Kate Tunstall (University of Oxford): "The Making of Diderot-philosophe, 1765-82” 

• Literature and Medicine Seminar

6.15pm, Green Templeton College,  Abrahams lecture theatre

Laurie Maguire (University of Oxford): 'Imitating Illness, Imitating Plays: Volpone, Othello and King Lear.'

In other news: 

The @OxfordCEMS Twitter feed continues to be your daily one-stop shop for Early Modern events, announcements, conference CFPs, and the occasional pretty picture. As we approach 1000 followers, we welcome suggestions for what we should do to celebrate!

It's been suggested that Twitter is a bit miserable this morning, so to cheer everyone up, here are some Puritans enjoying a good laugh. pic.twitter.com/KG6r6BFG6L

— Jonathan Healey (@SocialHistoryOx) February 9, 2017

It's busy week for Early Modern research, with a number of new and one-off events across a range of time-periods and disciplines listed below! As always, please get in touch if there's anything you'd like to see featured, or if you're interested in writing a blog post to share your news or work in progress.

Monday 6 February

• The Relation of Literature and Learning to Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe

2.00pm (ending by 3.30pm), Wharton Room, All Souls College

Richard McCabe (Merton College, Oxford): Literary Patronage and Hierarch

Lisa Sampson (UCL): Learning and Theatre in the Italian Academies

• The third annual joint Classics and English lecture: APGRD Public Lecture

2.15pm, Ioannou Centre Lecture Theatre, 66 St Giles'. Free, all welcome, no booking required.

Victoria Moul (KCL), ‘The Other Muse: Latin and English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’

• Bodleian Master Classes in Early Modern Manuscripts

2.15pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (Level 1) 

Chris Fletcher (Bodleian): '"Good Mr Wagstaffe": a project team presentation showcasing new electronic student editions of early modern letters in the Bodleian'

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Hannah Kinney (University of Oxford, Dept of Art History): ‘Originality and Ownership in Grand Ducal Florence’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room (access is via the entrance to the College on the High Street – please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at www.asc.ox.ac.uk/visiting-the-college).

Niccolo Guicciardini: ‘The publication of Newton’s Opera omnia in Geneva and Lausanne (1739–1761): a chapter in the reception of Newtonianism’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5pm Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Paul Monod (Middlebury College): ‘Voltaire and the Jacobites, 1722-1733’ 

• Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar

5:15pm, Old Library, Hertford College

Dr Ryan Hanley (New College, Oxford): '"The poor woman's fair fame and reputation": Mary Prince, Slavery, and the Celebrity of Victimhood'

Tuesday 7 February

• Early Modern Catholicism Seminar

​5pm, Wolfson College, Seminar Room 3

Aislinn Muller (Cambridge): 'Regnans in Excelsis and Catholic Missions to England'

• Early Modern Graduate Forum

5.15pm, St Cross Building, History of the Book Room

Natalya Din-Kariuki: "Making Friends in Strange Places: Henry Blount's Voyage into the Levant (1636) and the Rhetoric of Similitude"
Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull: "Grave Matters: New Interpretations of Mary Lady Chudleigh’s 'Epitaph'"

Wednesday 8 February

Thursday 9 February

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

Peter Hill (Christ Church College, Oxford): "The First Arabic Translations of Enlightenment Literature: Syrians, Greeks and Franks in Damietta, 1808-1818"

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Charles I's most loyal subject: Thomas Harrison and the Sin of Uzzah 
Preparatory reading: ‘The trial of Thomas Harrison,’ in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 3 (1809), 1369-82; Noel Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”: An Episode in the History of the Organization of Knowledge’, Seventeenth Century, 19 (2004), 196-232; .David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford, 2015), pp. 177-209 (‘Importunate Petitioners’); 2 Samuel 6: 1-7 or 1 Chronicles 13: 7-11. 
Prof David Cressy (Claremont Graduate University and Christ Church)

• ​Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music

​5-7pm, All Souls, Wharton Room

Christian Thomas Leitmeir (Magdalen College), ‘The Mendicants and the Motet’

Friday 10 February

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Dr Jeremiah Dittmar, Department of Economics, London School of Economics: 'The Price of Books in Early Modern Europe: An Economic Perspective'

In other news:

The Lexicons of Early Modern English project at the University of Toronto is now open access, allowing you to search a large variety of dictionaries published between 1480 and 1755. 

The World Turn'd Up-side-Down;
as imagined by a printer of ballad slips with a very literal sense of creativity.#britishlibrary 1875.d.16. pic.twitter.com/3avZxZdFyQ

— christian algar (@CBarnacles) January 31, 2017

Monday 30 January

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Diana Presciutti (University of Essex, Dept of Art History): ‘Marble, Grisaille, Print: Materials and Visual Hagiography in Renaissance Italy’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room (access is via the entrance to the College on the High Street – please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at www.asc.ox.ac.uk/visiting-the-college).

Nicholas Hardy (University Library, Cambridge): ‘Biblical typology and Protestant scholarship, from Joseph Scaliger (d. 1609) to Jean Le Clerc (d. 1736)’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5 p.m. Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Peter Jones (University of Birmingham): ‘Agricultural Enlightenment: the Knowledge-Based Approach to Growth in the Rural Economy, c. 1750-1840’ 

Tuesday 31 January

• Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Legalism Seminar

4.30pm, Wolfson College

Andrew Simpson (School of Law, University of Aberdeen): 'The Invention of New Law in the Poetry of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (ca.1496–1586)'

• Early Modern Literature Seminar

5.15pm, Ertegun House

Victoria van Hyning (Oxford), “English Convent Autobiography, 1630-1795”

Wednesday 1 February

• 'Reading Images' Workshops at the Ashmolean Museum

​1pm, New Douce Room, Ashmolean

Vittoria Fallanca (DPhil Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford): 'Thinking drawing differently (with some help from Boucher and Montaigne)'

• Early Modern German Culture: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

2pm, Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty (followed by afternoon tea).  

Emilie Dosquet (IMHC, Paris),  'Of Fire and Ink: the Fabrication of the Desolation of the Palatinate (1688–9). On Some German Aspects of a European Event'  

Thursday 2 February

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

Ada Rapoport-Albert (University College, London): "Trans-cultural Sectarians: The Messianic Cult of Jacob Frank and His Daughter in Eighteenth-Century Poland"

• Key Words in Early Modern French Culture Seminar

3.30pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

Catriona Seth (University of Oxford): “Salon” 

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

"My Authority is Absolute”: Mapping the Political Landscape of Later Stuart Cornwall and South-West Wales 
Preparatory reading: D.W. Hayton, The House of Commons, 1690-1715: Introductory Survey (2002), pp. 124-31, 137-40; A.H. Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales (1952), ch. 5. 
James Harris (University of Oxford)​

• Literature and Medicine Seminar

6.15pm, Green Templeton College,  Abrahams lecture theatre

Evelyn Welch,  Professor of Renaissance Studies at King’s College London, speaks about 'Renaissance Skin'

Friday 3 February

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Professor Stephen Oakley, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University: 'Incunabular Stemmatics'

In other news: 

The Folger Shakespeare Library has launched the beta site of Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), which provides transcriptions, metadata and images of manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The proposal deadline for "Mobility and Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe" is on Wednesday, 1 February -- see the conferences page for details.

CEMS' own Professor Rhodri Lewis is in the Times Literary Supplement with a topical contribution:

In the TLS: @profrhodrilewis on Shakespeare and Trump. https://t.co/nKdSOA2miQ

— Oxford CEMS (@OxfordCEMS) January 24, 2017

After completing his DPhil, Niall Allsopp joined the English Faculty and Oriel College as a Departmental Lecturer in Michaelmas 2016. As part of this series of introductions to new members of staff, he tells us a bit about his current work and research interests.

My core interest is in how early-modern writers fashioned ideas of social cohesion and mutual obligation, during a period in which these concepts were heavily tested and contested. I am particularly interested in the English Revolution and the works of Thomas Hobbes. I am interested in Hobbes as a literary author in his own right, but whose intellectual influence opens up new approaches to major poets—those who are neglected (Cowley, Davenant), those who need revisiting (Dryden), and those who still command wide attention today (Marvell, Milton). I am interested in critical close reading, alongside book history, archival research, and intellectual and political history.

In my doctoral thesis I explored how poets re-thought the nature of sovereignty and obligation in the ideological vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Stuart monarchy in the late 1640s. I investigated the impact of Hobbes—his theories of language, psychology, and political relations—on the key poems of the 1650s. I tried to show the vitality of a radical body of political theory from outside of the conventional royalist and republican canons: focusing on writers who abandoned the former without embracing the latter. A couple of side-projects which emerged from the thesis have been published as articles: on readers’ satirical annotations to Davenant’s poetry, and on Hobbes’s impact on the literary controversies of the 1660s. I passed my viva in January 2016, and am now working on turning the thesis into a monograph, which will be called Hobbes and the Poets of the English Revolution.

Several questions have preoccupied me since finishing my thesis. I am pondering how to teach the English Civil Wars, how to excite undergraduates about the amazing writing of this period, and how to convey the historiographical controversies which have energized so much of the scholarship in ways that will unlock (rather than stifle) engaged and sophisticated work. Conversely, teaching the Oxford course—whose period boundaries bisect my area of interest—has challenged me to think how my work interacts with longer-term trends, both from the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, and into the later Restoration, the Williamite revolution, and the early eighteenth century. As I teach these periods this year (along with the Shakespeare paper), I will be on the lookout for connections, leads, and sources.

In answering the latter question I have started on two new research projects. Both involve intersections between the history of political ideas, the history of reading, and literary criticism; and both involve Hobbes. The first concerns the changing nature of the early-modern epic, and how our view of this might change if we experiment with looking beyond the (understandable) dominance of Paradise Lost. I am currently thinking about how epic projects ideas of statehood and sovereignty, particularly in the context of seafaring narratives. My second question focuses on the experience of ritual—in texts and in everyday life—and how this was changed by the English Revolution. I want to learn more about how early-modern authors understood the ritual properties of texts themselves, their capacity to transform, affirm, or oblige.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words about the new CEMS website, and to all who have submitted profiles to be affiliated with us -- we're particularly keen to hear from current DPhil students.

Here are all of the many Early Modern events taking place this week. As always, let us know if there's anything you'd like included in future round-ups, or if you'd like to write a blog post relating to a publication/event/your current research. 

Monday 23 January

• Bodleian Master Classes in Early Modern Manuscripts

2.15pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (Level 1) 

Victoria Pickering (QMUL): 'Richard Richardson and his 'Botanick friends': Bodleian correspondence and natural history in the early eighteenth century'

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Catherine Whistler (Ashmolean Museum, Dept of Western Art): ‘Drawing and Venice’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room (access is via the entrance to the College on the High Street – please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at www.asc.ox.ac.uk/visiting-the-college).

Felix Waldmann (Christ’s College, Cambridge): ‘The Chair of Ethics in the University of Naples, 1703–69’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5pm Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Vittoria Feola (Università degli Studi di Padova): ‘Prince Eugene of Savoy and the Radical Enlightenment: A Reappraisal’ 

• Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar

5:15pm, Christ Church Library

Archive Workshop: The Brady Collection, Christ Church College Library (please congregate at the Library lobby 5pm) 

Tuesday 24 January

• Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Legalism Seminar

4.30pm, Wolfson College

David d’Avray (Department of History, UCL): 'Social Systems and the Internal Legal Forum, with special reference to the Papal Penitentiary'

• Early Modern Graduate Forum

5.15pm, St Cross Building, History of the Book Room

Edwina Christie: "Reading Seventeenth-Century Prose Romances"
Jonathon Iverson: "Philosophies of 'Taste' in English (and French) Cookery Books of the Seventeenth Century"

Wednesday 25 January​

Thursday 26 January​

• Traditions in Motion: The Circulation of Texts, 1100-1900

2.15pm, Quarrell Room, Exeter College

Alastair Hamilton (American University in Cairo): "Johann Michael Wansleben: an early use of Arabic sources in Ottoman Egypt"

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

"The Country conquers it self” - The Idea of Conquest and the English Civil War 
Preparatory reading: John Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a reissue with a retrospect, (1987); Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, (2002), Vol. 3, Ch. 8 (‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’); Johann Sommerville, ‘History and Theory: the Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought’, Political Studies, 34 (1986), 249‐261. 
Jonas Pollex (University of Oxford)

​

Friday 27 January

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Dr Louis-Gabriel Bonicoli, Paris: 'Parisian Early Printed Book Illustration (around 1500)'

In other news:

"Shakespeare's World", one of many groundbreaking Early Modern projects at Oxford (and an excellent tool for palaeographic training and procrastination), was featured in The New Yorker:

#EMOxford research by @VanHyningV in The New Yorker: https://t.co/21fi0UJ0hj

— Oxford CEMS (@OxfordCEMS) January 17, 2017

Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, who joined the University of Oxford in Michaelmas 2016. 

I’m delighted to be returning, at this late stage in my career, to Oxford, where I first studied English Literature as an undergraduate and then completed a DPhil on Thomas Nashe, under the supervision of Professor Emrys Jones. But I am also delighted, as part of my role as Merton Professor, to be taking on the co-directorship of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. The interdisciplinary mission of CEMS – which seeks to promote the study of the early modern period throughout the university – chimes with all that I’ve found most rewarding in my own research.

Back in the 1980s, when I was doing my DPhil, New Historicism was just beginning to take hold and to transform us all from literary critics into analysts of the poetics of early modern culture. These were stimulating times. I was already reading lots of social and economic history, trying to understand Nashe’s fascination with figures of scarcity and excess. I found the increasingly cultural, theoretical and material turn of literary studies in the 1990s liberating and illuminating, yet I didn’t want literary studies to become a mere branch of cultural history. At Queen Mary University of London I was lucky enough to work with Lisa Jardine, and was very influenced by her feminist critique of Renaissance humanism, but I was also a big fan of Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text (1979). I think in my work from that period -- Thomas Nashe in Context (1989), the article, ‘Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth Century England’ (Representations, 1993) and The Usurer’s Daughter (1994) – I tried to blend my pleasure in the figurative quality of literary language with a more sceptical analysis of the cultural work literature performs. I became interested in rhetoric and plot. I explored new ways of reading late sixteenth century prose narratives, discovering how they rework humanist and classical texts on husbandry and household governance,, on friendship, and on military strategy.

In the later 1990s I began to be intrigued by relations between legal thinking and fictional composition in sixteenth-century England. Reading the law reports of Edmund Plowden, I found that the legal fiction of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ was part of a broader contemporary interest in the hermeneutics of interpreting laws equitably. Equitable interpretation has, as many critics have shown, affinities with fiction. Around this time, I spent a brief but enjoyable time at the University of Hull, and was then appointed Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley I collaborated with Victoria Kahn to edit an interdisciplinary collection on Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (Yale, 2001). Some people speak of the rise of ‘law and literature’ in these years, but I prefer Bernadette Meyler’s idea of a triangulation of law, literature and history. As early modern social history has been invigorated by turning to legal records, so literary critics have come to recognise that kinship relations and the powerful emotions associated with love and family are very often legally structured – and nowhere more so than in early modern English drama, whether revenge tragedy or city comedy. And for those who think that legal approaches are anachronistically secularising, it’s worth pondering the extent to which theology itself draws on legal ways of thinking. In all religions in which the dead are judged, noted Jacques Le Goff, the afterlife is modelled on earthly justice.

While I was at Berkeley, I was given a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue a project on how forensic rhetoric – questions of proof and evidence – shaped aspects of the narrative form of English Renaissance drama. I found that the participatory nature of the English justice system meant that forensic forms of inquiry into fact and motive were popularly diffused in ways that resonate with the narrative and ideological forms of English drama, whether comedy, history or tragedy. This research – which critiqued the application to English drama of Foucault’s model of spectacular punishment– was published as ‘Rethinking the Spectacle of the Scaffold’ and ‘Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis’ (Representations, 2005 and 2006) and as a  monograph entitled, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007).

At the University of St Andrews, to which I moved in 2004, I had the good fortune to work with Professor John Hudson, an expert on mediaeval Anglo-Norman law. Together we founded CMEMLL, the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature. Since 2011, CMEMLL has been a vigorous forum for interdisciplinary research, supporting, among many other things, work for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700.

My most recent book, Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015), was based on the Wells Shakespeare Lectures at Oxford in 2012. I looked at the way in which Shakespeare’s innovative creation of imagined offstage worlds and the inner lives of dramatic characters draws on legal rhetoric, specifically, the so-called ‘topics of circumstance’ which examine time and place in relation to questions of guilt and innocence. As well as my work on law and literature, I have kept up scholarly interests in women’s writing and in the history of sexuality as well as in the writings of Ben Jonson, on whose plays I have written articles for Representations and ELH and whose commonplace book, Discoveries, I edited for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson (2012). And in this, my first year in post as Merton Professor, I am completing the final year of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which looks at Anglo-Scots literary and legal fictions of the two polities in the century leading up to Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

 Any profile of research, like this one, underplays the role of colleagues, students and teaching and administration in one’s intellectual life. I’ve learned so much from teaching students from all nationalities and backgrounds in institutions in three different countries. Students – both undergraduate and graduate – have,  with their energy and their scepticism, kept me interested in the important questions. Here at Oxford, I look forward to all the opportunities to engage, through CEMS and through the Faculty of English, with the full and dazzling range of colleagues’ and students’ research in the early modern period. 

As we kick off another term, here is a digest of the exciting Early Modern events taking place in Oxford this week. In addition, have a look at the newly-posted Call for Papers for the upcoming CEMS conference, "Mimesis on Trial" (deadline 15 March).

If there is anything you would like included in future round-ups, please drop us a line.

Monday 16 January

• Italian Renaissance Seminar

5pm, St Catherine’s College

Heather Webb (University of Cambridge, Dept of Italian): ‘Botticelli’s Illustrations of Dante’s Paradiso: The Construction of Conjoined Vision’ 

• All Souls College Seminar in Early Modern Intellectual History

5.00–6.45pm, All Souls, Hovenden Room (access is via the entrance to the College on the High Street – please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at www.asc.ox.ac.uk/visiting-the-college).

Dmitri Levitin (All Souls College, Oxford): 'What was the comparative history of religion in seventeenth-century Europe? And why did Pierre Bayle believe in virtuous atheists?’ 

• Besterman Enlightenment Workshop

5 p.m. Voltaire Foundation (99 Banbury Road)

Ruggero Sciuto (University of Oxford): ‘Diderot and d’Holbach on Causal Necessitation’ 

Tuesday 17 January

• Early Modern Literature Seminar

5.15pm, Ertegun House

Maggie Kilgour (McGill): “What did Milton Learn from Shakespeare? The Matter of Macbeth”

Wednesday 18 January

• Early Modern German Culture: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

2pm, Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty (followed by afternoon tea).  

Alix Cooper (Stonybrook University, NY), ‘Family Matters: Natural Knowledge in the Early Modern German Household.’  

Thursday 19 January

• Key Words in Early Modern French Culture Seminar

3.30pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

​Richard Scholar (Oriel College): “Ancients and Moderns” 

• Early Modern British History Seminar

5pm in The Breakfast Room, Merton College (tea from 4.45)

Ned Ward and Laughter at the end of the Seventeenth Century 
Preparatory reading: Quentin Skinner, 'Why laughing mattered in the Renaissance', History of Political Thought, 22/3 (2001); Jan Bremner and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour (1997), introduction. 
Dr Kate Davison (University of Oxford)

• Early Modern French Seminar

5.15pm, Maison Française Library (2-10 Norham Road)

Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney):  “Playing the Game of History Painting: François Boucher’s Billiard Room Brilliance” 

Friday 20 January

• The Seminar in the History of the Book

2.15pm, in the Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2)

Professor Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford): 'The Italian Trade with the Frankfurt Book Fair around 1600'

And from our Twitter, an Early Modern manuscript from the Bodleian with a small feline surprise: 

Early modern commonplace kitty in Bodl. MS Douce 280! pic.twitter.com/1ipvae1bDI

— Simone Hanebaum (@SimoneHanebaum) January 11, 2017

We're very pleased to introduce the new and improved website for the Centre for Early Modern Studies! We hope that it will become a hub for researchers in Oxford and beyond to learn more about each other’s work and relevant news and events. Although based in the English Faculty, CEMS is an interdisciplinary centre with an inclusive approach to the period in all its variety.

Some of what you might expect to find on this blog in coming weeks and months:

• Early Modern news from Oxford
• Announcements of conferences, seminars, and publications
• Introductions to new members of staff
• Guest posts from researchers about their work in progress

If you are planning an event, have recently had a book published, or have a research story to share, we want to hear from you! Please get in touch with Natasha Simonova, the CEMS Research Coordinator, at natasha.simonova@ell.ox.ac.uk; you can also find us on Twitter @OxfordCEMS.