Hilary 2019

Downloadable Programme:

Week 1 (15 January)
Piet van Boxel (University of Oxford)
'Surenhusius and his Mishnah edition in context'

Week 2 (22 January)
Omer Michaelis (Harvard Divinity School)
'Juda ha-Nasi, Author Mishnae: authorship discourses between Medieval al-Andalus and Early Modern England'

Week 3 (29 January)
Robert Madaric Beer (University of Tübingen)
'Jacob Judah Leon and his models of the Temple and the Tabernacle in 17th century scholarship'

Week 4, 5 February
Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge)
'Humphrey Prideaux and the history of Judaism in the 17th century'

Week 5, 12 February
Marcello Cattaneo (University of Oxford)
'The first English translation of the Mishnah: the scholarly contexts of William Wootton’s version of Shabbat and Eruvin (1718)'

Week 6, 19 February
Guido Bartolucci (University of Calabria)
'A German student of Isaac Abendana: Theodor Dassow and the Latin translation of the Mishnah'

Week 7, 26 February
Theodor Dunkelgrün (University of Cambridge)
'Isaac Abendana’s Mishnah translation (1663-1676) and Judaic studies in Restoration Cambridge'

Week 8, 5 March
Yosef Kaplan (Hebrew University)
'Haham Jacob Abendana, the author of a Spanish translation of the Mishnah. Steps towards an intellectual profile'

All welcome. Wine and refreshments served.

Week 1 (15th January)
Eric Langley (University College, London)
‘To Stretch; to Flinch: Shakespearean Tenderness’

This paper – obeying Derrida’s insistence that we ‘extend an ear and tenderly attend to the … words – tender, tend, extend’ – explores the state of tenderness in Shakespearean drama, working through the implications of Michel de Montaigne’s claim to ‘sympathise very tenderly with the afflictions of others.’ It considers the potential hazards and the cost of attentive, tender existence, where a nervous subject tenders themselves, ‘stretch[ing] and expand[ing] outwards’ towards the recipient of their compassionate feelings, before examining the ‘tender-minded’ (King Lear) figures of Shakespearean drama in the context of period’s passionate pathologies, where to be attentive to others would be to simultaneously risk infection. The paper will conclude with some more tentative – possibly tenuous – speculations on one final piece of etymological wordplay, in considering the legally inflected concept of ‘extenuation’, assessing both the merits and limitations of extending mercy, or stretching the tenure of the otherwise ‘strict’ or ‘precise’ legal sentence.

Week 3 (29th January)
Helen Smith (University of York)
'“Being thus poetically composed”: Early Modern Women's Elemental Poetry’

Like many of her contemporaries, Hester Pulter was fascinated by the stuff of the world. Questions of the nature, status, and transmutations of the elements play out across her poetry, most explicitly in the remarkable ‘The invocation of the Elements the longest Night in the Year 1655’. In this paper, I will explore Pulter’s elemental verse, tracing her poetic conversations with precursors and contemporaries including Ovid, George Herbert, John Donne, and particularly Anne Southwell, and Anne Bradstreet. I propose to explore Pulter’s ‘elemental method’ showing how she finds a compelling imaginative connection between poetic materials, the stuff of the world, and the inventive forms into which ideas might be collected, dispersed and reassembled.

Week 7 (26th February) [NB location: Fitzjames 1, Merton College]
Mary Nyquist (Toronto)
‘Tyrannicide, Sacrifice, and Law in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’

This talk starts by challenging two views, first, that Plutarch’s Lives have been exhaustively searched for materials relevant to Julius Caesar and, second, that tyranny and tyrannicide were rather fuzzy, threatening notions at the time Shakespeare produced his plays.  Drawing on unexamined materials by Plutarch that relate to sacrifice and to legislation regarding tyrannicide, Nyquist will argue that Shakespeare’s drama foregrounds the conspirators’ complacent disregard of forensic evidence pertaining to tyranny and that it thereby offers spectators (or readers) an opportunity to determine whether Caesar can be said to be tyrannous and, if so, at which moment ambiguities might be said to be resolved. Shakespeare's use of antityranny rhetoric and discourse will also be closely examined.

Week 8 (5th March)
Lena Cowen Orlin (Georgetown University)
‘What Shakespeare’s Funerary Monument Tells Us About his Overnights in Oxford’

With its carved portrait bust of a man holding a quill in his right hand and a sheet of paper with his left, Shakespeare’s funerary monument shows its subject as an author. This has made it a site of scrutiny for those who believe that someone else wrote the plays and poems. As the anti-Stratfordian argument has it, writing implements were at some point added to the representation of a pork butcher or wool dealer. One theory is that a monument to Shakespeare’s merchant father was re-inscribed to the son. The very number of buttons on the sculpture’s doublet has become a subject of controversy. This talk will analyze the monument’s place in Shakespeare’s biography. Oxford University is where we find the key to its legitimacy.

Week 2 (23 January)   

REBECCA BULLARD (University of Reading):
‘Deaths of eminent persons’: Obituaries and Social Hierarchies in Early Eighteenth-Century England

JOHN GALLAGHER (University of Leeds):
A Conversable Knowledge: Language-Learning in Early Modern Educational Travel

Week 4 (Monday 4 February)

NEIL KENNY (All Souls College, Oxford):
Ore, Lore, Status: The Curious Case of the Baron and Baronne de Beausoleil

RICHARD SCHOLAR (Oriel College, Oxford):
French à la mode in Restoration England

Week 6 (20 February)  

JONATHAN PATTERSON (St Hilda’s College, Oxford):
Colbert’s Police Files: Between Bureaucracy and Literature

BRIAN BREWER (Trinity College Dublin):
The Figure of the Merchant in the Works of Miguel de Cervantes

Week 8 (6 March)  

EVA GRIFFITH (Independent Scholar):
Christopher Beeston: His Plays and Place in the Social Hierarchy of Early Stuart London

KATHERINE IBBETT (Trinity College, Oxford):
Une petite Venise: The Seventeenth-Century Beaver

All welcome!

Week 1 (17th Jan)
Kathleen Perry Long (Cornell)
"Transforming Dystopia, Performing Utopia in the Island of Hermaphrodites”

Week 3 (31st Jan)
Todd Reeser (Pittsburgh)
“Essaying affect with Montaigne”

Week 5 (14th Feb)
Dorine Rouiller (Geneva/Oxford)
"La journée cosmopolite de Théophile de Viau”

Week 7 (28th Feb)
Jess Stacey (The Queen's College)
"Authors of Catastrophe: narrative and periodisation in eighteenth-century France"

All are welcome!

Week 2 (22 January)

‘Civil Rage: Poetry and War in the 1740s’

Professor Thomas Keymer (Chancellor Jackman Professor of English, University of Toronto)

Week 4 (5 February)

‘Jane Austen and the Novel as Complex System’

Professor Sean Silver (Rutgers State University of New Jersey)

Week 6 (19 February) [Venue: Seminar Room East, Mansfield College]

‘Lady in a Veil’ Performance based on the life and works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, followed by a discussion.

Dr Georgina Lock (Nottingham Trent University)

Downloadable Programme:

All welcome.

Week 3 (Monday, 28 January 2019)

Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (Newcastle University)

'The Shelleys' German translations'

Week 5 (Monday, 11 February 2019)

Dr Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales)

'Antiquaries on Tour: Exploring the Pennant-Gough Correspondence'

Week 7 (Monday, 25 February)

Dr Lorenzo Calvelli (Università Ca' Foscari)

'Lost and Found: Early modern transcriptions of a Hellenistic Interstate Treaty from Crete'

Week 1 (14 January)

Sarah Vowles Department of Prints & Drawings, British Museum

‘Confronting the canon: Two new drawings in the Mantegna and Bellini exhibition at the National Gallery’

Week 2 (21 January)

Simon Gilson Italian Department, Oxford University

‘“Making Aristotle vernacular" in Padua and Florence: Benedetto Varchi's Italian translations and commentaries on Aristotle 1538-43’

Week 3 (28 January)

Lorenzo Caravaggi Balliol College, Oxford

‘A knight and his library in the age of the aristocratic communes: Romanitas, chivalry, and urbanitas in the 12th and 13th centuries’

Week 4 (4 February)

Martin Kemp Trinity College, Oxford

‘“It’s yours for $450 million.” Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi’

Week 5 (11 February)

Lia Costiner Merton College, Oxford

‘Mercanti artisti: Illustrating the book in the late-medieval Italian home’

Week 6 (18 February)

Caspar Pearson History of Art Department, Essex University

‘Between shipwreck and the giants: Leon Battista Alberti’s letter to Filippo Brunelleschi’

Week 7 (25 February)

Matilde Malaspina Lincoln College, Oxford

‘Aesop’s Fables in the 15th-century Veneto, in manuscript BL 10389 and print’

Week 8 (4 March)

Viktoria von Hoffmann Fund for Scientific Research, F.R.S.-FNRS / University of Liège

'The Sense of Touch in Italian Renaissance anatomy’

All are welcome.

Week 2 (24 January)

John Milsom, Liverpool Hope University

‘Polyphony, in four parts: composing, performing, listening, reflecting’

Over the past three decades, much thought has been given to the matter of how sixteenth-century composers conceived and crafted their polyphonic works, especially ones made mainly in fuga (imitation). In general, however, this research has been academic and abstract; the dialogue between musicologists and performers has barely begun, even though the musical ideas and issues explored through analysis might be relevant and interesting to singers, players and directors. As for listeners, they tend to be sidelined altogether. Rarely is it asked how any performance of a polyphonic work, let alone an analysis-informed one, is processed by a listener, and indeed is differently processed depending on that listener’s experience, knowledge, and familiarity with the work in hand. This in turn leads to the question of what it means to ‘appreciate’ and ‘understand’ a polyphonic work, especially when issues that were arguably of central concern to the composer are barely apprehended by most modern listeners, let alone savoured by them. Might the richest engagement with sixteenth-century polyphony therefore be attained not only by performing it and listening to it, but also by considering it from the angle of how it was made?

Week 4 (7 February)

Étienne Anheim, Directeur d'études, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

‘The musical chapel of the popes in Avignon during the fourteenth century’

The Avignon Court of the popes, during the 14th century, was the birthplace of a new institution that would play a major role in the history of Western music, the chapel. The reform of Benedict XII in 1334 and the creation of the first "Master of the Chapel (magister capelle)" in 1336 marked a break with the tradition of the liturgical chapels inherited from the Carolingian model. The chapel was now a musical curial service provided by specialized musicians, if not “professionals”,  trained in the best cathedrals of the north of France. The rich archives of the Avignon Court allow us to reconstruct this process. We can describe the sociology of the singers, explore the daily functioning of the chapel in the Palais des Papes and question the repertoire in use. We can thus try to understand how Avignon gave a new geographical, aesthetic and symbolic dimension to Ars Nova polyphony in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

This seminar will be held in conjunction with the third international study day of the MALMECC project 'Avignon as transcultural hub' on Feb 8th, St Luke's Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities Campus. Confirmed speakers include Anna Alberni, Étienne Anheim, Karen Cook, Sarah Griffin, Karl Kügle, Sofia Lannutti, Christophe Masson, David Murray, and Philipp Nothaft - for further information and to register (free of charge), see http://www.malmecc.eu/events/ 

Week 6 (21 February)

Roger Bowers, University of Cambridge

'Composer biographies – the cases of John Dunstable and 'Roy Henry''

It may be not the most glamorous component of musicology, but the establishment of the biographies of composers remains an essential task. In the case of John Dunstable there seems at present to be a surfeit of material, much of it contradictory, fugitive, and inconsistent; there are too many John Dunstables. In the case of ‘Roy Henry’ the name is idiosyncratic, and there are only two possible candidates; nevertheless, even that is one too many.

Dunstable may be shown to have been a musician engaged at the top of his profession, but of character otherwise conventional for his time. He was fortunate to merit employment by members of the top aristocracy, and by them was temporarily rewarded even with crumbs of loot falling from the table of the French wars. Meanwhile, as merely ‘Mr John Dunstable, of London’, a detail of his long association with William Trokyll, his parish priest at St Stephen, Walbrook, does now encourage the rehabilitation of an item of biographical information long known but lately rather disregarded; and this in turn engenders some speculation about his earlier career.   

For the composer a date of death in 1453 can now be confirmed, so that he may be distinguished from a thuggishly unprincipled county gentleman of the same name who died in 1459. This Dunstable (who may in fact have been close kin of the composer) enjoyed both landed estates in Essex and on the Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire border, and property interests in London. Also, from a position in 1427/8 on the outer affinity of a great lady, Joan of Navarre, Queen dowager of England (as widow of Henry IV), he had emerged by 1436 as a major purveyor for her – at a very high price – of some commodity currently highly desirable, most probably security.

Realistically, ‘Roy Henry’ can be only King Henry IV or King Henry V, of England. There is at present no ‘smoking pen’, and this issue can be resolved only on a balance of probabilities. Indications are that the case to be made for Henry IV is much the stronger. In view of his conspicuous concern both for the consolidation of the role of his Chapel Royal in general, and also for the welfare of its most junior members; of his receipt during 1392/3 of some personal attention from one member of the ensemble of five French singing-men who formed the core of the household chapel of his father, John of Gaunt; and of his description by a well-informed contemporary as micans in musica, it is not easy to see how a countervailing case even stronger can be built for Henry V.

Week 8 (7 March)

Laurence Libin, Curator of Musical Instruments emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

‘Reconstructing medieval instruments: Why bother?’

Too little is known about medieval instruments and their playing techniques to justify claims that any reconstruction is “authentic” in terms of design and musical qualities. Reliable evidence is lacking; iconography, written descriptions, modern “folk” practices, and the few surviving exemplars furnish only vague clues to how medieval instruments were made and played, though some types, bells for example, may be better understood than others. Each type of instrument presents unique problems, and solutions adopted in one locale may not have been widely or lastingly applied; yet we have no choice but to generalize. Even if, by chance, a new replica should sound exactly like an original did when it was new, how could we know this? As with performers’ interpretations of medieval notation, instrument makers can at best aim to arrive somewhere within a broad, defensible field of possibilities largely defined by consensus rather than fact. In the face of such uncertainty, why do musicians and makers bother? 

In discussion with Jeremy Montagu, a pioneer of England’s post-War early music movement, we will explore the sources, motivations, and opportunities for reconstructing various types of medieval instruments. Examples will be shown.

Suggested preparatory reading follows the titles.

Week 1 (17 January)

Prof. Andrew Hopper (Univ. of Leicester)

‘The Human Costs of the Civil Wars’

David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper (eds), Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (2018); Mark Stoyle, ‘“Memories of the maimed”: the testimony of Charles I’s former soldiers, 1660–1730’, History, 88 (2003), 204–26; David J. Appleby, ‘Unnecessary persons? Maimed soldiers and war widows in Essex, 1642-62’, Essex Archaeology and History, 32 (2001), 209–21; Geoffrey L. Hudson, ‘Negotiating for blood money: war widows and the courts in seventeenth-century England’, in Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994), 146–69; Eric Gruber von Arni and Andrew Hopper,  ‘Welfare for the Wounded’, History Today, 66 (2016), 17-23.

Week 2 (24 January)

Thomas Pert (Lincoln College)

‘“The Prince Elector is going from hence to London, I imagine for no good”: The Elector Palatine, Parliament, and the Civil War c.1638-1644’

C.V. Wedgwood, 'The Elector Palatine and the Civil War', History Today, 4 (1954), 1-10; Motives and reasons, concerning his Highnesse the Prince Elector Palatines coming into England...                (London, 1644). [available on EEBO].

Week 3 (31 January)

Joel Butler (Wadham College)

‘Two Interesting Episodes from the Embassy of William Harborne to the Ottoman Empire’

Tobias Graf, The Sultan's Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575-1610 (2017); Christine Woodhead, ‘Harborne, William’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Matthew Ward (Kellogg College)

‘A principle of “Natural Justice”: Sir William Petty and the “Royal Absolutist” Case for Excise’

William Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England 1640-1845 (2010); D’Marris Coffman, Excise Tax and the Origins of Public Debt (2013); Noah Dauber, State and Commonwealth: The Theory of State in Early Modern England, 1549-1640 (2016).

Week 4 (7 February)

Dr Ian Archer (Keble College)

‘The Carmen of London and Stereotypes of the Labouring Poor’

I.W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (1991), ch. 4; D. Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750 (1995); J.M. Fewster, The Keelmen of Newcastle.Labour Organisation and Conflict in the North-East Coal Industry, 1600-1830 (2011), intro and ch 1.

Week 5 (14 February)

Michael Heimos (St Cross College)

‘“As you know the storie of Storie”: Loyalty & Religion at Common Law, 1571-1608’

Polly J. Price, ‘Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin's Case’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 9 (1997), 73-145; Ronald Pollitt, ‘The Abduction of Doctor John Story and the Evolution of Elizabethan Intelligence Operations’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 14 (1983), 131-56.

William White (St Anne’s College)

‘Preaching, Royalism, and Episcopalian “Conformity” in Interregnum England’

Robert Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (1951), chs. 1 & 2; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–60’, in Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (2010), 18–43.

Week 6 (21 February)

Emily Glassford (Lincoln College)

“'For their owne singuler lucre”: Perceptions of Strangers as an Economic Threat in London and at the English Court, c. 1450-1558’

Ian Archer, ‘Responses to Alien Immigrants in London, c. 1400-1650’, in Il Ruolo Economico Delle Minoranze in Europa Secc. XIII-XVIII (2000), 755-74; Jessica Lutkin, ‘Settled or fleeting? London’s  medieval immigrant community revisited’, in M. Allen and M. Davies (eds), Medieval merchants and money: Essays in honour of James L. Bolton (2015), 137-55.; Sylvia Thrupp, ‘Aliens in and Around London in the Fifteenth Century’, in A. Hollaender, P.E. Jones, and W. Kellaway (eds), Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Jones (1969), 251-72.

Heather McTaggart (Lincoln College) ‘Conflict and Collaboration: The Spanish Ambassadors in the Elizabethan Court’

Michael J. Levin, Agents of empire: Spanish Ambassadors in sixteenth-century Italy (2005), Ch. 7; Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, ‘A new diplomatic history and the networks of Spanish diplomacy in the          Baroque era’, International History Review 36 (2014), 603-18; Alexander Samson, ‘A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39 (2009), 65-94.

Week 7 (28 February)

Graduate student transfer of status presentations

Week 8 (7 March)

Graduate student transfer of status presentations

All welcome to this interdisciplinary seminar which meets four times this term.

Please contact edmund.wareham@some.ox.ac.uk for further information

Week 1 Saturday 19 January, 10am, Weston Library, Blackwell Hall

For the quincentenary of the death of Emperor Maximilian I, there will be a Maximilian Study Day which will take place across Oxford in the Bodleian Library, Printing Press, Ashmolean Museum and the Taylorian, finishing with a Feast of early modern German food. Meet at the Weston Library, Blackwell Hall, at 10am on Saturday, 19 January 2019 where the day will start with collectively recreating a woodcut from the Triumph of Maximilian and seeing an exhibition of Maximilian-related books and manuscripts. Please email Prof. Henrike Lähnemann henrike.laehnemann@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk if you are interested in participating.

Week 5 Thursday 14 February 2 to 4 pm, New Powell Room, Somerville College

Katherine Bond (Anglia Ruskin) The Impact of Habsburg Court Culture on the Development of Costume Books

Richard Morris (Cambridge) Identity, Court Festivals, and the Politics of Access in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire

Week 6 Wednesday 20 February 5:15 pm, Wharton Room, All Souls College - Joint session with the History of War Seminar

Astrid Ackermann (Jena) Bernhard of Weimar as Military Enterpriser

Week 8 Thursday 7 March 2 to 4 pm, New Powell Room, Somerville College

Barbara Eichner (Oxford Brookes) Music in a Divided City: The Introduction of Polyphony at St Katherine's, Augsburg

Matthew Laube (Birkbeck) Music, Piety, Conflict: Towards a Sonic History of the Netherlandish and German Home

Seminar Organisers: Louis Morris, Edmund Wareham, Róisín Watson

Downloadable Programme:

Please email Rachael.hodge@sjc.ox.ac.uk or Georgina.wilson@balliol.ox.ac.uk with any queries or if you would like to give a paper in Trinity Term.

Week 2 (22 January)

Philip Hunt: “Weren’t there any Ganymedes in the Globe audience?” Reconsidering the male homoerotic audience in Renaissance theatre

Week 4 (5 February)

Lakshmi Balakrishnan: Monetary and Affective Transactions in Shakespeare

Richard Phillips: George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale and the Sleeping Narrator  

Week 6 (19 February)

Jake Arthur: Derivative, devotional, ‘disappointing’: early modern women’s biblical verse paraphrases

Leah Veronese-Clucas: “Suuing for grace”: the rhetoric of petition   

Week 8 (5 March)

The Graduate Forum will not run this week due to a clash with the Early Modern Seminar.
 

Seminar in the History of the Book

The History of the Book and French, Scottish, and British Authors, Hand-Printing in the 21^st Century, 15cHEBRAICA, and introducing the digital resources of the 15cBOOKTRADE

Weston Library, Visiting Scholars’ Centre (VSC) – Hilary Term, Fridays 2.15pm

Convenor: Cristina Dondi (Lincoln College and 15cBOOKTRADE)

http://15cbooktrade.ox.ac.uk/news-events-dissemination/seminar-in-the-history-of-the-book/

18 JANUARY 2019

Bumble-Bee Witches and the Reading of Dreams: Spectacular and Speculative Marginalia in a Renaissance Reader’s Montaigne

Earle Havens, Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts at Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, and Director, The Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance

25 JANUARY 2019

NO SEMINAR (we are il London: The Archeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, www.bookwheel.org)

1 FEBRUARY 2019

Scottish and British Authors Published Abroad 1470-1700

Jane Stevenson, Senior Research Fellow, Campion Hall, Oxford

8 FEBRUARY 2019

15cBOOKTRADE tools for the History of Art

15 FEBRUARY 2019

15cBOOKTRADE tools for Modern Languages, History, and Classics

22 FEBRUARY 2019

NO SEMINAR

1 MARCH 2019

15cHEBRAICA: Capturing the former owners of Hebrew incunabula and their annotations in the Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) database

8 MARCH 2019 – Weston Lecture Theatre

A very special book launch: Manuale Tipografico IV. A triumph of hand-printing aesthetics, paper and watermarks

Enrico Tallone (Tallone Editore, Turin), Carlo Ossola (Collège de France, Prof. of Modern Literatures of Neo-Latin Europe), Stefano Salis (Il Sole 24 Ore)

Downloadable Programme:

W. 1 – Wed. 16 Jan 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Introduction to Florentine Latin Humanism’
Introduction – Giacomo Comiati
Leonardi Bruni, The times of Bruni and De Temporibus suis (24-6) –Michael Malone-Lee

W. 2 – Wed. 23 Jan 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Thinking of Latin Antiquity’
Petrarch’s Letter to Varro – Herman Hermans
Cristoforo Landino, Xandra, I.22 – Giacomo Comiati

W. 3 – Wed. 30 Jan 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Alberti’s Autobiography and Burckhardt’s “Renaissance Man”’
Leon Battista Alberti, Vita – Martin McLaughlin

W.4 – Wed. 6 Feb 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Marsilio Ficino on How True Philosophy Leads to Happiness’
Ficino, Letter to Sebastiano Salvini (Letter IV, 32 in Opera omnia, p. 780) – Maude Vanhaelen

W. 5 – Wed. 13 Feb 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘The Conspiracy against the Medici and Poliziano’s Coniurationis commentarium’
Poliziano, Coniurationis Commentarium – Marta Celati (University of Warwick)

W. 6 – Wed. 20 Feb 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Enea Silvio Piccolomini commentator and poet’
Piccolomini, Commentariorum Pii Secundi Pontificis Maximi libri – Guy Westwood
Piccolomini, Cinthia – Tristan Franklinos

W. 7 – Wed. 27 Feb 2019 (1pm-2.15pm)
‘Boccaccio’
Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, 42 ‘Dido’ – Melinda Letts
Boccaccio, Eclogue 15, Phylostropos (114-221) – Adir De Oliveira Fonseca

W. 8 – Tuesday 5 Mar 2019 (1pm-2.15pm) [Note change of day]
‘Bruni’
Leonardo Bruni, Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum – Simon Gilson

Week 5:

Fabio Antonini (Birkbeck College, University of London):
‘A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive: The War of Cyprus, Record Keeping Practices and Historical Research in the Early Modern Venetian Chancery’
 
Date: 12 February 2019, 4:30-6:30 pm
 
Venue: Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty

Abstract: 

Just as critical approaches to diplomatic records should be mindful of their form and physicality, so too must they consider the context of their initial storage, preservation, and arrangement within a wider collection of texts. The recent ‘archival turn’ in historical studies has illustrated the pivotal role of record keeping institutions in the transmission of historical information across the centuries, and how their physical and organisational structures dictate the relationship between the historian and their sources. This paper focuses on the Secret Chancery of the Republic of Venice, and its role in shaping contemporary historical narratives of the outbreak of the War of Cyprus in 1570. It demonstrates that changes in record keeping practices corresponded with a shift in historical paradigms, by analysing how individual dispatches were organised and relayed from the archive by state historians to the reading public; and it examines the early development of the diplomatic record from a political tool into a historical and cultural artefact.

Link: https://earlymoderndiplomacyevents.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/fabio-antonini-birkbeck-college-university-of-london-a-diplomatic-narrative-in-the-archive-the-war-of-cyprus-record-keeping-practices-and-historical-research-in-the-early-moder/

Week 7

Prof. Mía J. Rodríguez-Salgado (The London School of Economics and Political Science)
‘Public news: An ambassador’s secret weapon. Diego Guzman de Silva’s interventions in the Low Countries from the embassy in Venice, 1568-1573’
 
Date: 26 February 2019, 4:30-6:30 pm
 
Venue: Gerry Martin Room, History Faculty

Abstract:

The papers of early-modern ambassadors have increasingly been used to study a wide range of topics. My own was in some ways traditional but also different: I wanted to find out the type of information that Philip II’s ambassadors in states not directly involved in the civil war in the Low Countries had of that conflict, and if possible learn something about the informants and what the ambassador did with that information. The results were disappointing in some embassies, but by dint of putting together some of the dispersed papers of the embassy in Venice, they yielded a wealth of material on the manipulation of manuscript news and Guzman de Silva’s use of the embassy in Venice in order to intervene in the politics of the Low Countries and change Philip II’s policy towards them.

https://earlymoderndiplomacyevents.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/mia-j-rodriguez-salgado-the-london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-iberian-habsburg-diplomatic-relations-with-muslim-powers-in-the-sixteenth-century/