Seminar Programmes for the Current Academic Year
Trinity 2024
Convenor(s): Hanna Sinclair and Maximilian Diemers.
Time: Mondays (with the exception of week 3). Weeks 1, 2, 3, 5. 16.30 (UK time)
Venue: Memorial Room, Jesus College.
Week 1: Monday 22 April, 16.30.
‘Courtly Encounters/Courtly Mediators: Transnational Objects as Diplomatic Gifts at the Court of Naples’
Speaker: Leah Clark (Kellogg College, Oxford)
Week 2: Monday 29 April, 16.30.
‘Hire Slow, Fire Fast: Human Resources Management in the Early Modern Princely Household’
Speaker: Dries Raeymaekers (Radboud University)
Week 3: THURSDAY 9 May, 16.30.
‘The Fêting Court: Festivals as Tools of Diplomacy at the French Court’
Speaker: Bram van Leuveren (Utrecht University)
Week 5: Monday 20 May, 16.30.
‘(Re)Présentez vos armes au roi. A socio- cultural history of the militarisation of the courts of Versailles and Vienna in the Eighteenth Century’
Speaker: Maximilian Diemer (New College, Oxford)
Convenor(s): Raphaële Garrod, Jessica Goodman, Alice Roulliere
Time: Thursdays. Weeks 1, 3, 5, 7. 12.30-14.00 (UK time)
Venue: Maison Française d’Oxford.
Week 1: Thursday 25 April. 12.30 - 14.00.
‘Madeleine de Scudéry's animals'
Speaker: Helena Taylor (University of Exeter)
Abstract: Looking across print and manuscript works at Scudéry's chameleons, butterflies, turtledoves and other creatures—and featuring lodestones, quinine and the ancient Greek atomist philosopher, Democritus—this paper situates Scudéry's animal writing within sociable literary traditions, poetics of natural history writing, and questions of possible knowledge.
Week 3: Thursday 9 May. 12.15–13.45. Please note that this week's seminar starts slightly earlier than normal and will take place at St John’s College (New Seminar Room).
Graduate Showcase. Title and Abstracts to follow.
Week 5: Thursday 23 May. 12.30 - 14.00.
‘Le chirurgien au miroir: récits de cures et récits de carrière chez Leonardo Fioravanti et Ambroise Paré’
Speaker: Ariane Bayle (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon III)
Abstract: Ma communication présentera quelques résultats d’une recherche que j’ai menée sur les collections de récits de cure de deux chirurgiens de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, Leonardo Fioravanti et Ambroise Paré, respectivement dans le Tesoro della Vita Humana (Venise, 1570 pour la 1ère éd.) et L’ Apologie et les voyages (1585). Dans ces publications en vernaculaire, contemporaines de l’essor des recueils de Curationes et d’Observationes, les deux chirurgiens livrent le récit d’un moment de leur carrière en évoquant une série de cas médicaux qu’ils ont eu à traiter. Fioravanti raconte les étapes de sa formation entre 1548 et 1558, pendant les dix années qui séparent ses débuts dans la pratique de la médecine empirique en Sicile du moment où, installé à Venise, il fait imprimer ses premiers livres. Paré, lui, relate vingt campagnes militaires, de 1537 à 1564, période au cours de laquelle il a été confronté à des cas médicaux très divers, en tant que chirurgien militaire.
Je comparerai la manière dont se nouent récit professionnel et récit de soi chez ces deux auteurs. Je montrerai que l’ambition de ces histoires cliniques mises en série, présentées comme exemplaires d’un point de vue didactique, dépasse ce but attendu et qu’elles contribuent à façonner non seulement une image de bon chirurgien mais aussi de bon narrateur, capable de faire de chaque cas une aventure.
Week 7: Thursday 6 June. 12.30 - 14.00.
‘From Montaigne to the New World: Imprinted Ecology in Renaissance France’
Speaker: Pauline Goul (University of Chicago)
Abstract: In “Des Cannibales”, Michel de Montaigne uses the word “impression” to refer to the trace left by the Dordogne river on its surroundings. What if this particular word—and this particular moment—implied a kind of environmental feeling or consciousness that would be less mild and superficial than it appears: what if it expressed the intricacies of environmental change, as well as the concept of human and nonhuman as porous, overlapping bodies? Imprinted ecologies, in this talk, are ways of thinking about the environment as leaving an imprint on bodies. In other words, Renaissance France thought about environmental change in ways that affected people and left traces. Yet the pressure applies both ways: the works of André Thevet and Jean de Léry show various depths of engagement with indigenous peoples and ways of life. On Thevet’s woodcuts—whose author is unknown—we see traces of an already-extractive labor, in an otherwise disaffected narrative. In Léry, however, the interaction with the Tupi natives leads to a reckoning about what we today call sustainability. Ultimately, these three authors ask the question of what leads one to be impressionable, to let oneself be affected, a much-discussed problem in a paradoxical age of climate anxiety and paralysis.
Convenor(s): Filippo de Vivo (St Edmund Hall); Leah Clark (Kellogg); Jane Crawshaw Stevens (Brookes); Federica Gigante (History of Science Museum); Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter); Emanuela Vai (Worcester).
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 3, 4, 7.
Venue: Please note that the venue for this seminar changes throughout term.
Week 2: Tuesday 30 April, 11.00–13.00. Rees Davies Room, History Faculty.
‘Renaissance Individualism Revisited: A Business History Perspective’
Speaker: Francesa Trivellato (IAS, Princeton)
Week 3: Tuesday 7 May. 17.15–19.15. T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre. With Early Modern English Literature Seminar.
‘What is Literary History Now? Recovering the Premodern Textual World in the 21st Century’
Speaker: Warren Boutcher (QMUL)
Abstract: We find ourselves in a moment when, on the one hand, the resources available to recover the premodern textual world are diminishing, and, on the other hand, the possibilities for such recovery have never been more exciting and widely shared. Specialists in History, Modern Languages, Literature, and scholars trained in various national historiographies such as English and Italian studies, have for decades been converging on the historical study of texts in transregional or global frameworks. In so doing they have been challenging the traditional, nation-state-based disciplines and fields that shaped the study of texts from the nineteenth century. So, what is literary history now? This talk will offer one answer by presenting some preliminary materials and arguments from a project supported by two great institutions still willing to put significant resources into Humanities research for its own sake: the European Research Council and Oxford University, in this case though its department, Oxford University Press. The project (‘TextDiveGlobal’) is based at Queen Mary University of London and runs until 2026. It will produce for OUP a literary history of Europe in the world between the two sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683), by coordinating the research of about 90 collaborators from many different fields, working on texts and extra-textual artefacts of many different kinds. What are the potential gains and losses of a project on this kind of scale, located in the wide domain between literature and history, and beyond the dominion of any single western European national or bi-national (e.g. Anglo-Italian, Iberian) field of global studies?
Week 7: Tuesday 4 June. Time/ Location TBD.
‘Late-Renaissance Genoa Through the Lens of Social Lyric’
Speaker: Virginia Cox (Trinity College, Cambridge)
Please note that abstracts for the above papers are available via https://italianhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/early-modern-italian-seminar along with further details about the seminar series.
Convenor(s): Lorna Hutson, Joe Moshenska, Bart Van Es
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 1, 3, 4, 7. 17.15 - 19.15 (unless otherwise noted).
Venue: Merton College. T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre (with the exception of week 4)
Week 1: Tuesday 23 April. 17.15 - 19.15. T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre.
Paper 1: ‘Hecuba from Page to Stage in Early Modern England’
Speaker 1: Carla Suthren (St Catherine’s College, Oxford)
Paper 2: ‘“Nombers flowe?” Plato’s Numbers and Spenser’s Line’
Speaker: Beth Dubow (Oriel College, Oxford)
Week 3: Tuesday 7 May. 17.15–19.15. T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre. With Early Modern Italian World Seminar.
‘What is Literary History Now? Recovering the Premodern Textual World in the 21st Century’
Speaker: Warren Boutcher (QMUL)
Abstract: We find ourselves in a moment when, on the one hand, the resources available to recover the premodern textual world are diminishing, and, on the other hand, the possibilities for such recovery have never been more exciting and widely shared. Specialists in History, Modern Languages, Literature, and scholars trained in various national historiographies such as English and Italian studies, have for decades been converging on the historical study of texts in transregional or global frameworks. In so doing they have been challenging the traditional, nation-state-based disciplines and fields that shaped the study of texts from the nineteenth century. So, what is literary history now? This talk will offer one answer by presenting some preliminary materials and arguments from a project supported by two great institutions still willing to put significant resources into Humanities research for its own sake: the European Research Council and Oxford University, in this case though its department, Oxford University Press. The project (‘TextDiveGlobal’) is based at Queen Mary University of London and runs until 2026. It will produce for OUP a literary history of Europe in the world between the two sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683), by coordinating the research of about 90 collaborators from many different fields, working on texts and extra-textual artefacts of many different kinds. What are the potential gains and losses of a project on this kind of scale, located in the wide domain between literature and history, and beyond the dominion of any single western European national or bi-national (e.g. Anglo-Italian, Iberian) field of global studies?
Week 4: Tuesday 14 May. 17.30. Mansfield College, Seminar Room East. With Eighteenth Century Literature Seminar.
‘Happy Pills and Horoscopes: Collecting and Using Early Modern Almanacs 1600–1800’
Paul Salzman (La Trobe)
Week 7: Tuesday 4 June. 17.15 - 19.15. T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre.
‘Ghost Kings’
Speaker: Sarah Knight
Convenor(s): Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, Katie Noble, Nicole Pohl, David Taylor, Carly Watson, Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, Abigail Williams.
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 2, 4, 6.
Venue: Seminar Room East, Mansfield College.
Week 2: Tuesday 30 April. 12.30–14.00. Sandwich lunch will be provided.
‘From Corpus to Canon. Editing and Translating Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literatures in the British Long Eighteenth Century’
Speaker: Claire Gallien (University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3)
Week 4: Tuesday 14 May. 17.30-19.00.
‘Happy Pills and Horoscopes: Collecting and Using Early Modern Almanacs 1600-1800’.
Speaker: Paul Salzman (La Trobe)
Week 6: Tuesday 28 May. 12.30-14.00. Sandwich lunch will be provided.
‘“Lent to Copy”: Art Rentals in the Age of Jane Austen’
Speaker: Janine Barchas (University of Texas)
Convenor(s): Nicholas Cronk and Avi Lifschitz
Time: Wednesdays. Weeks 3–6.
Venue: Summer Common Room, Magdalen College (except week 4).
Week 3: Wednesday 8 May. 17.00.
‘Philosophical narratives and the formation of national culture: the case of the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition’
Speaker: Paola Rumore (Turin)
Week 4: Wednesday 15 May. 17.00. **Please note that this week’s seminar will be held in the Sophia Sheppard Room.
‘Manners and Political Stability in a Commercial Republic: the Case of France, c. 1795–1799’
Speaker: Sonja Asal (Halle)
Week 5: Wednesday 22 May. 17.00.
‘The Dialectics of Myth in the Enlightenment’
Speaker: Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge)
Week 6: Wednesday 29 May. 17.00.
‘Doing things with Poetry: Uses and Reuses of Poésie Fugitive in the long 18th century’
Speaker: Roman Kuhn (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)
*Please note that these listings are from HT24. The TT programme will be updated very soon. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Convenor(s): Natasha Bailey (Exeter College), Erica Feild-Marchello (Exeter College), Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College), Glyn Redworth (Exeter College), and Cecilia Tarruell (New College).
Time: Wednesdays. Weeks 2, 3, 4, 6, 8. 16.30 - 18.00 (UK time)
Venue: Rector’s Drawing Room, Exeter College.
Week 2: Wednesday 24 January, 16.30 - 18.00. Joint Session with the Early Modern Italian World Seminar.
‘Transforming the Atlantic World from the Mediterranean: Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650-1700’
Speaker: Alejandro García Montón (Universidad de Granada)
Week 3: TUESDAY 30 January, 16.30 – 18.00. Joint Session with the Early Modern Italian World Seminar. DOCTOROW ROOM, ST EDMUND HALL.
‘Disasters That Made the World Shudder: How Extreme Events Redefined Communication and Politics in the Spanish Monarchy’
Speaker: Domenico Cecere (Università di Napoli ‘Federico II’)
Week 4: Wednesday 7 February, 16.30 - 18.00.
‘Translation as Object and Method for Historical Inquiry: A Case Study on Sixteenth-Century Letters in the Maya Yucatec Language’
Speaker: Caroline Cunill (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Week 6: Wednesday 21 February, 16.30 - 18.15.
‘Dying Forms: Martyrdom Narratives on the Margins of Iberian Empire’
Speaker: Nicole T. Hughes (Stanford University)
Week 8: Wednesday 6 March, 16.30 - 18.00.
‘Mobile Polities and Reciprocal Encounters in Eighteenth-Century Philippines’
Speaker: Mark Dizon (Ateneo de Manila)
Convenor(s): Elisabeth Grass, Stuart Parks, Amanda Westcott
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7. 16.15 (with tea and coffee available from 16.00)
Venue: Lower Lecture Room, Lincoln College. For those away from Oxford, the talks will be available on Teams. Apply to perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk for the link to join the meeting online.
Week 1: Tuesday 23 April. 16.15.
‘Critiquing Roman Law: Oroonoko, Two Treatises, and the Shifting Justifications of Slavery’
Speaker: Cameron Bowman (Keble)
Week 3: Tuesday 7 May. 16.15.
‘Policing the “British” in Paris during the French Revolutionary Terror’
Speaker: Simon Macdonald (UCL)
Week 5: Tuesday 21 May. 16.15.
‘What Might Ship Names Tell Us About Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Port Elites?’
Speaker: Peter Solar (CEREC, UCLouvain–Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
Week 7: Tuesday 4 June. 16.15.
‘Reckoning with Race in Early Modern London’
Speaker: Jamie Gemmell (KCL)
For information about the seminar, and news of forthcoming events, visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oxford-seminar-in-mainly-British-History-...
We would be happy to post notices of interest to our group – contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
Convenors: Dr Tracey Sowerby, Dr Kristine Dyrmann and Antonio Pattori.
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8. 16.15 (unless otherwise stated).
Venue: Merze Tate Room, History Faculty. Also online: please contact tracey.sowerby@history.ox.ac.uk for the link to join.
Week 2: Tuesday 30 April. 16.15.
‘A Diplomatic Conspiracy? The Fall of Thomas Cromwell Revisited’
Speaker(s): Susan Brigden (University of Oxford) and Antonio Pattori (University of Oxford)
Week 4: Tuesday 14 May. 16.15.
‘Royal letter-writing in the 16th century: the edition of the letters-missive of Francis I’
Speaker: David Potter (University of Kent)
Week 6: Tuesday 28 May. 16.15.
‘Sight and Sound in Royal Ceremonial: The Chapel Royal and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy (1558-1625)’
Speaker: Oscar Davies Patton (University of Oxford)
Week 8: Tuesday 11 June. 16.15. Please note that this seminar will be held in person only in the Gerry Martin Room at the History Faculty.
‘Courtly Marriage’.
Speaker(s): Hanna Sinclair (University of Oxford) and Max Diemer (University of Oxford)
*Please note that these listings are from HT24. The TT programme will be updated very soon. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Convenors: Paul Norris and Joseph Turner
Time: Tuesdays of weeks 2, 4, 6, 8.
Venue: 17.15 Seminar Room B, English Faculty.
Week 2: Tuesday 23 January. 17.15.
‘Reintroduction to Paleography’
Meghan Kern (Lincoln College)
Week 4: Tuesday 6 February. 17.15.
Paper 1: ‘‘I think h’as knocked | His brains out’: Laughter, violence and impropriety in Jacobean revenge tragedy’
William Hale (Oriel)
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Paper 2: ‘Amaranths: The Making of an Early Modern Myth’
Gui Nabais Freitas (Trinity, Cambridge)
Week 6: Tuesday 20 February. 17.15.
Herin Han (Magdalen), Title TBD.
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Camille Gontarek (Jesus), Title TBD.
Week 8: Tuesday 5 March. 17.15.
Richard Bradshaw (Hertford), Title TBD.
Convenor(s): Diarmid MacCullough, Judith Maltby, Sarah Mortimer, and Grant Tapsell
Time: Thursdays, 5pm. Weeks 1–8.
Venue: Campion Hall, Lecture Room. Also available online via Teams. Please email sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the link to join.
Week 1: Thursday 25 April. 17.00.
‘The First Tudor Succession Tract?’
Speaker: Paulina Kewes (Jesus College, Oxford)
Week 2: Thursday 2 May. 17.00.
‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits: Spiritual Direction in King Lear’
Speaker: Alison Shell (UCL)
Week 3: Thursday 9 May. 17.00.
‘“A fag end of the international medieval tradition”? – The Quality and Worth of Scottish Pre-Reformation Churches’
Speaker: Lizzie Swarbrick (University of Edinburgh)
Week 4: Thursday 16 May. 17.00.
‘The Aberdeen Reformations: Glimpses of an Alternative History’
Speakers: Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson (University of Oxford)
Week 5: Thursday 23 May. 17.00.
‘“My Simple Opinon”: Lay Belief and the Bible in the Reign of Henry VIII’
Speaker: Karl Gunther (University of Florida)
Week 6: Thursday 30 May. 17.00
‘Reading and Religion in the Civil wars: Lord Robartes and the Library at Lanhydrock’
Speaker: Sophie Aldred (University of Oxford)
Week 7: Thursday 6 June. 17.00.
‘Early Christianity, Confessionalization, and the Translation of Greek in Mid-Tudor England’
Speaker: John Colley (University of Cambridge)
Week 8: Thursday 13 June. 17.00.
‘The Demographic Crisis and Religious Toleration in Britain and Europe after 1650’
Speaker: Scott Sowerby (Northwestern University)
Convenor(s): Dr Nuno Castel–Branco (All Souls College, Oxford)
Time: Thursdays, 2pm. Weeks 1–3, 6-8.
Venue: Hovenden Room, All Souls College.
Week 1: Thursday 25 April. 14.00.
‘Robert Boyle’s Strange Reports: From the Outlandish to the Supernatural’
Speaker: Michael Hunter (Birbeck, University of London)
Week 2: Thursday 2 May. 14.00.
‘Authenticating Nature: Fossils and Fakes, 1590–1620’
Speaker: Jeremy Schneider (Trinity College, Cambridge)
Week 3: Thursday 9 May. 14.00.
‘Global Lines and Nautical Cartography in the Iberian Oceanic Expansion’
Speaker: Henrique Leitão (ERC Rutter Project, University of Lisbon)
Week 6: Thursday 30 May. 14.00
‘Franciscan Spirituality, Transmutation, and the Antichrist: John of Rupescissa’s Alchemical Thought and Practices’
Speaker: Lawrence Principe (Johns Hopkins University)
Week 7: Thursday 6 June. 14.00.
‘Eclipse Prediction in Late Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Lewis Caerleon’
Speaker: Laure Miolo (Lincoln College, Oxford)
Week 8: Thursday 13 June. 14.00.
‘Alchemy during the English Reformation: The Troubled Times of Thomas Charnock’
Speaker: Zoe Screti (Harris Manchester College, Oxford)
