Trinity 2019

All welcome. Wine and refreshments served.

Downloadable Programme:

Week 1: 30 April

Dr Dianne Mitchell (Queen’s, Oxford)

‘The Time Traveller's Poem: Intimacy, Polychronicity, and Lyric Copies’

Abstract:

‘What kinds of intimacy do we find in author-supervised copies of manuscript poems? Whether explicitly generated for posterity or created for the purpose of subsequent emendation, such texts seem self-evidently to imagine and desire a readership in the future. But these poems, I’ll propose, can have a less straightforward relationship with time. Instead, to borrow Jonathan Gil Harris’s words, their frequent authorial interventions allow poets to “collate many different moments,” including speculative futures, idealized pasts, and the losses of the present. This talk will explore a few temporal collisions in extant scribal copies of poems by the Renaissance contemporaries John Harington and Dudley North. I’ll suggest that these manuscript "witnesses" can help us see the Friend of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a new light - as a kind of textual object that affords contact with a surprising range of temporalities.’

Week 3: 14 May

Dr Ben Higgins (Lincoln, Oxford)

‘“Taverns, two-penny rooms, tyring-houses”: early modern bookshops and their uses’

Abstract:

What exactly was an early modern bookshop? This talk examines the sites from which literature was sold in London, exploring the goods and services that were typically available alongside books (including plague cures, astronomical instruments, and ‘universal elixyrs’) to consider how these items cohered with books in a richly material bibliographic environment. Bookshops were forums for criticism, in which customers could sit, read, and converse; one could lodge above a bookshop; learn languages; or address letters there for collection by travellers. Bookshops could also resolve questions of proof and authenticity: sceptical readers might be invited there to inspect a manuscript or dispute with an author. This talk will explore the ways in which more straightforward activities of browsing, reading, and buying books underwrote a much larger suite of cultural practices that were enacted within and engendered by the early modern bookshop.

Week 5: 28 May  

Professor Julie Crawford (Columbia University)

‘“The office becomes a woman best”: Sovereignty and Counsel in The Winter’s Tale’

Abstract:

‘In The Winter’s Tale Paulina claims that the office of giving counsel to a king who is behaving badly “becomes a woman best.” In this paper, I will consider the gendered nature of resistance theory, exploring how the play engages one of the most potent analogies of early modern political thought – the concept, in Francis Bacon’s concise formulation, that “Sovereignty is married to Counsel.”’

Week 7: 11 June.

Professor Warren Boutcher (Queen Mary, London)

‘Writing diversity and division: Montaigne and the literary history of Europe, 1550-1660’

Abstract:

 ‘Montaigne’s literary career was shaped by a mid-sixteenth century moment that changed the history not only of France but of Europe and its global connections and conflicts. Confessional divisions were politicised and weaponised. Writing and the book became as never before instruments both of pacification and government and of controversy and sedition. As the French, Dutch and English began to compete intensively with the Iberian powers for trade and colonies across the globe, fresh knowledge of the diverse peoples and cultures of the new and old worlds swept across the continent. This talk describes how a collaborative project for Oxford University Press will move from the case of Montaigne’s travel journal and Essais to the compilation of a literary history of this period on a connected and conflicted European level. The history will accommodate all kinds of literary objects that resided and circulated in places throughout northwestern Eurasia and the territories with which it was connected by colonialism, commerce, or missionary activity.’

Downloadable programme:

Week 2 (Tuesday 7 May)
Ellen B. Brewster (DPhil Student, Exeter College):
‘The Spouting Club: A Workshop’ Into the Archive Session

Week 4 (Tuesday 21 May)
Dr Tess Somervell (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leeds):
‘Foreknowing and Forecasting the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Georgic’

Week 6 (Tuesday 4 June)
Professor Henry Power (University of Exeter):
‘Pins in Mock-Heroic Verse’

Week 8 (Tuesday 18 June)
Dr Carly Watson (Faculty of English)
‘Miscellanies and the Conversation of Culture’

Dr Clare Bucknell (All Souls)
‘Becoming Peter Pindar’ Oxford Faculty Speaker Session 

All are welcome.

Downloadable programme:

Week 1, 30 April
Thomas Roebuck (University of East Anglia)
Mishnaic Scholarship in Seventeenth-Century England

Week 2, 7 May
Dirk van Miert (Utrecht University)
The social life of Guilielmus Surenhusius (1666-1729)

Week 3, 14 May
Kirsten Macfarlane (University of Cambridge)
Christianity as Jewish Allegory? Guilielmus Surenhusius’s ‘Sefer Ha-Mashveh’(1713) and New Testament Scholarship in the Early Eighteenth Century

Week 4, 21 May
Joanna Weinberg (University of Oxford)
The annotated Mishnah among Jews and Christians in early modern Europe

Week 5, 28 May
Richard Cohen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Imagining Visually the Mishnah: From Wagenseil to Wotton

Week 6, 4 June
Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)
Some Christian Uses of the Mishnah
(N.B. this talk will be delivered via Skype, as Prof. Grafton will be unable to travel).

 Week 7, 11 June *at 2.15pm
David Sclar (Harvard University)
Menasseh’s Mishnahs: Three Amsterdam Imprints in Intellectual and Cultural Context

Week 8, 18 June
Ada Rapoport-Albert (University College London)
How mishnaic was Immanuel Hai Ricchi’s Mishnat Hasidim (Amsterdam, 1727)?

Full programme here; selected early modern highlights below:

Week 1 (29 April)
Dr Kirsten Macfarlane (University of Cambridge)
‘An English Hebraist, an Ottoman ‘Rabbi’, and the Unlikely Story of the First Hebrew Books Printed in Amsterdam (1605-1606)’

Week 4 (20 May)
Dr Dirk van Miert (Utrecht University)
‘There was no Hebrew Republic of Letters: Christian Hebraism, conceptual history and theory of citizenship’

Week 5 (27 May)
Professor Shmuel Feiner (Bar Ilan University)
‘The Year 1700 and the Birth of the Jewish 18th century’

All very welcome.

Downloadable programme:

Week 1 (1 May)
Jennifer Rampling (Princeton/All Souls)
‘Experiment And Enterprise: The Reformation Of English Alchemy In The Sixteenth Century’

Week 2 (8 May)
Matteo Martelli (Bologna)
‘The Chemical Arts In Antiquity: Metals, Spirits And Medicines’

Week 3 (15 May)
Xiona Wang (Warburg Institute)
‘Robert Hooke’s Vibrating Matter And Isaac Newton’s Aether Queries’

Week 5 (29 May) [Please Note: Hovenden Room]
Surekha Davies (Utrecht)
‘Knowing With Images: Natural History Illustration And Cartography In The Global Renaissance’

Week 7 (12 June)
Ofer Gal (Sydney)
‘“Desire Is The Essence Of Man”. Kepler’s Optics, Descartes’ Epistemology And Spinoza’s Politics’

Downloadable programme:

Week 1 (2 May)
Eamon Duffy, Magdalene College, Cambridge
‘Richard Baxter Reminiscent: life writing in the Reliquiae and other works’

Week 2 (9 May)
Paulina Kewes, Jesus College, Oxford
‘“The godlye election of a Kyng”: The Debating of the Succession, 1549-1558’

Week 3 (16 May)
Freya Sierhuis, University of York
'Fulke Greville and the intellectual culture of Puritanism'

Week 4 (23 May)
Henry Jefferies, Thornhill College, Derry
‘British Reformations Compared’

Week 5 (30 May)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, St Cross, Oxford
‘Matters overlooked: straightening out the story of the Reformation’

Week 6 (6 June)
Anthony Milton, University of Sheffield
‘England's abortive reformation 1640-42’

Week 7 (13 June)
Stephen Holmes, Rector of the United Benefice of Padstow, St Merryn, and St Issey with St Petroc Minor, Little Petherick, Hon Fellow in the History of Christianity at Edinburgh University School of Divinity (New College)
'Sacred Signs in Reformation Scotland’

Week 8 (20 June)
Sarah Mortimer, Christ Church, Oxford
‘Natural religion and political thought in Reformation Britain’

All are very welcome (including undergraduates).

Downloadable programme:

Week 1 (29 April)
Blair Worden (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)
‘Ben Jonson, Ovid, and the Fall of Essex 1600-01’

Week 2 (6 May)
Derek Dunne (Cardiff University)
‘Shakespeare’s Licence’

Week 3 (13 May)
Harriet Archer (University of St Andrews)
‘Place, Identity and Brennus the Gaul in Early Modern Imaginative Historiography’

Week 4 (20 May)
Nadine Akkerman (Leiden University)
‘Manuscript Sleuthing: An Introduction to Invisible Agents’
Copies of Invisible Agents will be available for purchase at a special discount

Week 5 (27 May)
Clare Egan (Lancaster University)
‘Performing Provincial Libel in Early Modern England’

Week 6 (3 June) [Cancelled due to speaker illness)
Sarah Dustagheer (University of Kent)
‘Shakespeare’s London Words’

Week 1 (30 April)
Stefanie Freyer (Universität Osnabrück)
'The ‘King of Peace’ off Track? The Provoking Strategies of James I’s Diplomats in Germany'

Week 2 (7 May)
Sara Smart (University of Exeter)
'Confession, Conflict, & Cultural Renewal: the Hohenzollern Consort in the Seventeenth Century'

Week 3 (14 May)
Alexander Samson (UCL)
'Robert Ashley’s Spanish Books: Textual Diplomacy'

Week 4 (21 May)
Charlotta Forss (University of Oxford):
''There was a rumour in the city that we were imprisoned’: Swedish Diplomats in the Ottoman Empire & the Challenges of Misinformation'

Week 5 (28 May)
Ineke Huysman (Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands):
'The Diplomatic Correspondence of Dutch Grandpensionary Johan de Witt'

Week 6 (4 June)
Maïa Pal (Oxford Brookes University):
'The Social Origins of Early Modern Ambassadors & Consuls: The Potential (& Limits) of an International Relations Analysis'
 

Week 7 (11 June)
John Watkins (University of Minnesota):
'Working Around the Ius Gentium: Diplomatic Lies and the Invention of Southern Europe'

https://www.oxbibsoc.org.uk/lectures

Week 2
5.15pm, 8 May 2019, Magdalen College Lecture Theatre
Dr Thomas Roebuck, University Of East Anglia
'O Note This Place and This Life': A Renaissance Reader's Copy of Sir Thomas North's Translation of Plutarch's Lives (1579)

Week 6
5:15pm, 5 June 2019, Merton College T.S. Eliot Theatre
Tim Pye, National Trust Librarian
Reconstructing the library of Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-1786)

Week 8
4.30pm,  21 June 2019, Lincoln College Oakeshott Room
Oxford Bibliographical Society Annual General Meeting

followed by after-meeting speaker:
Dr Cristina Dondi, Lincoln College
Running an ERC project in the History of the Book: reflections on the 15cBOOKTRADE Project five years on

Week 1: 2nd May
Fanny Lacôte (Stirling/Oxford)
'Le roman gothique en traduction française, 1789-1804 : une affaire de femmes 'révolutionnées’?'

Week 3: 16th May
Benoît Autiquet (Bâle/Oxford)
'Enjeux politiques des Lettres (1586-1619) d'Etienne Pasquier.

Week 5: 30th May 

Alison Calhoun (Indiana University )
'Turning on the waterworks: technologies of the passions on the French baroque stage.'

[Cancelled]

Week 7: 13th June 
Sylvaine Guyot (Harvard University)
'Les scénographies de l'éblouissement au XVIIe siècle : modélisation, tensions, inflexions.’

[Cancelled]

Week 2 (7 May)

Felicity Brown: 'Deploying and denying medieval tradition: The Misfortunes of Arthur'

Adam Dumbleton: ‘Stay, view this stone’: Fictions of placement in some seventeenth-century object poems'

Week 4 (21 May)

Chloe Fairbanks: Womb to tomb: birth, death, and the natural world as agents of national making in Shakespeare’s history plays'

Letitia Johnston: ‘But for the satisfaction of many that have desired it:’ The Instability of the Preliminary Matter to Paradise Lost'

Week 6 (4 June)

Molly Clark: 'Heywood, Shakespeare, and Dramatic Rhyme'

Natasha Sarna: ‘The Best of all Possible Worlds: Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and the Gendered Construction of (Feminine) Utopia in the Early Modern Period’

Week 8 (18 June)

7pm: Dinner for all graduate early modernists

Please email Rachael.hodge@sjc.ox.ac.uk or Georgina.wilson@balliol.ox.ac.uk with any queries.