● The Lure of Foundations and Experiences of Mobility: The Making of Jesuit Spaces in the Early Modern period, Oxford (19-20 October 2007)

● Communes and Despots in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Oxford (6-7 September 2007)

● Collecting & the Princely Apartment, Ottobeuren (13-17 July 2007)

> Early Modern Playing
13 December 2007, 18:30-21:00
Shakespeare's Globe, London

> The Republic of Letters: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment
30 November - 1 December 2007
Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center

Click here to visit the website

> Britain's Icons: Writing, Images and Cultural Signs, 1450-1670
23-24 November 2007
Birkbeck, University of London

Friday, 23 November

10:00-10:30 Registration

10:30-12:30

> Margaret Healy (Sussex), 'Hieroglyphs, Emblems and the Eye of the Mind.'

> Susan Wiseman (Birkbeck), ‘Civil War Icons.’

12:30-1:30 lunch (own arrangements)

1:30-3:30

> Anthony Bale (Birkbeck), 'Preserving Sacramental Childhood? Boy saints and ritual murder narratives in the Reformation.'

> Philip Schwyzer (Exeter) ‘”Cast down his Bones!”: Early Protestant responses to Catholic corpses.’

3:30-4:00 tea

4:00-6:00

> Tom Betteridge (Oxford Brookes), 'How many bloody letters been written in this book': Christ as text in the work of John Fisher, Thomas More and George Herbert.’

> David Loewenstein (Wisconsin), ‘Burning Heretics and Fashioning Martyrs: Religious Extremism and Violence in John Foxe.’

6:00-7:30 drinks reception.

Saturday 24 November

9:00-9:30 coffee

9:30-10:30

> Isabel Davis (Birkbeck), 'Plastic icons: Picturing the Conjugal Family in the Later Middle Ages.'

10:30-11:00 coffee

11:00-1:00

> Richard Williams (Birkbeck), 'The Reformation of an Icon: The 'Portrait' of Christ in Late-Sixteenth-Century England.'

> Matthew Dimmock (Sussex), 'Anti-Icons: Alternative Christs in Post-Reformation England'

1:00-2:00 lunch

2:00-4:00

> Tom Healy (Birkbeck), ‘Elizabeth I and the Spenserian imagination.’

> Alice Hunt (Southampton), ‘Idol ceremony?: James I's Protestant Coronation, 1603.’

For more information, please contact

Prof Thomas Healy: t.healy@bbk.ac.uk or

Prof Susan Wiseman: s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk

Conference Fees: Staff/Waged: £20; Students/Unwaged £10.

Venue:

23 November: Room G01, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Sq, London WC1.

24 November: Room 101, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, 30 Russell Sq, London WC1.

Click here for a map of how to find Birkbeck.

Click here for the London Renaissance Seminar webpage

Click here to download a copy of the Britain's Icons programme

Click here for the Britain's Icon's poster

> Mystik und Natur Symposium
16-18 November 2007
Salzburg University, Austria, organised by the Theophrastus-Stiftung

Please click here to visit the website

Click here to download the programme (PDF)

For further information, send an email to: info@theophrastus-stiftung.de

> Art and Morality in the Italian Renaissance
16-17 November, 2007
National Gallery, London

Speakers:

> Mary Carruthers
> David Freedberg
> David Summers
> Barbara Maria Stafford
> Gervase Rosser
> Timothy Verdon
> Dallas Denery
> Robert Maniura
> Phillppa Plock
> Scott Nethersole
> Kate Dunton

The Christian defence of the image was grounded on its moral usefulness, as is well known, but it is less frequently noted that humanist writers on art, from Alberti to Vincenzo Borghini, were equally clear that the primary function of the image was its moral utile.  This ensured that the moral purpose of the image continued to underlie assumptions about the nature of the work of art throughout the Renaissance period.  To explore some of the ways in which this informed Renaissance visualities is the aim of this conference which will hear contributions from leading scholars in Europe and North America.

The first task of the conference will be to trace the development of moral modes of viewing from the medieval into the renaissance period, with a particular emphasis on the Christian legacy of spiritual seeing. The second aim is to clarify the ethical role of memory and imagination, and to consider how contemporary models of the mind may have shaped concerns about the moral (or immoral) impact of the image.  Leading on from this, the third aim is to examine the way in which the renaissance viewer negotiated violent and erotic images and to what extent this was determined by their gender and social status.  Finally, the conference will consider the implications of moral viewing for current debates within and beyond the discipline of art history, with a particular focus on the relationship between the thinking brain and the feeling body.

 SPEAKERS and SESSIONS

Friday

10.00 - 10.45 Registration and coffee

11.05    Moral Utility and the Christian Image from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance

Dr Robert Maniura (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Dr Gervase Rosser (Oxford University)

Rev. Dr Timothy Verdon (Stanford University Study Centre, Florence)

2.20 Seeing and Being Seen: Optics, perspective and moral vision

Dr Dallas Denery (Bowdoin College)

Dr Kate Dunton (University of Essex)

3.55 'Right Seeing' : The elite viewer and resisting affect

Mr Scott Nethersole (Courtauld Institute, London)

Dr Phillippa Plock (University of Warwick)

Saturday

10.15 Memory, Imagination and Moral Judgement

Professor Mary Carruthers (New York University)

Professor David Summers (University of Virginia)   

11.50 Thinking Mind and Feeling Body:  Taking a ‘long view’ at the cognitive implications of moral modes of viewing.

Professor David Freedberg (Columbia University)

Professor Barbara Stafford (University of Chicago)

Click here to visit the conference webpage

> CFP Northern Renaissance Seminar: 'Everyday Life'
10 November, 2007 (10:00am - 5:00pm)
Lancaster University

The importance of the everyday for understanding early modern culture and society took its main impetus from the Annales school of historiography in the 1960s and 70s, and it has long since become a main theme of new historicist and related schools of early modern cultural studies since the 1980s. In fact, the everyday has become so common a concern of Renaissance studies that we may well be taking it for granted. What is ‘the everyday’ in the context of early modern Europe? What is its relation to the exceptional event, the ritual moment, the conduct of political life, or the production of literature and art? How was the everyday vertically and horizontally integrated, or non-integrated, in view of regional affiliations and class and status divisions? How did artists and writers represent it – or for that matter, fail to represent it?

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on these and related questions.

Please send proposals of c.200 words to Liz Oakley-Brown by 15 October 2007 (revised deadline):
E-mail: e.oakley-brown@lancaster.ac.uk

You are invited to participate in a workshop aimed at producing a collection of neo-Latin texts to be used in the teaching of post-medieval Latin. The workshop will feature a series of talks on topics such as the online dissemination of language teaching materials, and interdisciplinary, interdepartmental approaches to teaching neo-Latin. Participants will be asked to prepare beforehand recommendations for short texts to be included in the anthology, with suggestions for commentary and glossary. These will be discussed at the workshop. The day will be divided into a series of plenary sessions in the morning, followed by group work in the afternoon to develop the anthology materials.

When the organisers have had chance to follow up these various possibilities, we will make the teaching materials we have compiled available for widespread distribution and dissemination to all teachers of neo-Latin within the higher education sector.

The workshop is supported by the Classics Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy.

If you would like more information, please contact the organisers:
Dr Andrew Taylor, Churchill College, Cambridge: awt24@cam.ac.uk and
Dr Sarah Knight, Department of English, University of Leicester: sk218@le.ac.uk

> Gender and Belief in the Early Modern World
9 November 2007
University of Warwick

Part of the series of events co-organized by the Newberry Library (Chicago) and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (Warwick) with funding from the Mellon Foundation.  

This one-day workshop, to be held at Lecture Room 4, Scarman House, the University of Warwick (from 10 am), will address topics such as:

    * What were women’s experiences of belief?
    * How did masculinity shape -and how was it shaped by- belief?
    * What was the relation between gender and spiritual/religious writing?

Papers and discussions may touch on such varied areas as monasticism, reformation and counter reformation, witchcraft/demonology, sanctity, and so on.
 
There will also be an interdisciplinary postgraduate forum during which postgraduate students will make brief presentations of their project and invite discussion on how, and to what extent, issues of 'gender and belief' pertain to their investigations.

    * Kimberley Martin: 'Gendering a City: Representations of London in Civic Pageantry of the Early 17th Century'
    * Laura Sangha: 'The significance of belief about angels in the English Reformation'
    * John West: Inspiration and Aspiration: Invocations of the Holy Spirit in Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder and John Milton's Paradise Lost
    * Justine Williams: 'James Shirley, Ireland's Catholic playwright?'
    * Jonathan Willis: 'Music, Gender and Belief in Post-Reformation England'

Programme

10-10.30 Registration and coffee

10.30 Welcome and Introduction (Dr Ingrid De Smet, Director, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance)

Session 1: Open or closed? Gender, belief and community in a transatlantic perspective

10.35-11.10 Dr Silvia Evangelisti (University of East Anglia): “Female Religious Communities in Early Modern Europe”

11.10-11.45 Prof. Lyndal Roper (Balliol College, Oxford): “Luther and the Household: Myth and Reality”

11.45-12.30 Prof. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): “Gender and Religion in Early Modern Colonialism: an Overview”

12.30-12.45 Round table discussion

12.45-1.45pm Lunch

Session 2: Configurations of Gender and Belief

1.45-2.20 Prof. Em. Brenda Hosington (Associate Research Fellow, CSR, Warwick): “Faith and Gender in English Renaissance Women Translators' Paratexts”

2.20-2.45 Kimberley Martin (CSR, Warwick): “Gendering a City: Representations of London in Civic Pageantry of the Early 17th Century”

2.45-3.10 John West (Warwick): “Inspiration and Aspiration: Invocations of the Holy Spirit in Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder and John Milton's Paradise Lost”

3.10-3.30 Tea

Session 3: Gender and Belief: problems, questions and avenues for research

3.30- Laura Sangha: ‘'The significance of belief about angels in the English Reformation'

Justine Williams: 'James Shirley, Ireland's Catholic playwright?'

Jonathan Willis: ‘Music, Gender and Belief in Post-Reformation England’

Discussants will also include Prof. Robert Swanson (University of Birmingham) and Prof. George Hoffmann (University of Michigan).

Click here to visit the Belief and Unbelief in the Early Modern Period website

Click here to download the programme

Register by 1 November with Lisa Cook: l.d.cook@warwick.ac.uk

> M&EM: The Medieval and Early Modern Workshop
Wednesday 24 October 2007, 2.30 - 4.30 pm
Cambridge, CRASSH

A twice-termly, interdisciplinary forum, offering talks, discussion, and practical research advice on key areas of medieval and early modern scholarship. Supported by the Society for Renaissance Studies and coordinated by Jennifer Rampling (jmr82@cam.ac.uk) and Felicity Green (fmg26@cam.ac.uk).

> Professor Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute, London):
'Translation and Transmission of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom'

Held at CRASSH,
17 Mill Lane,
Cambridge CB2 1RX

Refreshments provided. All welcome.

> The Lure of Foundations and Experiences of Mobility: The Making of Jesuit Spaces in the Early Modern period
19-20 October 2007
Maison Française d’Oxford

Friday 19th October 2007, 2:30 – 5:30pm

2:00pm : Welcome/coffee

Chair Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick

Introduction by Stéphane Van Damme & Antonella Romano  

• J. Michele Molina, Stanford University, Evangelization and Consolation Or Philosophy in the Mission Field

• Patrick Goujon, Paris, centre Sèvres, Surin entre ville et campagne : les enjeux de l’écriture missionnaire

4.00pm Coffee Break

• Paul Cohen, University of Toronto, The Linguistic Learning Curve in Representation and Practice: Jesuit Missionaries and Amerindian Languages in New France, 17th-18th Centuries

 General Discussion

Saturday 20th October 2007, 9:30am – 12:30

Chair: Pietro Corsi (Linacre, Oxford)

• Olwen Hufton, Merton College, Oxford, Money, men and the mission: integrating the jesuit college into their wider agenda

• Aliocha Maldavski, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, Les jésuites italiens au seuil de la mission lointaine. Significations sociales de l’exil missionnaire dans la première moitié du 17 e siècle

• Paolo Bianchini, (Università di Torino), Dimension locale, nationale et internationale dans l’expérience biographique et culturelle des jésuites à la fin du XVIII siècle

Saturday 20th October 2007, 2:00 – 5:00pm

Chair: Noel Malcom (All Souls, Oxford)

• Silvia Sebastiani, (IISU, Florence), Enlightenment on America: Clavijero and the Scottish historical discourse
• Stephane Van Damme, University of Warwick, Between universalism and localism: Jesuit Scholars of Lyon and the Republic of Letters

• Antonella Romano, European University Institute, Between universalism and localism: Jesuit Scholars of Rome and the Republic of Letters

3.30: Coffee Break

General discussion

Conveners: Pierre-Antoine Fabre (EHESS), Antonella Romano (EUI), & Stéphane Van Damme ( Warwick University)

With the support of MFO-CNRS, Centre d’anthropologie religieuse europeenne (EHESS) & European University Institute ( Florence)

- All welcome -

Maison Française d’Oxford
2-10 Norham Road
Oxford, OX2 6SE
Tel. (01865) 274 220
Fax. (01865) 274 225
Email: maison@herald.ox.ac.uk

Click here to visit the website

> Great Fire of London Study Day
6 October 2007
London, Museum in Docklands

How true are the established 'facts' about The Fire of London?

Did only six people die in the fire? Did the fire stop the plague? Leading experts will discuss these and other questions about London's infamous disaster in this study day at Museum in Docklands.

Saturday 6 October 10am-5.30pm
Tickets £20 (£15 concs)

Museum in Docklands Study Day

The Great Fire of London: Myths and Realities

6 October 2007

10am - 5.30pm

How true are the established 'facts' about the Great Fire of London? Did only six people die in the fire?  Did the fire really bring about a revolution in London's architecture? Did the fire stop the plague? Leading experts will discuss these and other questions about London's infamous disaster. Can we tell myth from reality?

10.00   Registration

10.15   Introduction, Meriel Jeater, Museum of London

10.30   How many people died in the Great Fire?, Neil Hanson, author, and Gustav Milne (University College London)

11.30   Did the fire radically change London's architecture?, Stephen Porter, author, and Dr John Schofield (Museum of London)

12.30   Lunch (provided for speakers)

13.30   Why was it claimed that the fire was started by a Catholic conspiracy?, Dr Colin Haydon (University of Winchester)

14.30   Did the fire stop the plague?, Professor Justin Champion (Royal Holloway, University of London)

15.30   Coffee

16.00   How has London coped with fires since 1666?, Alex Werner (Museum of London) and Phil Butler, Fire Borough Commander for Enfield

17.00   Final questions and close

Each session will include a panel discussion and time for questions. The day will be chaired by Dr Vanessa Harding of Birkbeck, University of London.

For further information or to book,
Tel: 0870 444 3855 or
E-mail: info@museumindocklands.org.uk

Museum in Docklands, West India Quay E14
DLR: West India Quay, Tube: Canary Wharf

Click here to download the flyer

Confirmed speakers include:
> Mary Ellen Lamb
> Arthur Kinney
> Gary Waller
> Sheila Cavanagh
> Julian Lethbridge

Click here to visit the EMSIS webpage for full details

Click here for a copy of the Conference Poster

Papers to be published in the Sidney Journal

For further information contact Christopher Murray: c.murray@dundee.ac.uk

There are also a limited number of bursaries available for postgraduates registered at UK universities.  These bursaries will be available in the first instance to those offering papers. Please contact Andrew Gordon a.gordon@abdn.ac.uk if you wish to apply.

The experience of pain, far from being a purely bodily sensation, is powerfully mediated by cultural belief systems. The early modern period is one of most important eras in the history of pain in Western Europe. For example, the origins of modern Western attitudes towards pain as meaningless are partly to be found in the Reformation era, when Protestant theologians attempted to redefine and circumscribe the spiritual meaning of physical suffering, and rejected late medieval assumptions about pain. In late medieval religious culture, physical suffering was seen as a way of participating in the Passion of Christ, or as a form of ‘purgatorial suffering’ that could contribute to salvation. Reformation theologians, by contrast, downplayed the theological significance of physical suffering, and saw Christ's self-sacrifice as a unique and complete event, from which humans were excluded. This  often highly ambivalent and piecemeal transformation was only one among a range of developments within early modern notions of pain, whose roots frequently go back to the later medieval period.

This conference will investigate these developments from a range of different angles, and from an international as well as interdisciplinary perspective. The editors welcome articles on theology, humanism (for example on the humanist interest in Stoicism), medicine (the impact of anatomy on conceptions of pain, or the growing separation between medical and theological notions of pain), print culture (the impact of the printed book on our understanding of the body), visual culture (representations of the Passion in early modern art) and literary texts (pain in devotional verse, or the role of pain in the warrior ethos of epic poetry). This list is not exhaustive, and the editors are specifically interested in essays which investigate the interrelations between the various fields sketched here.

Conference papers will be published in volume 12 of Brill's Intersections series, scheduled to appear in 2008. Click here for more information about Intersections.

Proposals should be sent (preferably by email) no later than 1 December 2006 to:

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
University of Leiden
Department of English
PO Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
E-mail: j.van.dijkhuizen@let.leidenuniv.nl

> Colloquium on the History of Alchemy
26 September 2007
Birkbeck, University of London - SHAC: The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry’s autumn meeting will be held on Wednesday 26 September 2007 in the Basement Lecture Theatre, B33, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, University of London beginning at 10.50am.

10:50: Introduction

11.00: Jennifer M. Rampling (HPS, Cambridge):
‘George Ripley and the Pseudo-Lullian Tradition.’

12.00: Barbara Obrist (CNRS, Université Paris 7):
‘Views of history in medieval alchemical writings.’

1.00: Lunch

2.00-2.15: AGM for SHAC Members

2.15: John T. Young (The Isaac Newton Project, University of Sussex):
‘Missing Pieces of the Jigsaw: New Evidence about Newton's Alchemical Sources.’

3.15: Peter J. Forshaw (Birkbeck, University of London):
‘Alchemy meets Cabala: Giovanni Panteo's Voarchadumia (1530) ’

4.15: Discussion and Refreshments (Room B29)

5.15: End of Colloquium

The meeting is open to both members and non-members of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. The fee for SHAC members is £10 and the fee for non-members is £15. Refreshments, but not lunch, are included in the meeting fee.

For further details about the meeting, please contact:
Dr Anna Simmons: A.E.Simmons@open.ac.uk

Click here for the Colloquium Registration Form

Click here for the SHAC Membership Leaflet

Click here to visit the SHAC website

> Second Jozef IJsewijn Lecture
26 September 2007
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae

> Prof. H. Hofmann (Universität Tübingen): 'Literary Culture at the Court of Urbino during the Reign of Federico da Montefeltro'

Wednesday 26 September 2007 at 5 p.m.

Lipsiuszaal (Erasmushuis)
Blijde-Inkomststraat 21,
3000 Leuven
BELGIUM

Click here to download the announcement (PDF)

 The Paul Mellon Center, London and I Tatti, Florence are jointly sponsoring a three-day event, which will take place in Florence on 19-21 September 2007.

Devoted to the study of the artistic links between the early Tudor courts and Medicean Florence, the conference will focus on the sculptural projects which galvanized the attention of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The architectural context for decorative sculpture will be highlighted together with the parallel, growing interest for painting documented through imported works, as well as by the presence of Florentine painters in London.

Research in these areas has been gathering momentum in the 1980s and ‘90s but never before have Anglo-American and Italian scholars gathered together and attempted a joint synthesis and interpretation of the flux and progress of Renaissance, and more specifically Florentine, artistic themes in England.

The wealth of documentary evidence still awaiting careful study in the archives of both countries, combined with the surviving artefacts make this subject one of the most stimulating and promising.

Wednesday 19th September 2007

17:30 Opening remarks by Brian Allen and Joseph Connors

18:00 Plenary lecture by Steven Gunn (Merton College, Oxford), Anglo-Florentine contacts 1485-1547: political and social contexts

Thursday 20th September 2007

9:00 Registration

9:25 Opening remarks by Joseph Connors, session chaired by Joseph Connors

> Cinzia Sicca (Università di Pisa), Giorgio Vasari and the progress of Italian art in early sixteenth-century England

10:00
> Alan P. Darr (Detroit Institute of Arts), Pietro Torrigiani and his sculpture in Henrician England: sources and influences

10:30
> Louis Waldman (University of Texas) Benedetto da Rovezzano in England and after

11:00 COFFEE

11:30
> Francesco Caglioti (Università Federico II, Napoli), Benedetto da Rovezzano in Inghilterra: novità sulla tomba del cardinale Wolsey e poi di Enrico VIII

12:00
> Giancarlo Gentilini and Tommaso Mozzati (Università di Perugia), Centoquarantadue figure e un Re a cavallo. Il mausoleo di Baccio Bandinelli per Enrico VIII

12:30 Discussion

Afternoon Session chaired by Brian Allen

14:30
> Phillip G. Lindley (University of Leicester), Why were Italian sculptors successful in early sixteenth-century England?

15:00
> Maurice Howard (University of Sussex), Italian architects and military engineers under royal and courtier patronage in the reign of Henry VIII

15:30
> Thomas Campbell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), From Papal Rome to Tudor London: The context and significance of Henry VIII's Raphael workshop tapestries

16:30
> Susan Foister (National Gallery, London), Holbein, Antonio Toto and the market forItalian painting in early Tudor England

17:00
> Martin Biddle (Hertford College, Oxford) The Palace of Nonsuch

17.30 Final discussion chaired by Joseph Connors

Friday 21st September - visits to relevant sites in Florence

Morning: San Salvi, Cappella Pandolfini alla Badia, Museo del Bargello

Afternoon: Santa Trinita, Santi Apostoli, il Carmine

Contacts: Susan Bates, I Tatti, Florence, e-mail: sbates@itatti.it

> CFP London in Text and History, 1400-1700
13-15 September 2007
Jesus College, Oxford

Organisers: Ian Archer ( Oxford), Matthew Davies (Centre for Metropolitan History, London), Ian Gadd ( Bath Spa), Tracey Hill ( Bath Spa), Paulina Kewes ( Oxford)

Plenary speakers include:
> Paul Griffiths
> Rob Hume
> Mark Jenner
> Mark Knights
> Peter Stallybrass
       
CALL FOR PAPERS
       
This conference will focus on the variety of metropolitan identities, and how these were constructed, represented, and contested by contemporaries through a variety of media, including text (broadly defined), visual culture, maps, architecture and performance.
       
Between 1400 and 1700, London expanded hugely in population; it was affected by religious and political upheaval; it emerged from the shadow of its near-neighbour European competitors to become a world metropolis; and its physical face was transformed by the dissolution and the Great Fire. Our concern, however, is not so much with what these political, economic, or religious changes were but rather how they were figured in a range of forms and genres: ballads, drama, civic shows, sermons, pamphlets, poems, urban chronicles, topographical guides, paintings, engravings, and maps.

Lively literatures exist for medieval and early modern London but they rarely engage with each other nor do studies of post-Restoration London connect with the pre-civil war period. Consequently, plenary speakers will range widely to set up the major areas of debate, while the panels will be designed to encompass broad time-spans and to facilitate exchange among scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, architecture and cartography. The conference will also reflect on the impact of some 10-15 years' worth of unprecedented scholarly attention to London.

We would particularly welcome proposals for papers relating to the following topics:
       
 Ideas and beliefs
       
* 'The idea of the City'. How contemporaries understood the city in local, national, and international terms
* Citizenship. The shaping and contestation of notions of 'citizenship' in London
* History and civic memory. Chronography, chorography, and civic history. The ways Londoners' identities were informed by their sense of the city's past and by the associations of particular places
* Belief and the citizen. Perceptions of the place of religion in the life of the capital; responses to and interpretations of religious change and controversy

Places and people
       
* The urban landscape. Ideas of civic/communal/private space; perceptions of boundaries, streetscapes and neighbourhoods; the representation of London's physical expansion
* Urban 'deviance'. The shaping of languages of deviance by the metropolitan experience; the representation of disorder and criminality
* Visual London. The changing ways in which the city was represented to itself and to others in maps, prints, and paintings
* Inclusion and exclusion: the problem of the stranger. Representations of 'aliens' and 'foreigners'; newcomers and the problem of marginality
* London's business and commerce. The perception and representation of economic change and the city's position in relation to other cities; consumerism; financial and productive network

Texts and art
       
* Literary London. The ways in which writings about London were both shaped by and shaped the identities of Londoners
* Civic entertainments. Lord Mayor's Shows, royal entries: pageantry, display, and politics
* Communication and information. Licit and illicit communication; the production and consumption of advertising and propaganda; gossip and civic 'reputation'
* Readers, writers and the circulation of texts. Reading communities in the city; the creation of cultural networks

Proposals for papers (300 words max) should be sent by email to:
ian.archer@history.ox.ac.uk or t.hill@bathspa.ac.uk no later than 1 March 2007

In the last twenty years the notion of landscape has undergone significant theoretical development which has focused attention on discourses, knowledge, power and questions of representation.  Geographers have reconfigured the relationship between landscape and identity by drawing on a range of cultural texts.  However, their treatment of creative writing has been incomplete, despite cultural geography’s engagement with literary theory.

Literary Studies, similarly, has engaged with the social or psychological relations of individual authors to landscapes but not fully understood (a) the combined influence of landscapes and their literary constructions on the creative process and (b) the significance of that process as half-conceived and half-written.

Keynote speakers:
> Professor Timothy Fulford (Nottingham Trent University)
> Professor Donna Landry (University of Kent)
> Professor Kenneth Olwig (SLU, Sweden)

Questions we would seek to discuss include:

· How does a writer respond not just to landscape but to generic conventions of landscape writing?
· How does the writer’s response to landscape shift through the stages of writing?
· How do landscape, the textual representation of landscape and the process of representing landscape help shape identity?
· How does a sense of identity inform textual representations of landscape, in turn?
· How do we apply literary models of authorship and readership to the experiences of ‘real’ authors and readers in response to landscape?
· What are the methodological challenges in answering these questions?
· What are the challenges to theories of identity and/or landscape that need to be addressed?
· How can we combine productively theories of representation and non-representation to understand more fully the practices and performances of writing in relation to landscape?

Please send enquiries or abstracts of 300 words by 30th March 2007 to the
co-organisers:
Dr. Catherine Brace, Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Cornwall
Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ; email: cbrace@exeter.ac.uk
Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra, Department of English, University of Exeter,
Cornwall Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ; email: a.g.johns-putra@exeter.ac.uk

Click here to visit the University of Exeter website for further information

> Popular Culture in the Early Modern World
11-13 September 2007
University of Sussex, Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS)

An International conference organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) to be held at the University of Sussex, 11-13 September 2007.

Programme  

Tuesday 11 September

9.30-11.45          Registration (with tea and coffee 11.15-11.45)                          
Lounge 11.45-13.00       

Plenary 1: Peter Burke – ‘Revisiting Popular Culture’                           
Gallery Room 2 

13.00-14.15        Lunch - Lounge 
14.15-16.00       Session 1 – Defining Popular Culture                          

Chair: tbc 

          
> Michelle O’Callaghan (University of Reading) – ‘Thomas the Scholar’ versus ‘John the Sculler’: Defining Popular Culture in the early Seventeenth Century.          
> Neil Rhodes (University of St Andrews) – Orality and Popular Culture: Thomas Nashe and Marshall McLuhan.          
> Lori Newcombe (University of Illinois) – What is a Chapbook?

16.00-16.30 Tea and Coffee – Lounge 
16.30-17.50        Session 2(a) – Popular Science and the Supernatural                           

Chair: tbc              
> Robert Iliffe (University of Sussex) – Nature, Imposture and the Supernatural in Early Modern Britain            
> Kevin Killeen (University of Leeds) – ‘No Spirit, no God!’: Science and Witchcraft in the Seventeenth Century.           
> Amanda McKeever (University of Sussex) – Title tbc                              

Session 2(b) – Popular Stereotypes  
                        
Chair: tbc   

> Victoria Buckley-Jennings (University of Sussex) – ‘If You Kill With Powder’: Representations of

the Gunpowder Plot in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon.            

> Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) –Libels, the Theatre and Popular Xenophobia.            

> Catherine Parsons (University of Sussex) – Jezebels and Whores: Dangerous Women in Edwardian

and Marian England.            

18.00-19.00 Reception - Lounge

Following the Reception, delegates are to make their own dining arrangements

Wednesday 12 September

9.30-10.45 Session 3(a) – Social History

Chair: tbc
> Bernard Capp ( University of Warwick) – (Un)holy Wedlock: Bigamy and Bigamists in Early Modern England.
> Nick Tosney ( University of York) – Gamesters, Sharpers, and the ‘Contagion of Cheating’ in Early Modern England.
> Andy Durr ( University of Sussex) – The Society of Free-masons: A Late Medieval and Early Modern Trade Fraternity.

Session 3(b) – Early Modern Comedy

Chair: tbc
> Andrew Hadfield ( University of Sussex) – Spenser and Jokes
> Amy Orrock ( University of Edinburgh) – The Serious Matter of Play: Bruegel’s Children’s Games and Gargantua’s Games.
> Andrew Hiscock ( University of Wales, Bangor) – The Popular Cultures of Tudor Comedy

10.45-11.15 Tea and Coffee - Lounge

11.15-12.45 Session 4(a) – Early Modern Reading Practices I

Chair: tbc
> Femke Molekamp ( University of Sussex) – ‘Of the Incomparable Treasure of the Holy Scriptures’: Early Modern Readers’ Responses to the Geneva Bible.
> Elisabeth Salter ( University of Wales, Aberystwyth) – ‘The Dayes Moralised’: Evidence for Experiences of Popular Devotional Reading Across the English Reformation.
> Louise Wilson ( University of York) – ‘What the Simple Say I Care Not’: Reading Practices and Popular Romance in Sixteenth-Century England.

Session 4(b) – Italian Popular Culture

Chair: tbc
> Marta Moiso ( University of Turin) – Superstition, Magic and Medicine in Early Modern South Italy. Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) and the Case of ‘Tarantolati’.
> Leka Rozsa ( Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore , Milan) – Urban Life in the Renaissance Comedy in Italy
> Victoria Sheridan ( University of Toronto) – Those Monstrous Ornaments of Vanity: The Shoe, The Tendril and Silk Stockings in Early Modern Venice.

12.45-14.15 Lunch – Lounge

 14.15-15.45 Session 5(a) -Early Modern Reading Practices II

Chair: tbc
> Adriana Bontea ( University of Sussex) – Storytelling in Early Modern France: the Case of Charles Perrault.
> Nandini Das ( University of Liverpool) – A ‘Civil Conversation’ of the Planets: Conflating Humanist Astrology and the Italianate Tale in Robert Greene’s Planetomachia.
> Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, University of London) – Popular and Elite? Renaissance Texts of Transformation.

Session 5(b) – Astrology

Chair: tbc
> Stefania Crowther (Birkbeck, University of London) – ‘By Strange Language in the Skies’: Negotiating the Meaning of the Stars in Popular Literature of the English Civil War.
> Abigail Shinn ( University of Sussex) – ‘Extraordinary Discourses of Vnnecessarie Matter’: Spenser’s Shepaerdes Calender and the Almanac Tradition.

15.45-16.15 Tea and Coffee – Lounge

 16.15-17.30 Plenary 2: Mary Ellen Lamb – ‘Gendering Peter Burke’s Amphibious Subject’.
Gallery Room 2

19.30 - Conference Dinner (location tbc)

Thursday 13 September

9.30-10.45 Plenary 3: Ian Moulton – ‘Popu-love’: Sex, Love, and Sixteenth Century Popular Culture. Gallery Room 2

10.45-11.15 Tea and Coffee - Lounge

11.15-12.45 Session 6(a) – Urban Popular Culture

Chair: tbc
> Majella Devlin (Queen’s University Belfast) – Staging Women in the Early Modern Metropolis
> Alison V. Scott ( Macquarie University, Sydney) – ‘[P]ublish Your Temperance’: the Virtue of Urbanity and the Problem of the Popular in Jacobean Entertainment.
> Mira Assaf Veiga ( American University, Beirut) – Stealing the Show: Representations of Vagrancy in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl .

Session 6(b) – Miltarism and the Monarch in Popular Culture

Chair: tbc
> Katharine Craik ( Oxford Brookes University) – Shakespeare’s Soldiers
> Tom Healy (Birkbeck, University of London) – The Monarch’s Crowns: Patriotism and Popular Literature in Elizabethan England.
> Linda Hutjens ( University of Toronto) – The Disguised King in English Renaissance Ballads

12.45-14.15 Lunch – Lounge.

Disperse

Costs: £120 waged; £60 postgraduates unwaged (exclusive of accommodation).

Postgraduate bursaries available.

For Further Details, contact
Dr. Matthew Dimmock
Dept. of English
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton
Sussex, BN1 9QN
E-mail: M.Dimmock@Sussex.ac.uk
Tel.: 01273 877663

> Partners both in Throne and Grave: Mary and Elizabeth - Lessons in Tudor Monarchy
10-12 September 2007
University of Southampton

Recent research in a range of disciplines has begun to re-examine the reign of Mary, England's first Queen regnant. However, this scholarship has yet to be shared across disciplines and its implications for understanding Elizabeth's reign, and Tudor monarchy in general, to be explored further. By bringing together disciplines as seemingly diverse as history, architecture, law, literature, costume and music, this colloquium seeks to incorporate and move beyond the focus on gender and religion in order to explore the continuities between all the Tudor monarchs, both male and female, Catholic and Protestant. To what extent is it possible to construct a trajectory of Tudor monarchy that focuses on continuities as well as change? And what might we learn from placing the Tudor monarchs in the broader context of European Renaissance monarchy, particularly England's relationship with Spain?

Through a combination of papers, directed roundtable discussions and 'masterclasses' from selected disciplines, this conference will engage in a genuine interdisciplinary conversation that rethinks Tudor monarchy.

Topics addressed might include:
> Historiography
> Representations in art and literature
> Court-life, culture, music and entertainment
> Royal favourites and court intimates
> Princely education
> Royal supremacy and religious reformation
> Religious persecution
> Law, government and policy-making
> War and diplomacy
> Political thought and the role of counsel
> European monarchies
> Anglo-Spanish relations

Confirmed participants include:

Karen Hearn (Tate Britain); Paulina Kewes (Jesus College, Oxford); Maria Hayward (Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton); Ralph Houlbrooke (University of Reading); Ros King (University of Southampton); Jeri Mcintosh (University of Tennessee); Natalie Mears (University of Durham); Charlotte Merton (Lund University); Anne McLaren (University of Liverpool); Janel Mueller (University of Chicago); Stephen Rice (University of Southampton and University of Oxford); Alexander Samson (UCL); Christopher Skidmore (University of Oxford); Greg Walker (University of Leicester)

Dr Alice Hunt  
Lecturer in English
School of Humanities  
University of Southampton 
SO17 1BJ
Tel: 023 8059 3210
Email: a.hunt@soton.ac.uk

Dr Anna Whitelock
Research Associate
Corpus Christi College
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1RH
Email: amw52@cam.ac.uk

Sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies

> Communes and Despots in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy - A conference in Memory of Philip Jones
6-7 September 2007
Brasenose College, Oxford

Organised by John E. Law (Swansea) and Bernadette Paton (OUP)

George Holmes (Oxford, Emeritus) will introduce the conference, which will include the following speakers and titles:

> David Abulafia (Cambridge): ‘The mouse and the elephant: the kings of Naples and the Lordship of Piombino’
> Jane Black (Leeds): ‘The legality of the Visconti state’
> Robert Black (Leeds): ‘Despotism in Florentine political thought from Coluccio Salutati to Francesco Guicciardini’
> Trevor Dean (Roehampton): ‘Communes and despots: the historiography’
> Peter Denley (London): ‘The Italian communes and the universities’
> Marco Gentile (Milan): ‘Sperimentazioni politico-istituzionale a Cremona nella prima meta del Trecento’
> F. W. Kent (Monash): ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici and Prato’
> B. G. Kohl (Vassar, Emeritus): ‘The myth of the despot’
> Catherine Kovesi (Melbourne): ‘Muddying the waters: Alfonsina Orsini de’Medici and the lake of Fucecchio’
> Carol Lansing (Santa Barbara): ‘Magnates and communes’
> Christine Meek (Trinity, Dublin): ‘Paolo Guinigi, lord of Lucca’

In due course, the conference papers will form part of a published collection of essays, which will include Philip Jones’s ‘Communes and Despots’ (1965).

For further details, contact Dr Bernadette Paton, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, or by email at bernadettepaton@btinternet.com

There will be a conference registration fee of £20.00 (£10.00 for the unwaged and members of supporting societies). For those requiring College accommodation, details of cost are available on request.

> East meets West at the Crossroads of Early Modern Europe: Artistic Inspirations & Innovations
6-7 September 2007
University of Sussex

In the West, Central/Eastern Europe has tended to be neglected as an area of art historical study, yet it is an area with rich textual and visual sources. This conference brings together eminent researchers in the field and provides a unique opportunity to explore Central/Eastern European art and culture of the early modern period. The aim of the conference is a re-assessment of this artistic heritage, which will allow us to re-integrate the art of Central/Eastern Europe into the pan-European context. The conference will inform a new interpretation, not only of Central/Eastern Europe art, but also of Western art of the period.

For more information, click here to visit the conference website

Alternatively, contact the conference organiser, Dr J. J. Labno: crossroads@sussex.ac.uk

Sponsored by: Society for Renaissance Studies, Embassy of the Republic of Poland, School of Humanities, University of Sussex , MB Grabowski Fund

> Interpreting Shakespeare: The Director, the Actor, the Editor, the Teacher, the Critic - The Third British Shakespeare Association Conference

31 August - 2 September 2007
University of Warwick

The British Shakespeare Association was formed in 2003 and is dedicated to supporting people who teach, research and perform Shakespeare's works.

The BSA’s third biennial conference will be hosted by The CAPITAL Centre at the University of Warwick, a collaboration between the University and the Royal Shakespeare Company.  The Centre was established to use theatre performance skills and experience to enhance teaching and learning.

The conference will bring  together teachers, academics, students, theatre practitioners and enthusiasts for Shakespeare to consider the choices made in speaking Shakespeare, editing and teaching his work, directing his plays both on the stage and on film, and providing the music and stage design against which they are performed.

The first day of the conference will have a special focus on teaching  from KS2 to University level with a range of practical workshops from the Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and other experts culminating in a debate asking What is Creative Teaching? Discuss with Reference to Shakespeare. 

On 1 September the conference will move to Stratford-upon-Avon for the day where the Shakespeare Institute will host a plenary session addressing the cultural value of Shakespeare in the 21st century and posing the question Is Shakespeare Good for You? and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust will showcase its educational work and collections.

The programme will emphasise discussions and workshops to encourage active participation by delegates as well as the speakers. Panels will address Blogging the Bard, Editing Shakespeare, Speaking Shakespeare, Designing Shakespeare, Dressing Shakespeare, among other topics.

The seminar programme covers practical approaches to teaching Shakespeare;   Shakespeare’s plays on film; Shakespeare in performance, European Shakespeare; Shakespeare celebration as interpretation; and other topics.  

Speakers will include Jonathan Bate, Cicely Berry, Ewan Fernie, Philip Davis, Kate McLuskie, Simon Palfrey, Robert Weimann, Stanley Wells and Paul Yachnin and actors, directors, designers subject to availability.

The deadline for registrations is 13 August 2007.

For more information contact:

Susan Brock  

Tel  02476 150067

E-mail: s.l.brock@warwick.ac.uk

The CAPITAL Centre                                         

University of Warwick

Coventry

CV4 7AL

Click here for registration forms, a full list of seminars and a provisional programme.

This conference will attempt to re-examine the essence of Panofsky's influential 1944 article, where he stated the Renaissance:

"looked upon classical Antiquity from a historical distance; therefore, for the first time, as upon a totality removed from the present; and therefore, for the first time, as upon an ideal to be longed instead of a reality to be both utilized and feared."

Panofsky's proposition was not entirely new, but it remains the single most influential statement of the historical character of the Renaissance. It helped to create the idea of the Renaissance as a southern European phenomenon and gave credence to Huizinga's contention that, despite the spread of Italian cultural modes, the Middle Ages continued to cast their shadow on the north.

Despite its profound influence, however, Panofsky's definition of 'Renaissance' has recently come under question. Was it really the case that classical Antiquity was viewed as having been forgotten in the Middle Ages? Was the medieval period actually viewed as a distinct period of remove, separating individuals from the pure culture of the classical past? How strong was the notion of a 'Dark Age'? Was there ever a sense of conceptual continuity stretching from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to the 'Renaissance'? Was there really a Renaissance in the south whilst the rest of the continent continued to exist in a medieval cultural mindset?

These are vitally important questions for our perception of Europe during these centuries. They also affect every aspect of the past. Questions about perceived continuity and change are as relevant to Art History as to the history of Christianity. A more refined understanding of the influence of Classical Antiquity on the politics, economics, and culture of Europe in the period between 1300 and 1550 should challenge many of the preconceptions which dominate
our view of the Renaissance.

Programme:

Friday 31st August
The Classical Tradition

> Dr. Catherine Keen (University College London): Ovid’s Tristia and Italian lyrics of exile from c.1300
> Dr. Robin Sowerby (University of Stirling): Humanitas renata
> Prof. Robin Kirkpatrick (University of Cambridge): Shakespeare and the ‘Tragedy’ of the Renaissance

Plenary Lecture
> Prof. Robert Black (University of Leeds): The Renaissance and the Middle Ages: chronologies, ideologies and geographies

Art History

> Dr. Rhys W. Roark (Humboldt State University): Panofsky: Linear Perspective and Perspectives of Modernity
> Prof. Jeffrey Chipps Smith (University of Texas at Austin): The ‘invention’ of Dürer as a Renaissance artist
> Miss Erika de Young (Texas State University): A clash of cultures? Images of Hercules and David in Florentine statuary
> Dr. Maria Ruvoldt (Fordham University): Michelangelo’s Mythologies

Plenary Lecture
> Mr. Michael Bury (University of Edinburgh): History in Italian Renaissance art

Saturday 1st September 2007
The Northern Renaissance

> Prof. Michael Lynch (University of Edinburgh): Visual displays of classical rhetoric in Scotland, c.1500-c.1625
> Dr. Hanno Wijsman (University of Leiden): Aristocratic manuscript collections in England, France and Burgundy
> Dr. Malcolm Vale (University of Oxford): A Northern Renaissance? Panofsky and Huizinga reconsidered.

The Wider Renaissance

> Dr. Klara Benesovska (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences): Forgotten approaches to a different kind of Renaissance: Prague and Bohemia,c.1400
> Dr. Ingrid Ciulisova (Slovak Academy of Sciences): Jacob Burckhardt and Jan Bialoscocki’s The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe.
> Prof. Ian Blanchard (University of Edinburgh): Out of the Postan neo-classical strait jacket: a new look at the concept of the Middle Ages.

Plenary Lecture
> Prof. Andrew Pettegree (University of St. Andrews): A new world of the mind? Renaissance self-perception and the invention of printing.

Italy

> Dr. George Steiris (University of Athens): Machiavelli’s appreciation of Greek antiquity and the ideal of the ‘Renaissance’
> Dr. Matteo Burioni (University of Basle): Vasari’s ‘rinascite’
> Dr. Monica Azzolini (University of Edinburgh): The transmission of the astrological tradition in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Plenary Lecture
> Prof. Rob C. Wegman (Princeton University): The State of the Art

Click here to visit the conference website

Registration:

* Full - £40
* Concessions (students and SRS members) - £20
* Conference dinner - £35

Click here to download the conference leaflet

Click here to use the online registration facility

For further details, contact Alex Lee at renaissance@ed.ac.uk

Supported by: The Society for Renaissance Studies, the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies Programme in the University of Edinburgh, Brill and Blackwell.

Papers might address, but are not limited to, the following:

• Definitions of Crime
• Patterns of Crime
• Urban and / or Rural Crime
• Crime and Punishment
• Political Crimes
• Crime and Religion
• Crime and Philosophy
• Crime and the Early Modern Stage
• Crime and Printing
• The Early Modern Criminal Underworld: Fact or Fiction?
• Criminals and Social Class
• Criminals and Gender
• The Psychology of the Criminal
• The Body of the Criminal
• Visual Representations of Criminals
• Criminal Auto/Biography
• Uses of Archetypal Criminals (Biblical and/or Classical)
• Writing Criminals: Representations of Criminals in Plays, Poems, Prose Fictions, Diaries, Letters, and Ephemera
• Criminals Writing: Writings by Criminals
• Rhetoric of Criminality
• Imagining Criminals
• The After-Lives of Early Modern Criminals
• Methodological and/or Theoretical Problems raised by the Multi-Disciplinary nature of Source Materials

The keynote speakers are:

> Sandra Clark (Institute of English Studies, London)
> Martin Ingram (Brasenose College, Oxford)
> Claire Jowitt (University of Nottingham Trent)
> Mary Polito (University of Calgary, Canada)
> Nina Taunton (Brunel University)
> Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, University of London)

Please send abstracts of approximately 500 words by 15 May 2007 to:

Dr Nadia Bishai: nadia.bishai@canterbury.ac.uk and
Dr Astrid Stilma: astrid.stilma@canterbury.ac.uk

Department of English
Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent

Click here to download the Call for Papers

Sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies

> CFP Pathologies: Questions of embodiment in literature, arts and sciences
20-21 August 2007
Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science (RCLAS)

The Inaugural International Conference of the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science

Plenary Speakers:
> Tim Armstrong
> Kelly Hurley
> Jonathan Sawday

The newly formed Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, based at the University of Glamorgan, would welcome papers on topics falling under the title of ‘Pathologies’. Abstracts of no more than one page of A4 (approx 400-500 words) should be sent to all of the Conference organisers, and Co-Directors of the Centre, Professor Andrew Smith, Professor Jeff Wallace and Dr Martin Willis by February 28, 2007. Decisions will be made in March 2007.

To consider how the body has been pathologized is to ask questions of what it means to be human. As the originating site of humanity the body (extending from the individual to society and nation) is the physical, metaphorical and philosophical place for the inscription of selfhood, identity, normality and change. The multiple pathologies of the body invite us to reflect upon bodily conditions and behaviours that mark out the boundaries of the individual, the social and the national as well as their transgressions. Where does the self begin and end? How do we construct normality, deformity, and monstrosity? How do culture, society and the individual relate and connect across the many pathologies that invade, infect, distress and reconstruct the human?

This conference invites the submission of abstracts for 20 minute papers dealing with pathologies (broadly defined) across the intersections of literature and science or the arts and science. Papers may deal with any historical, artistic or literary period. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

●          Representations of disease
●          The Socio-politics of medical research
●          The art and science of early modern medicine/pathology
●          Dissection
●          The body and the machine
●          Gothic bodies
●          Cultural pathologies of identity
●          Pathologizing gender through science
●          Neurasthenia and modernism
●          The degenerate body

Please send your abstract, together with your name, university affiliation and position to all of asmith5@glam.ac.uk, jwallace@glam.ac.uk, mwillis@glam.ac.uk or alternatively to one of the organisers at:
Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science (RCLAS),
Science Imagined Conference,
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Glamorgan,
Pontypridd, CF37 1DL,
Wales, UK.

> International Summer School 2007
4-9 August 2007
Philipps-University Marburg

Open endings - closure, limit, transition:
Normative power and imagination of liminal event areas in early modern age Europe

The Graduate Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Philipps-University Marburg invites Ph.D. students of Humanities and Social Sciences to discuss new theories and current research projects with well-known academic experts and young researchers of the scientific community. In three parallel seminars we will be working on three specific subject areas:

1. Rule and limit

2. The death of the ruler

3. Contact or clash of cultures between the Old and New World

The intensive one-week workshops will be supplemented by a cultural program in the famous and scenic university town of Marburg. In addition to the seminars, two tutorials will be offered on the last day. These will provide an in-depth introduction to tools for graduate students, as well as offer participants the opportunity to establish further non-university contacts.

For further information, contact:

Dennis Conrad, M.A.
- Summer School -
Promotionskolleg für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6 D
35032 Marburg
Tel.: +49 (0) 6421/28-26141
Fax:  +49 (0) 6421/28-26099
Email: info@summerschool-marburg.de
Click here to visit the Summer School website
Click here to visit the University of Marburg website

> CFP Courtly Mythologies, XIIth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS)
29 July- 4 August 2007
University of Lausanne

The Faculties of Letters of the University of Geneva and the University of Lausanne have the pleasure to invite you to the XIIth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS), which will take place from 29 July to 4 August 2007 in Lausanne and Geneva.

We invite you to send us paper proposals on the theme: "Courtly Mythologies".
This theme will be developed through 4 different lines of thought:
a) Exemplary figures
b) Gender definitions and courtly mythologies
c) Rites and performances of power
d) Questions of style and rewriting

The official languages of ICLS are French, English and German.

We encourage you to register on line, if possible. Please submit a title and an 250-word abstract. The deadline for submissions is 12 December 2006.

For further information, you may contact the following address: icls2007@unil.ch

Click here to visit the conference website

> Summer School in Manuscript Studies
Friday 20th and Friday 27th July 2007
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, Institute of English Studies, London

Booking is now open for the Institute of English Studies Summer School in Manuscript Studies. In 2007, the Summer School will run in conjunction with the London Rare Books School and will be running half and day courses on Friday 20th and Friday 27 July.

• Professor Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute): Medieval Scientific Manuscripts
  Half Day - am
• Ms Patricia Lovett (CLAS): One thousand years of writing manuscripts
  Half day - pm
• Dr Marigold Norbye (UCL): An Introduction to Latin Palaeography
  Full Day
• Ms Mura Ghosh (ULRLS) and Ms Eva Oledzka (ULRLS): Electronic Resources for Manuscript Studies
  Half Day - pm

• Professor Michelle Brown (IES) and Professor Jane Roberts (KCL): An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
  Full day
• Ms Patricia Lovett (CLAS): Writing Gothic Book Script
• Dr Mara Hofmann (IES): Late Gothic and Renaissance Mss in France
  Full Day

> CFP Power
13-16 July 2007
Durham Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

How was power exercised, implicitly and explicitly, in the centuries of the medieval and Renaissance eras? How was it displayed and performed, theorised, ritualised, romanticised, codified, sanctified or opposed?

The conference will consider questions such as these in a sequence of interdisciplinary sessions covering the full span of the periods and looking at social contexts ranging from the medieval republic of Iceland to the imperial courts of Renaissance Europe.  It will discuss both the typical and the atypical structures of power and ways in which power was embodied in persons and institutions. It will investigate the roles of wealth in the acquisition of power and the maintenance of it. The conference will ask how power was related to knowledge: how it was determined by access to knowledge, how it regulated such access, and how it was challenged by knowledge in its various forms. It will seek to understand the ways in which power was gendered. And it will ask to what extent the realities of power were revealed in literature, historical writing and other cultural products.

Sequential sessions will be organised around five main themes:
1) Representation of Power
2) Gender and Power
3) Wealth and Power
4) Knowledge and Power
5) Narratives and Power

If you are interested in contributing to the conference, please send your title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, preferably by attached file, to:
Dr Cathy McClive
CMRS Power Conference 2007
Department of History
University of Durham
43 North Bailey
Durham, DH1 3EX
United Kingdom
cathy.mcclive@durham.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions is 15th September 2006

Political institutions, concepts and discourses do not exist in a timeless sphere. They have to be constantly negotiated, communicated and defended. Throughout history, this has been the prime responsibility of counsellors in the service of secular and ecclesiastical governments.

This workshop offers scholars the opportunity to compare and contrast European cultures of political counsel. We will investigate the ways in which political advice was rendered, received and applied in the courts and councils of Europe from c. 800 to c. 1800. Who are the people acting as counsellors? What training, experience and standards of professionalism do they bring to the task? In how far does their background determine the ways in which they perceive political reality, devise objectives and advise on decisions? Within which contexts - political, intellectual, institutional and cultural - do they operate? What terminologies and concepts, strategies and procedures do counsellors and their clients employ when conceiving and communicating their agendas and objectives?

Exploring the interface between theory and practice in political decision-making in medieval and early modern Europe, speakers will shed much needed light on what has become the overarching issue for historians of political thinking: in how far does political advice shape decisions and determine outcomes?

This is the first in a series of workshops working towards a cultural history of political advice and politics from the Middle Ages to the present. Subsequent workshops within the Cultures of Political Counsel Project will examine 19C and 20C cultures of political counsel as well as compare European cultures of political counsel with their counterparts in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Themes:

• Powerbrokers: Access & Lobbying
• Procedures, Spaces & Rituals
• Expertise
• Making & Communicating Decisions
• Implementation
• Gender
• Languages, Rhetoric, and Strategies of Counsel

Confirmed Speakers Include:

> Janet Nelson (King’s College, London) - Patron
> Courtney Booker (British Columbia)
> Eva Botella (Harvard)
> J.H. Burns (UCL)
> Jodi Campbell (Texas Christian University)
> Janet Coleman (LSE)
> Caroline Dodds (Cambridge)
> Serena Ferente (King's College, London)
> Tim Hochstrasser (LSE)
> Alistair Malcolm (Limerick)
> Anne McLaren (Liverpool)
> James Palmer (Nottingham)
> Aysha Pollnitz (Cambridge)
> Diogo Ramada-Curto (EUI)
> Nicole Reinhardt (Lyon)
> Brigitte Resl (Liverpool)
> Magnus Ryan (Cambridge)
> Rudolf Schuessler (Bayreuth)
> Jacob Soll (Rutgers)
> Pauline Stafford (Liverpool)
> M.W.F. Stone (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
> Simon Teuscher (Basel)
> Filippo Vivo (Birkbeck College, London)

This is the first in a series of workshops working towards a cultural history of political counsel and counsellors in Europe from the middle ages to the present. Themes for future workshops include 'Cultures of Political Counsel, c.1800 to the present', 'Cultures of Political Counsel in Global Comparison', 'The Political and the Sacred': Counsel, Conscience and Controversy' and 'Spinning the Wheels of Time: The Uses of the Past in Political Counsel and Communication

For further information or registration, please contact:
Dr. Harald E Braun
School of History
University of Liverpool
Tel. +44-(0)151-7942381
E-mail: h.e.braun@liv.ac.uk

Click here to visit the University of Liverpool webpage

The conference will explore ideas about the mind’s influence on the body.  We are hoping for papers in a wide range of disciplines, reflecting the interests of the MA courses based in the School: Children’s Literature, Texts in History 1500-1700, The Body & Representation, Victorian Literature and Culture, and our proposed MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature.  Possible topics include:

Reproduction:  genetics; pre-natal diagnosis and intervention; marked foetuses and the parental imagination; birthing rituals and strange births. 
The Child’s Body:  diet;  obesity;  gender development;  clothing. 
Sexuality and Gender:  hermaphroditic and other versatile bodies;  the gendered consequences of mind/body interaction.
 Modern and Contemporary Bodies: the diasporic body, the racialised body, the modified body.  History of Science: Mesmerism, phrenology, the mystery of Mind/Body interactions in the animal spirits. 
The Disordered Body:  psychosomatic illness, eating disorders, hysteria. 
Resisting Bodies:  martyred bodies, tortured bodies.
Creative Bodies:  performance and other aesthetic experiences.

Papers are to be 20 minutes long and read in English.  Please send proposals of no more than 200 words, with affiliation and contact details, via email (as Word attachment) to Carolyn Williams (c.d.lyle@reading.ac.uk) by August 1, 2006, or by post to:

Carolyn Williams, School of English and American Literature,
University of Reading, Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
Whiteknights, Reading,
PO Box 218, RG6 6AA, UK

> Shakespeare and the Law: A Conference - A Celebration
9-11 July 2007
University of Warwick

“I am a subject, and challenge law”  Richard II, Act II, scene III

The University of Warwick will host an international conference on Shakespeare and the Law from 9-11 July 2007 in association with Warwick Law School and The Capital Centre partnership between The University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The conference will provide a unique forum for scholarly discourse between the major humanities disciplines of law, literature and the performing arts. Confirmed speakers include several leading figures in Shakespearean Scholarship, theatre and the field of law and humanities.

The study of law as a humanities' discipline is concerned with the capacity of human beings to engage with their environment and reform it by the power of imagination expressed through arts which are not scientifically predictable in their operation or susceptible to empirical assessment. In this sense the study of law as a humanities' discipline is distinct from, albeit compatible with, the study of law as a social science. Law and humanities explores the relationship between subjects and the law; “subjects” indicating on the one hand the very human beings subject to the law, and, on the other hand, the humanities disciplines (including literature and drama) through which the human subject has traditionally created and challenged the law. There is no better starting place, or central case, for such a study than the works of William Shakespeare.

Speakers include:

> Prof. Jonathan Bate (Warwick)
> Gregory Doran (RSC)
> Prof. Germaine Greer
> Michael Pennington
> Prof. Peter Goodrich (Yeshiva University, NYC)
> Prof. B. J. Sokol
> Dr Mary Sokol

Click here for the conference progamme

We look forward to welcoming you to the University of Warwick for a full programme of scholarly and social events in the summer of 2007.

For further information, click here to visit the website, or email the programme organisers:

Paul Raffield: p.raffield@warwick.ac.uk
Gary Watt: gary.watt@warwick.ac.uk

> Milton and the Law
29 June 2007
Queen Mary, University of London

A one-day symposium on John Milton and the Law will take place at Queen Mary University of London on Friday 29 June 2007.

The symposium will bring together new work and approaches exploring Milton's complex and detailed engagements with legal subjects, debates and vocabularies.

Speakers include:
> Rosanna Cox
> Martin Dzelzainis
> Lynne Greenberg
> Peter Herman
> Graham Parry
> Joad Raymond

For further information or to register for the symposium, please contact:
Dr Rosanna Cox (r.cox@qmul.ac.uk, 020 7882 2855) or
Dr Chloe Houston (c.r.m.houston@qmul.ac.uk, 020 7882 2856)
in the School of English and Drama at QMUL

> International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference
28 June - 1 July 2008
University of Sheffield

The 2007 meeting of the International Margaret Cavendish Society will be hosted by the University of Sheffield in the UK. The conference will begin on Thursday evening, June 28, with a reception. Papers will be presented on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. We hope to offer an optional excursion to Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle on Sunday afternoon. Those who would like to stay on will find that Chatsworth House is nearby in North Derbyshire: Pride and Prejudice Territory. Sheffield itself, is much refurbished and by no means the depressed area made famous in The Full Monty. The Crucible offers theater and there are a number of galleries, in particular one that details John Ruskin's connection to the world of art.

There is no theme that abstracts must follow, but this year we intend to loosely focus around the Cavendish family generally, Jane, Elizabeth, and William. We will also focus on Cavendish and European Thought. Margaret's life of her husband and her own autobiography were published in a thoroughly annotated scholarly edition by CH Firth at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Firth was, for at time, professor of history at the University of Sheffield. His edition gave impetus to a TLS article on Cavendish by Virginia Woolf, an article collected in The Common Reader. Firth seems to have helped to establish the legitimacy of Margaret as a biographer and autobiographer, and we hope to have papers on her place in historiography as well as on Firth's interest in her.

Because many of you need to apply for travel funding, the Program Committee has decided to make decisions on abstracts this fall starting as of the posting of this notice. We would like to have abstracts in hand by March 1, 2007, and we would prefer that abstracts be sent electronically. Shortly after Christmas, it will be possible to register for the conference and pay fees. Unfortunately, those who have abstracts accepted must be removed from the program if they do not register and pay fees by May 28, one month before the beginning of the conference.

Please send abstracts to The Program Committee at the following three addresses.

• mendelso@univmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
• brandie_siegfried@msn.com
• j.fitzmaurice@sheffield.ac.uk

Questions about the conference to Jim Fitzmaurice: j.fitzmaurice@sheffield.ac.uk

Click here to visit the Margaret Cavendish Society website

> Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings
27-30 June 2007
University of Birmingham, Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies and Hilton Shepherd Centre for Medieval Studies

Confirmed speakers include: Julian Bowsher (Museum of London); Tarnya Cooper (National Portrait Gallery); Flora Dennis (V&A); Chris Dyer (University of Leicester); Geoff Egan (Museum of London); David Gaimster (Society of Antiquaries); Maria Hayward (AHRC Textile Conservation Centre); Stephen Kelly (Queen’s Belfast); Natasha Korda (Wesleyan); David Mitchell (Centre for Metropolitan History); Lena Orlin (UMBC); Sara Pennell (Roehampton); Roger Pringle (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust); Giorgio Riello (LSE); Barbara Rosenwein (Loyola); John Styles (University of Hertfordshire); John Thompson (Queen’s Belfast); Jennifer Tiramani (Globe Theatre); Bob Tittler (Concordia); Evelyn Welch (Queen Mary UL).

Panels include: reconstructing spaces through objects; books; music; shoes; pottery; land and property; London’s Southbank culture; feasting objects; domestic linen; paintings; the application of modern methods to the study of pre-modern objects.

This conference aims to encourage heritage practitioners and academics from different disciplines to debate the key terms of its title. It encourages them to discuss the methods by which they analyse material culture, but also the way they present their findings: how the analytical languages and methods of presentation used within their disciplines reconstruct material culture for a wider audience. Those working on such issues both within and outside the periods under consideration are invited to come and talk about the transferability of methodologies - to debate the existence of a specifically pre-modern material culture.

Material culture has become an increasingly important aspect of the study of medieval and early modern societies. Always the foundation of museum practice and the subject of enquiry for archaeologists and social anthropologists, ways of presenting the objects themselves and the findings of research into them have been the focus of increasing critical attention and hence new methodologies. Material culture has more recently become a key feature of scholarly negotiation with a variety of social behaviours across a much wider range of Humanities disciplines. Within literature departments it has provided an invaluable way of negotiating the relationship between literary productions, their original forms and meanings, and the way they were consumed by their various audiences. Within history departments it has, although initially driven by late modern consumption work, begun to offer a focus for the study of production and consumption in earlier periods, a focus which takes account of the motivations of consumers, and therefore offers the possibility of bridging the historiographical gap between economic and social change. As a particular kind of discourse of contact with past societies, it has found its way into departments such as art history, where art objects have been treated both as objects of exchange, use and display and, more equivocally, as forms of historical evidence about the world of material things. More or less central to all these developments has been an interest in the access material culture study gives to lived experience at the level of the individual.

This conference will address the difficulties inherent in a dialogue between diverse disciplinary research agendas, and it is therefore structured in a way which foregrounds such debates. It aims to marry two different approaches: one exploring the meaning of key terms and investigating ways of writing about material culture within and across disciplines; the other grouping papers around specific objects and categories of object to which curators and scholars from different disciplines are invited to speak.

Participants will be encouraged to address the relationship between objects and, for example, gender, power, taste, ideology, space, morality, identity, skill, value, culture, ritual, use, narrative, process, choice, individual response, continental and colonial influence, materiality, emotion, technical innovation, regional and national identity, inclusion and exclusion, status, competition and social mobility, location and locality, political climate and legislation.

In the course of these discussions, it is hoped that several significant subsidiary questions arising from the categorisation of medieval and early modern objects will be addressed. The study of material culture offers the possibility of cutting across the binary oppositions of traditional historiographies, and contributors are therefore encouraged to discuss 'everyday objects' as a way of questioning the relationship between public and private life and the changing connections between the sacred and the profane. However, it is also hoped that discussion will involve changes in contemporary categories of object more generally, and the boundaries between the usual and the unusual.

For further information please contact:

Dr Catherine Richardson
Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies
University of Birmingham
Tel: 0121 414 9511
Fax: 01789 414 992
C.T.Richardson@bham.ac.uk

Click here for the Programme
Click here for the Conference Poster
Click here for the Conference Booking Form

For further information, click here to visit the Conference webpage

This conference is generously supported by the Heritage, Cultural Production and Interpretation Collaborate Research Network , University of Birmingham

> CFP The Seventh Triennial Congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa
24-27 June 2007
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Eastern Province, South Africa

The International Spread of Shakespeare

Confirmed plenary speakers to date:
> Thomas Cartelli (Muhlenberg College)
> John Gillies (University of Essex)

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers of 25 minutes duration are invited on the following or related topics:

i) How Shakespeare uses nation, geography and territory
ii) Shakespeare’s impact beyond England in his own time
iii) Connections between Shakespeare and international trade, now and then
iv) The impact of ‘travelling Shakespeare’ (tours, television and film) on local theatre and culture
v) Indigenous Shakespeare outside Britain: fact or fiction?
vi) Is electronic Shakespeare global Shakespeare?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the conference convenor, Ms Hildé Slinger (h.slinger@ru.ac.za), to reach her by no later than 31 January 2007.

Those who wish to coordinate special interest sessions should notify the convenor of the proposed topic and participants. For further information, and to answer any queries, please contact the convenor at the email address: h.slinger@ru.ac.za

PRELIMINARY CONFERENCE FORMAT

Sunday 24 June

Flights met (bus times for transfer from Port Elizabeth Airport to Grahamstown to be announced)

Monday 25 June

Tuesday 26 June

Wednesday 27 June

Thursday 28

Delegates not staying for the Arts Festival depart after Breakfast (Airport bus departure times to be announced)

NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL (28 June – 8 July 2007)

Delegates are reminded that the conference is arranged to back onto the National Arts Festival, South Africa’s premier arts events which takes place annually in Grahamstown. Please take the opportunity to enjoy this amazing event while you are in South Africa.

Conference and Festival Accommodation

Because of the National Arts Festival, delegates are advised to secure their accommodation promptly so as to ensure proximity to the conference venue.

B&B INFORMATION AND ADVICE is available from the conference organisers.

Budget accommodation in RHODES UNIVERSITY RESIDENCES is available from 25 June.

Click here to visit the congress website

> Manchester Early Modern Texts Workshop: Conversion Narratives
23 June 2007
John Rylands Library, Manchester

> Naomi Baker (The University of Manchester)
> Jeremy Gregory (The University of Manchester)
> Crawford Gribben (The University of Manchester)
> Jerome de Groot (The University of Manchester)
> Phyllis Mack (Rutgers University)
> Jackie Pearson (The University of Manchester)
> Roger Pooley ( Keele University)

For further details, please contact
Dr Crawford Gribben
Email: crawford.gribben@manchester.ac.uk
Tel: 0161 275 3166

> Patriarchalism
16 June 2007
University of Reading

An informal conference at Reading, to be held between 11 and 6 on Saturday June 16

Patriarchalism is the strange belief that the character of authority in households is (other things being equal) the same as that of authority in states.  For much of the seventeenth century, this belief was widely accepted among the Anglican clergy, in spite of the fact that it that ignored a structuring principle of virtually all Western social thought - the distinction between the 'public' political and the 'private' household spheres - and that its implications were wildly at variance with English social and political practice (the English did enjoy property rights against their monarch, even if those rights could in some circumstance be over-ridden; English fathers did not execute their children).  Questions that may arise include

> The relationship between its acceptance and Jacobean political debates
> The distinctiveness (or otherwise) of Filmer's formulation, especially when contrasted with French thinking
> The degree of its popularisation in what was probably its heyday: the reign of Charles II
> Its relationship with the great anti-patriarchalist works of the early 1680s
> Its challenge to Lockean liberalism
> The scale of its subsequent persistence (including its influence on American loyalism)
> The degree to which it shaped perceptions of actual household relations, including relations between

    Husbands and wives
    Parents and children
    Employers and servants
    Masters and slaves

There will be two main sessions and a concluding general discussion. 

Session One ('Polities') will be introduced by Glenn Burgess, Rachel Foxley, and Johann Sommerville

Session Two ('Households') will be introduced by Ralph Houlbrooke, Margaret Sommerville, and Naomi Tadmor

I anticipate a memorable event that will result in intellectual progress.  To reserve a place, please simply reply to this email; to recruit a friend or student who might benefit, please forward it to the person or people concerned and ask them to contact me at this address (a.d.t.cromartie@rdg.ac.uk). 

A charge of £10 to non-speakers will subsidise lunch; there will also be the customary cheap and cheerful dinner for anyone not in a hurry to get home.

For further information, please contact:

Dr Alan Cromartie
Reader in Politics and Director of Research
School of Sociology, Politics, and International Relations
University of Reading
Whiteknights
Reading RG6 6AA
a.d.t.cromartie@rdg.ac.uk

Organised jointly by the Warburg Institute, London and the Gabinete de Filosofia Medieval, Porto.
With the support of the Department of Philosophy, University of Porto and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

It has long been customary to say that there was a rupture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Recent scholarship, however, has tended to question whether the break was so drastic and different scholars have placed the break at different points of time, often depending on the country concerned.  This conference will bring together a select group of scholars, both those of confirmed reputations and younger scholars who have shown great potential, to explore what continuities or ruptures there were.  It will consist of a number of case studies, rather than address the question in a general way. An important element of the conference will be discussion, for which the group of scholars who are coming together for the meeting of the committee of the Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales (FIDEM), to be held just after the conference, will provide a forum.

Friday 15 June

10.00  Doors open; registration
10.15  Welcome by Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Jacqueline Hamesse (President of FIDEM)and José Meirinhos (Secretary of FIDEM)

10.30  Olga Weijers, Researcher, Huygens Instituut, The Hague:
           The development of the disputation between the Middle Ages and Renaissance

11.15  Coffee

11.45  John Marenbon, Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge:
           Changes in attitudes towards pagans
12.30  David d’Avray, Professor of Medieval History, UCL:    
           Continuity in papal law

1.15    Lunch (for invited guests)

2.30    Magnus Ryan, Lecturer in Medieval Political Thought, Cambridge: (title to be confirmed)
3.15    Jill Kraye, Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy, Warburg Institute:
           From medieval to early modern Stoicism

4.00    Tea

4.30    Santiago Orrego Sánchez, Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de
           Chile, Santiago:
           The XVIth century Salamanca School as a context of synthesis between the Middle     
           Ages and Renaissance in theological and philosophical matters
5.15    Agnès Passot-Mannooretonil, Lille:
           La spiritualité catholique à destination des mondains: mobilité des choix entre      
           édification morale et dévotion dans le genre des miroirs

6.00    Wine reception

7.00     Buffet Supper (for invited guests)

Saturday 16 June

 9.45    Doors open.

10.00   Outi Merisalo, Professor of Romance Philology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland:
            Transition and continuity in medical manuscripts (XIIIth-XVth centuries)
10.45   Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Professor of Medieval Philosophy, University of Würzburg:
            Greek versus Arabic astrology in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

11.30   Coffee

12.00   Guido Giglioni, Cassamarca Lecturer in NeoLatin Cultural and Intellectual History, Warburg Institute:
            Girolamo Cardano as interpreter of Pietro d’Abano

12.45   J.J. Vila-Chã, Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Católica, Braga:
           Between Middle Ages and Renaissance: Leone Ebreo and the circularity of love

  1.30    Conclusion

Registration fee: £20.00 (£10.00 for students)

For further information and registration please contact Elizabeth Witchell at the Warburg Institute or by e-mail: elizabeth.witchell@sas.ac.uk

Organizing Committee
José Meirinhos, Jacqueline Hamesse, Charles Burnett

Jointly organised by:

> CFP The Idea of the City: Early modern, Modern, and Post-Modern Locations and Communities
8-9 June 2007
University of Northampton

Salman Rushdie provocatively observes that 'the modern city is the locus classicus of impossible realities'. This conference will explore the nature of the modern city in literature from its origins in the early-modern period to post-modern dislocations. Speakers are encouraged to submit papers which explore the representation of real and imagined, national and international, capital and regional cities, in poetry, prose and drama. Prospective papers might dwell upon the city as a context within which literature is created, structured, or inspired, and as spaces, places, and localities in which distinct voices and genres emerge, for example plague-ridded sixteenth-century London, post-revolutionary Paris, Bradford after the 2001 riot, sectarian Belfast, the interface between the tradition and technology in Tokyo, or globalisation in Mumbai.

While the focus of the conference is literary, papers are welcome by scholars from cognate disciplines, including history, art, and film, especially if their paper considers the interface between their discipline and the literary. Potential areas of interest might include: the impact of regional theatre upon its cities; the role of city authorities in the dissemination of ideas; the city and its aliens; ethnic minority voices in the inner cities; the tension between the country and the city; the interface between global cities; and marginal urban identities and activities (vice, prostitution, and poverty).

Plenary speakers:

Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers by 1 March 2007 to the conference organizers:
Dr Joan Fitzpatrick: mail@JoanFitzpatrick.org
Dr Lawrence Phillips:Lawrence.Phillips@northampton.ac.uk

Click here to visit the conference website

> CFP Sixteenth-Century Commentary
24-25 May 2007
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Pre-Congress Conference, Classical, Medieval & Renaissance Studies

The interdisciplinary Classical, Medieval & Renaissance Studies (CMRS) faculty at the University of Saskatchewan invite proposals for a conference on “Sixteenth-Century Commentary” May 24–25, 2007, in Saskatoon, Canada. Papers may be presented in English or French. Proposals are welcome from scholars within and outside Canada.  Graduate students and independent scholars as well as faculty are encouraged to participate. The deadline for proposals is August 15, 2006. 

The Renaissance recovery of classical texts; the development of printing and the spread of literacy; exploration, trade, colonization, and increasingly conspicuous consumption; the Reformation return to the sources of Christianity; the critique of authority engendered by religious controversy and the beginnings of science--these are among the factors that make commentary on authoritative texts a vital, dynamic genre in the rapidly changing sixteenth century.  Topics for 20-minute papers or 90-minute panels might include (but are not limited to) changing definitions and types of commentary, development and format of the printed commentary, commentary as a vehicle of controversy, issues of attribution and authority, and the sixteenth century in the history of commentary from its ancient beginnings to the present.

The conference precedes the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the largest annual academic gathering in Canada, to be held May 26–June 2, 2007 amid the Collegiate Gothic architecture of the University’s beautiful Saskatoon campus.

CMRS Conference delegates will be welcome to register for the annual meetings held at the Congress by Canadian societies, e.g. in bibliography; history; philosophy; Biblical, Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance studies; English and French languages and literatures; German, Hispanic, Italian, and Slavic studies; religion, theology, and church history; history and philosophy of science and history of medicine; linguistics; political studies; and women’s studies.

Proposals of 200–300 words for papers or of 500–750 words for panels should be submitted through the CMRS website (click here for a form), or by mail to “Sixteenth-Century Commentary” Committee, CMRS/Department of History, 9 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5, Canada.

Click here to visit the Sixteenth-Century Commentary conference website

> Appel à communications « Le commentaire au seizième siècle »
jeudi 24 mai – vendredi 25 mai 2007
Université de la Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Le groupe interdisciplinaire pour l'étude de l'Antiquité, du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance (Classical, Medieval & Renaissance Studies, CMRS) à l'Université de la Saskatchewan sollicite des communications pour un colloque sur le thème «Le commentaire au seizième siècle» qui aura lieu du 24 au 25 mai 2007, à Saskatoon (Canada).  Les communications se feront soit en anglais soit en français.  Les propositions de chercheurs du Canada et d'autres pays sont les bienvenues.  Nous souhaitons accueillir des personnes qui sont en train de faire une maîtrise ou un doctorat, ou qui font des recherches indépendantes, ainsi que des enseignant.e.s d'université.  La date limite de réception des propositions est le 15 août 2006.

Redécouverte des textes antiques à l'époque de la Renaissance ; développement de l'imprimerie et alphabétisation ; exploration, commerce, colonisation, et consommation de plus en plus ostentatoire ; retour aux sources du christianisme au temps de la Réforme ; critique de l'autorité engendrée par la controverse religieuse et les débuts de la science : pour ces raisons et d'autres encore, le commentaire sur les textes qui font autorité est un genre dynamique au seizième siècle.  Les communications de 20 minutes, ou les tables rondes de 90 minutes pourraient traiter, entre autres sujets possibles : l'évolution des définitions et des types de commentaire ; le développement et le format du commentaire imprimé ; le commentaire comme véhicule de controverse ; des questions d'attribution et d'autorité ; et le seizième siècle dans l'histoire du commentaire de ses débuts dans l'Antiquité jusqu'à présent.

Le colloque aura lieu avant le Congrès de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines.  Ce congrès, la plus grande assemblée savante du Canada, se tiendra du 26 mai au 2 juin 2007 à Saskatoon sur le beau campus de style collegiate gothic. 

Les participants au colloque du CMRS pourront s'inscrire aux réunions annuelles des sociétés du Congrès, par exemple : bibliographie ; histoire ;  philosophie ; études bibliques, patristiques, médiévales et de la Renaissance ; langues et littératures anglaises, françaises, allemandes, espagnoles, italiennes et slaves ;  religion, théologie et histoire de l'Église ; histoire et philosophie de la science et histoire de la médecine ; linguistique ; études politiques ; et études sur les femmes.

Les propositions, de 200-300 mots pour les communications ou de 500-750 mots pour les tables rondes, seront soumises par le site CMRS (cliquez ici pour un formulaire), ou envoyées par la poste au Comité «Le commentaire au seizième siècle», CMRS / département d'Histoire, 9 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan, SK S7N 5A5, Canada.

Cliquez ici pour entrer dans le site web

> Art as a Vehicle of Religious Insight
14-16 May 2007
University of Southern Denmark, Odense

This workshop will investigate a recurrent topos in European intellectual and religious history, namely that art, and visual symbols more generally, can convey religious knowledge in ways that ordinary discourse cannot. Examples can be found throughout history, from the early modern period (e.g. in John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica), via the Romantic age, further on to the occult tarot, to the abstract paintings of 19th/20th century theosophy and anthroposophy, and up to our own time.

Confirmed speakers:
> Sven Rune Havsteen (University of Copenhagen)
> Aksel Haaning (University of Roskilde, Denmark)
> Mikael Rothstein (University of Copenhagen)
> Peter Forshaw (University of London)
> György Endre Szonyi (University of Szeged)
> Stephen Clucas (University of London)
> Jennifer Rampling (University of Cambridge)
> Anke Timmerman (University of Cambridge)
> Christine Maillard (Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg)
> Mark Sedgwick (American University, Cairo)
> Gheorghita Geana (University of Bucharest)
> Adrian Hermann (Universität München)
> Kirstine Munk (University of Southern Denmark)
> Annika Hvithamar (University of Southern Denmark)
> Niels Kofoed (EmeritusProfessor, University of Copenhagen)

For further information, please contact:

Olav Hammer
Professor, History of Religions
University of Southern Denmark
Campusvej 55
DK-5230 Odense M
Denmark
Phone +45 65503390
Email: ohammer@ifpr.sdu.dk

> Venetian Seminar
5 May 2007
Edinburgh, Italian Cultural Institute, 82 Nicolson Street

11:00 Coffee

11:30-1:00 Chair: Peter Humfrey (St Andrews)
> Marta Ajmar-Wollheim (Victoria & Albert Museum):
‘At home in Renaissance Italy: Beyond Venice and Florence’
> Patricia Allerston (National Galleries of Scotland):
‘Reflective clothing: Workers’ dress in early modern Venice’

1:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:30 Chair: Samuel Cohn ( Glasgow)
> Michael Bury (Edinburgh):
‘Serlio on the principles that should govern architecture’
> Jane Stevens (Cambridge):
‘Islands and isolation in sixteenth-century Venice’

3:30 Tea

4:00-5:30 Chair: Alex Bamji (Cambridge)
> Alex Cowan (Northumbria):
‘“Looking in and looking out”: gossip and street culture in early modern Venice’
> Rosa Salzberg (Queen Mary):
‘Per le piaze & sopra il ponte: Reconstructing the geography of print in Cinquecento Venice’

Lunch will be provided thanks to the generosity of the Denys Hay Memorial Fund and the Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies Programme (MERSP) of the University of Edinburgh.

Some grants for graduate students are available thanks to the generosity of the Society for Renaissance Studies; for more information, please contact Stephen Bowd: stephen.bowd@ed.ac.uk

There is a small amount of accommodation at the Kenneth Mackenzie Suite, tel. 0131 651 2063,
E-mail: bed.breakfast@ed.ac.uk

Click here for information about cheap accommodation.

For information, please contact
Mary Laven: mrl25@cam.ac.uk
Filippo de Vivo: f.de-vivo@bbk.ac.uk

> 'Melancholy and Ecstasy: Colloquy in honour of Michael Screech for his 81st birthday
4-5 May 2007
Maison Française d’Oxford

Friday 4th May

14.15: Welcome by Laurence Auer, Conseillère Culturelle, Ambassade de France

14.30: Stephen Rawles & Alison Adams (Glasgow University), Emblemata in honorem MAS

15.00: Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), More’s Paradox

15.30: Philip Ford (Clare College, Cambridge), Les Interventions didactiques dans le Quart Livre de Rabelais

16.00: Tea

16.30: Marie-Luce Demonet (Directeur, Centre de la Renaissance, Tours), Rabelais calloier – l’extase en temps de guerre

17.00: Richard Cooper (Brasenose College, Oxford), “Ad formam nasi cognoscitur” – Rabelais à la Foire des Nez

17.30: Mireille Huchon (Paris-IV), “Tous ravys en admiration”

Saturday 5th May

9.00: Welcome by Elizabeth Fallaize, Pro-Vice-chancellor, University of Oxford

9.15: Anna Holland (St John’s College, Oxford), Montaigne, Muret and Catullus

9.45: Agnieszka Steczowicz (Queen Mary University, London), Spiritual Exercises in Montaigne’s Essais and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

10.15: Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, Oxford), “La Langue ne guerit les hommes” – Anatomy, Melancholy, and a Monster

10.45: Coffee

11.15: Stephen Bamforth (University of Nottingham), Monsters, Magic and Melancholy in Montaigne

11.45: Emma Herdman (Worcester College, Oxford), Pierre de La Place - Partial Impartiality

12.15: Alain Besançon (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques), Conclusions

12.45: Michael Screech, Reply

 - All welcome -

Maison Française d’Oxford, 2-10 Norham Road , Oxford, OX2 6SE ; Tel. (01865) 274 220, Fax. (01865) 274 225,

Email: maison@herald.ox.ac.uk
Click here to visit the website
Click here to download the poster

> CFP Authority and Authorities in Thomas Browne and His Contemporaries: A Symposium
21 April 2007
University of Leeds

This day-long symposium will examine how early modern writers - especially but not exclusively those involved in natural philosophy - claim, invoke, construe, query or undermine authority and authorities. This is the second session of the 'Thomas Browne Seminar', but papers are by no means confined to Browne's works. In particular, we hope to encourage papers on the following: the establishment of 'scientific' authority; classical and/or biblical literature as sources of authority - or otherwise; the development of an authoritative, 'scientific', style.

Deadlines: Submission of papers (call for papers): 5 January 2007; registration for a conference place: 21 April 2007

Contact:

Kevin Killeen
School of English
University of Leeds,
LS2 9JT
Tel: (+ 44) (0)20 8671 4603
Email: k.j.killeen@leeds.ac.uk

> CFP Latin and Vernacular in Renaissance Iberia III: Ovid from the Middle Ages to the Baroque
19-20 April 2007
University of Nottingham

Following the success of the previous two Latin and Vernacular in Renaissance Iberia, we propose a third conference to explore one particular aspect of this field, to be held at the University of Nottingham on 19-20 April 2007.

Up to 15 papers of 20 minutes in English or Spanish are invited on the pervasiveness of Ovid in the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Possible topics might include: aemulatio; commentaries and translations; bilingual editions; Neo-Latin reworkings of Ovid; the integration of his poetry into vernacular style; the presence of Ovid within the school and university curricula; Ovidian imagery and themes within the comedia.

Submissions from postgraduate students will be welcomed.

Proposals for papers should be sent to Dr Alejandro Coroleu by 1 December 2006.

Organisers:

Dr Alejandro Coroleu (to whom all correspondence should be addressed)
Department of Hispanic and Latin American Studies
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD (UK)
alejandro.coroleu@nottingham.ac.uk

Dr Barry Taylor
Early Printed Collections
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB (UK)
barry.taylor@bl.uk

> Models of Intellectual History - International Society for Intellectual History Conference
17-20 April, 2007
Birkbeck, University of London

The next meeting of the International Society for Intellectual History will be held at Birkbeck, University of London, Tuesday 17 to Friday 20 April 2007. The topic will be ‘Models of Intellectual History’, and we are keen that this conference engage the broad range of our members' interests.

Click here for Conference details

For further information, please contact the conference organisers:
Stephen Clucas: s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk
Stephen Gaukroger: stephen.gaukroger@arts.usyd.edu.au

Remember that only ISIH members can present papers. If you are not a member already, please join us! From 2007 membership automatically comes with subscription to Intellectual History Review, the successor to Intellectual News. Details of how to subscribe will be announced in the near future. We are planning to launch Intellectual History Review at the April conference.

> CFP In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions - Exiles and Emigrés
13-15 April, 2007
University of Leicester

From 1995 to 2003, under a Bilateral Agreement to encourage collaborative research, the Universities of Leicester and Pisa hosted an Anglo-Italian colloquium on methodological and ideological issues: Studies in European Cultural Transition, funded for its last three years by the British Academy. From 2004 this was replaced by another British Academy project: In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions.

Four interdisciplinary colloquia – Performing National Identities (Berlin, 31 March – 2 April, 2006), Exiles and Emigrés (Leicester, 2007), Translations and Travels (Paris, 2008), and East/West (Pisa, 2008) – will result in a volume of proceedings for each meeting, and, finally, a comprehensive book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural cross-fertilisation between the two nations.

Exiles and Emigrés

 Our subject here will be liminal figures such as John /Giovanni Florio who have mediated between the two cultures. We shall look, for instance, at Italian communities in Britain and British communities in Italy, investigating, for instance, cultural ambassadors and displaced persons, terms that might be interchangeable. We intend to analyse only in this context the work of canonical authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and architects etc. who have moved back and forth between Britain and Italy. Go-betweens – diplomats, politicians, fine art traders, explorers, merchants, servants – will be of particular interest, as will the problems of exile and of assimilation.

If you would like to contribute a twenty-minute paper to this, or to the Paris or Pisa colloquia, please contact:

Prof. Martin Stannard
Department of English
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RH
Tel: (0116) 2522621
Fax: (0116) 2522065
E-mail: maj@le.ac.uk

Click here for a Word copy of the CFP

For further details of the whole project, click here to visit the website

Programme

Friday 30th March 2007

9.00am – 9.30am Registration, Bodington Hall, University of Leeds

9.30am Welcome

9.45am Alexander Nagel ( University of Toronto)

Soft iconoclasm: Some forms of the image debate in Italy in the 1530s

10.45am Coffee/tea

11.00am Chrysa Damianaki (Università di Lecce)

Pontormo’s lost frescoes in San Lorenzo reconsidered

12.00pm Letizia Panizza (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Paradoxes in Cinquecento Italy: Friends or Enemies of Religion? The Case of Ortensio Lando

1.00pm Lunch

2.00pm Harald Hendrix (University of Utrecht)

Representation of Suffering and Religious Change in the Early Cinquecento

3.00pm Raymond B. Waddington ( University of California at Davis)

Aretino, Titian, and ‘la humanità di Cristo’

4.00pm Coffee/tea

4.30pm Abigail Brundin ( University of Cambridge)

Riforma al femminile: Vittoria Colonna’s poetic legacy

5.30pm Antonio Corsaro ( University of Urbino)

The dissemination of spiritual poetry in mid-XVIth-century Italy

7.30pm Conference dinner, University of Leeds

Saturday 31 st March 2007

9.30am Stephen Bowd (University of Edinburgh)

Religious Friendship and the Republic of Letters in Renaissance Italy

10.30am Coffee/tea

11.00am Noel O’Regan (University of Edinburgh)

Church reform and devotional music in 16 th-century Rome: the influence of lay confraternities

12.00pm Tom Nichols (University of Aberdeen)

‘Recalled from the infernal regions’: Venetian mythological painting in an age of religious reform

1pm Lunch

2.00pm Iain Fenlon (University of Cambridge)

Varieties of Experience: Music and Reform in Renaissance Italy

3.00pm Matthew Treherne ( University of Leeds)

The Tridentine liturgy as theological discourse in Tasso’s late works

4.00pm Coffee/tea

5pm Closing remarks: Professor Brian Richardson (University of Leeds)

The conference is organised by Abigail Brundin (Department of Italian, University of Cambridge) and Matthew Treherne (Department of Italian, University of Leeds), and is supported by the British Academy, the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Society for Renaissance Studies, and the Department of Italian, University of Leeds.

There are still a few places left for this international conference.
The closing date for registration is 28 February 2007.
Click here to go to the registration page.
For further information, click here.

> Geometrical Objects: Architecture and the Mathematical Sciences 1400-1800
19-20 March 2007
Museum of the History of Science and Worcester College, University of Oxford

Recent scholarship in the history of science has underscored the mutually reinforcing relationship between “high” and “low,” or theoretical and practical, forms of early modern mathematics. As many historians have shown, mathematicians of the period were deeply involved in problems of instrument making, surveying, engineering, gunnery, and navigation.  At the same time, the practitioners of these arts were increasingly concerned with questions of higher mathematics and natural philosophy as they pertained to the advancement of their craft.  In fact, practitioners appear to have provided an important intellectual and technical context for many of the period’s mathematical discoveries – an essential development, historians now maintain, in the larger history of the “scientific revolution.”

Architecture, too, was a “mathematical” art, almost wholly dependent on geometrical or arithmetic operations of some form or another.  The process of design itself - insofar as it required the application of consistent proportional rules – was largely defined by them, as were many other basic tasks. Surveying, cost estimates, bookkeeping, and even the use of routine graphic techniques – perspective, scaled orthogonal drawing, and stereotomic diagrams – all entailed a certain amount of mathematical training.  Nor were these skills limited to the design of buildings. Architects also used calculations in mapping cities, laying out fortifications, and planning hydraulic projects for gardens, dams, and canals.  Military and civil engineering had long been part of the Vitruvian tradition.

This symposium seeks to explore issues and questions raised by this situation. To what extent can the architect be considered a “mathematical practitioner”? What role did architectural practice and building technologies play in the broader evolution of mathematics?  How did architects see themselves in relation to mathematicians and scientists?  What are the documented cases of contact or conflict between these groups?

Click here for further information

Keynote Lecturer: Asuncion Lavrin (Arizona State University)

Louis L. Martz Lecturer: Annabel Patterson (Yale University)

William B. Hunter Lecturer: Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University)

Click here to see the conference programme

Sponsored by:

• The South-Central Renaissance Conference
• The Queen Elizabeth I Society
• The Marvell Society
• The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
• The Society for Renaissance Art History

Papers (15-20 minutes in length) are invited on any aspect of Renaissance studies (history, art history, literature, music, philosophy, science, theology). Abstracts only (400-500 words; a shorter 100-word abstract for inclusion in the 2007 program) must be submitted online no later than December 1, 2006 via the SCRC website's abstract submission form.

Sessions: sessions should be proposed no later than November 1, 2006 and e-mailed to the Program Chair (link given in contact info below). Abstracts of papers for approved sessions should be submitted online via the SCRC website's abstract form.

Christopher Baker
Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy
Armstrong Atlantic State University
11935 Abercorn St., Savannah, GA 31419

Phone: 912-921-5618
Fax: 912-927-5399

Program participants are required to join SCRC and are encouraged to submit publication-length versions of their papers to the SCRC journal, Explorations in Renaissance Culture.

A limited number of graduate travel fellowships are available; graduate students presenting a paper at the 2007 conference may apply to the program chair for travel assistance (maximum $250). Complete essays must be submitted electronically by February 1 to be eligible for consideration. See the graduate travel fellowships page for instructions on how to apply.

> Writing the New Science in the Age of Bacon: Literature & Scientific Ideas in the Seventeenth Century
10 March 2007
Oxford, Maison Française

Saturday 10th March, 9:00am - 5:00pm  

Morning session: 9.00 am - 1.00 pm
Chair: William Poole (New College)

1. Gisèle Venet (Univ. Paris 3):
"Imagining New Realities: Geography in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy"
2. Frédérique Aït-Touati (Univ. Paris 4):
"The Poetics of the New Hooke's The Attempt to prove the Motion of the Earth"
3. Sandrine Parageau (Univ. Paris 3):
"The function of analogies in the Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway"
4. Claire Preston ( Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge):
"Thomas Browne's Consumptions: A Letter to a Friend as medical narrative" 

Afternoon session: 2.00 - 5.00 pm    
Chair: Stéphane Van Damme (CNRS-MFO)

5. Christine Sukic (Univ. Bourgogne):
"As of a picture wrought to opticke Optics and ethics in George Chapman's Works"
6. Lynn Sermin Meskill (Univ. Paris 13):
"This is a piece of Oxford Magnetism in Jonson's The Magnetic Lady (1620)"
7. Line Cottegnies (Univ. Paris 3):
"Hermeticism and the Baconian programme Cavendish's The Blazing World"
8. Sarah Hutton ( Middlesex University):
"Hester Pulter (1596- A woman poet and the new astronomy"

Convener: Line Cottegnies (Université de Paris)

All welcome

Maison Française d'Oxford
2-10 Norham Road
Oxford, OX2 6SE
Tel. (01865) 274 220
Fax. (01865)
Email: maison@herald.ox.ac.uk
Click here to visit the Maison Française d'Oxford website

> Cornelius Gemma (1535-1578): Medicine, Cosmology, and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Louvain
23 February 2007
Centre for History of Science, University of Ghent, Belgium

Cornelius Gemma, the son of the famous cosmographer Reinier Gemma Frisius, was a professor of medicine at the University of Louvain. Until very recently, he was almost totally neglected by historians although he played an important role in the intellectual map of the second half of the sixteenth century through his main works, De arte cyclognomica (Antwerp, 1569) and De naturae divinis characterismis (Antwerp, 1575), highly appreciated by eminent scholars like Johannes Kepler and Guillaume Postel. His work touches upon such diverse fields as medicine, astronomy, astrology, monstrous generation, divination, prophecy, eschatology, encyclopedism, art of memory etc. The present conference aims to furnish the first substantial survey on this elusive figure through multidisciplinary approaches. 

Participants 

> Jean Céard (Paris X): “La notion de prodige dans la pensée de Gemma”
> Thomas Leinkauf (Münster)
> Germana Ernst (Roma III): “Divination et signes célestes chez Campanella et Gemma”
> Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck College, London): “Cornelius Gemma and Encyclopedism”
> Steven Vanden Broecke (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel)
> Dario Tessicini (University College London): “Giordano Bruno and His Reception of Gemma's Work on Celestial Phenomena of 1570's”
> Concetta Pennuto (Institut d'histoire de la médicine, Genève): “Cornelius Gemma lecteur de Girolamo Fracastoro: sympathie, antipathie et contagion”
> Hiro Hirai (Centre for History of Science, Ghent): “Lécture néoplatonisante d'Hippocrate chez Fernel, Cardan et Gemma” 

Organized by Fernand Hallyn & Hiro Hirai (hhirai@tiscali.be), Centre for History of Science, Ghent University (Belgium)

For further information, click here to visit the conference webpage  

> CFP Reconstructing Histories, 1550-1850
22-25 February 2007
Chicago, Illinois, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies

The 14th Annual Conference for the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS) will be held from February 22-25, 2007, in Chicago at the Palmer House Hilton. The theme for this year's conference is Reconstructing Histories, 1550-1850 and is intended to foster discussions about the ways in which perceptions of literary, cultural, social, and economic history have changed during the last decades. We invite papers, panels, discussion groups, and workshops that examine both early modern engagements with the making and unmaking of these histories and those that explore our contemporary understandings of our disciplinary narratives. In defining these historical and metacritical questions broadly, GEMCS provides a forum for innovative inquiries into all aspects of early modern culture and we encourage proposals on all aspects of early modern cultural studies.

GEMCS grew out of a need for a truly interdisciplinary organization that spans the early modern period and provides a forum for scholars to explore how our understandings of class race, gender, the body, sexuality, science, trade, colonialism, and nationalism continue to be reshaped by ongoing work in critical and cultural theory. The rubric "cultural studies" encompasses a variety of disciplinary fields--among them literature, history, art history, political science, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and philosophy--and it allows for a variety of approaches: feminist, materialist, multiculturalist, gay, lesbian, and queer. GEMCS defines the early modern period broadly to include the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and the early nineteenth century, and we remain committed to fostering critical dialogues across traditional boundaries of historical specialization and sociopolitical geography. We are particularly interested in expanding dialogues about the relationships between European national and linguistic cultures and their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

We invite proposals in the following areas for the 2007 conference, but, as always, encourage papers, panels, and discussions on other topics dealing with the period between roughly 1550 and 1850:

Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres
Nation and National Identity
Transcultural Exchanges within Europe and Beyond
Comparative Imperialisms
European Sciences and Indigenous Forms of Knowledge
Trade, Colonialism, and Gender
Women Writers and the Problem of Genre
Beyond the "New Formalism"
Manuscript and Print in the Early Modern Period
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Studies
Biocultures
Technology and the Body
The Problems of Periodicity: Rethinking the "Early Modern"
Rethinking Character, Rethinking Genre
Teaching Early Modern Cultural Studies
The Nature of the Object
Animals and their Companion Species
Transatlantic Exchanges
Things and their Destinies

Panel organizers should reserve half an hour to forty-five minutes for discussions so please ask each speaker to limit his or her presentation to no more than fifteen minutes. Please send abstracts for complete panels (approx. 500 words) or individual papers (approx. 250 words) to ecti@uiuc.edu using the subject line "Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies." Abstracts should include academic addresses for all panel participants and their e-mail addresses.

The deadline for abstracts for individual papers, roundtables (six to eight participants), and paper sessions (three to five participants) is September 15, 2006.

We will begin this year a policy of rolling acceptances, so you will hear within six weeks whether your proposal has been accepted.

Click here to visit the GEMCS website for updates and hotel information.

The registration fee for the annual conference includes membership in the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies and a year's subscription to the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies published by Indiana University Press.

Click here for information about the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

> Renaissance Translation
24 February 2007
University of Stirling

“The worth of a skilfull and worthy translator is to obserue the sentences, figures, and formes of speech proposed in his author, his true sence and height, and to adorne them with figures and formes of oration fitted to the originall in the same tongue to which they are translated” (George Chapman, 1598)

“Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated!” (MND)

“ He hath studied her well, and translated her will out of honesty into English” (Merry Wives)

Both the concept and the practice of ‘translation’ were a vital part of Renaissance culture throughout Europe, stimulated in part by the growth in printing and reading, and by travel and the exchange of ideas across cultures. The proposed one-day symposium seeks to explore the topic of ‘translation’ in all of its manifestations, ranging from translation from one language to another, to ‘translation’ involving the shift between different discursive registers within English-speaking cultures.

Among those who have already agreed to offer papers are:
> Dr Danielle Berton ( University of Cleremont)
> Professor Supriya Chaudhuri ( Jadvaphur University, Bengal)
> Dr Sarah Knight ( University of Leicester)
> Dr Robin Sowerby ( University of Stirling) Dr Alison Thorne ( University of Strathclyde)
> Dr Sergi Mainer ( British Academy Fellow, University of Stirling)

It may be possible to accommodate ONE or TWO further papers, but proposals will need to be submitted by 23 January, 2007 at the latest to:

Professor J Drakakis: jd1@stir.ac.uk

There is a fee of £25 for the day, which will cover coffee, tea, and a buffet lunch. Cheques to be made payable to Department of English Studies, University of Stirling. A registration form is attached to this call for papers. Delegates who wish to pay on the day can do so, but please send in your registration form beforehand so that we can plan for meals.

The registration list will close when the number has reached 30 participants, and registration will be done on a first-come-first-served basis. Please complete the following slip and return it by Monday 5 February 2007 to:

SINRS Symposium
Department of English Studies
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4 LA
Scotland

> Historiography in Golden Age Spain
17th February 2007
University College London, Cruciform Building

Speakers:
> Dr Harald Braun ( University of Liverpool):
Historia Magistra Iuris? History, Law and Prudence in Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) .
> Professor Jeremy Robbins ( Edinburgh):
Arts of Perception: The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580-1720.
> Dr Alexander Samson ( UCL):
Writing Early Modern Spain: Historiography and Rhetoric in the works of Florián de Ocampo

Seminar Room 2 from 2:00 - 5:00 pm

> Law, Evidence and Fiction
17 February 2007, 10:30 - 5:00
St Andrews

The Early Modern Studies in Scotland Seminar

Speakers include:
> Malcolm Gaskill ( Cambridge)
> Garthine Walker ( Cardiff)
> Julian Luxford (St Andrews)
> Marion Wynne-Davies (Dundee)
> Subha Mukherji ( Cambridge)
> Lorna Hutson ( St Andrews)

Click here for full details of the programme and titles

Please note there are a number of bursaries available for PG students from Scottish universities wishing to attend. Please contact Andrew Gordon for details on a.gordon@abdn.ac.uk

ACMRS and RMMRA invite session and paper proposals for their joint annual interdisciplinary conferences to be held 15 - 17 February 2007 at the Fiesta Inn Resort in Tempe, Arizona. We welcome papers that explore any topic related to the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and especially those that focus on this year's theme of masculinities and femininities, both in their literal and metaphorical manifestations.

Selected papers related to the conference theme will be considered for publication in the conference volume of the Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance series, published by Brepols Publishers (Belgium).

The conference keynote speaker will be Valerie Traub, Professor of English and Women's Studies and Director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Among her many publications are Gay Shame, ed. with David Halperin (forthcoming University of Chicago Press), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. with M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge Press, 1992).

Before the conference, ACMRS will host a workshop on manuscript studies to be led by Timothy Graham, Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico. The workshop will be Thursday afternoon, February 15, and the limited number of participants will be determined by the order in which registrations are received. Email acmrs@asu.edu with "conference workshop" as the subject line to be added to the list. The cost of the workshop is $15 and is in addition to the regular conference registration fee.

The conference registration fee is $85 ($45 for students) and includes welcoming and farewell receptions, two days of concurrent sessions (Friday and Saturday), and keynote address. Please note that there will be an opening reception Thursday evening, but there will be no sessions that day.

The deadline for proposals is 5:00 pm Mountain Standard Time on 15 October 2006. Proposals must include audio/visual requirements and any other special requests. Subsequent a/v requests may not be honored without additional charge.

In order to streamline the committee review process, submissions will only be accepted at the ACMRS online proposal submission site from 28 July through 15 October 2006.

Questions? Call 480-965-9323 or email acmrs@asu.edu