● 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