11th Biennial Conference Programme

Linked to 1.4 and 6.1

Location: 1.H021

Chair: Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck)

Richard Ansell (Birkbeck), ‘“My French mother, as I then called her”: Language Exchanges across the Early Modern English Channel’

Laura Seymour (Swansea), ‘Disability and Non-Elite Women’s Texts, a Microhistory of Sarah and Mathew Caute’

Melissa Marsh (Birkbeck), ‘Ralph Josselin: a father in grief’

Location: 1.H030

Seminar Leaders: Derek Dunne (Cardiff) and Kim Gilchrist (Cardiff)

‘History from below’ has revolutionised the questions we ask and the stories we tell about historical periods from the early modern to our own – instead of grand narratives of sovereigns and state officials, how was historical change experienced and shaped by those further down the social ladder? This seminar borrows this methodology to explore new facets of Shakespeare and early modern drama, by switching focus from well-established cultural institutions – universities, theatres, arts organisations and publications – to more marginalised groups such as:

• the unhoused
• apprentices
• unlicensed players
• prisoners
• refugees and asylum seekers
• the precariat/gig economy workers
• soldiers and veterans

+ those at the intersection of these and other disenfranchised groups

We invite papers both historicist and presentist that grapple with these neglected (in both senses) aspects of Shakespeare studies, and particularly welcome those that reflect on methodological problems and/or their own positionality in telling such stories.

What is known of early modern dramatists and practitioners’ experiences of marginality, especially less documented groups and individuals beyond London’s professional networks? Did the increase in licensed playing companies in the sixteenth century disenfranchise regional or semi-professional practitioners? How have prisoners repurposed Shakespeare for their own ends? Can Lear’s ‘unaccommodated man’ speak to present homelessness crises? In what ways has the cultural power of ‘Shakespeare’ been weaponised against any of these groups? What ethical questions are raised by the strategies of cultural institutions to make Shakespeare ‘accessible’? While there are no doubt positive stories to tell, we must also acknowledge and explore the damage done by ‘Shakespeare’ across time periods and geographies. Our hope is that addressing Shakespeare in this way can contribute to a more inclusive pedagogy and practice

Linked to 5.3 and 6.3

Location: LT2

Chair: Fiona Sit (Leeds)

Susan Anne Naramore (University of Notre Dame, US), ‘Audacious Perugians: Constructing New Regional Identities in the Wake of the Salt War and Florentine Expansion’

Roberto Sisinni (Texas Tech University, US), ‘Justice, violence, and community: a case in the Venetian countryside during the carnival of 1576’

Fergal Leonard (University of Durham, UK), ‘“The Graymes and there clanne”: Kinship and identity on England’s northern frontier, 1593-1603’

Fabio Gigone (Danish Academy, Denmark), ‘The Architecture of the Conclave: Private Space and Collective Identity in the Early Modern Papal Election’

Location: LT3

Chair: Lisa Kattenberg (Amsterdam)

Francesco Formigari (University of Bergamo), ‘An intellectual life made of interconnections: Francesco Patrizi da Cherso’s case’

Thomas Matthew Vozar (University of Florida), ‘Oriental Studies and the General Scholar in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Meric Casaubon’

Mareile Pfannebecker, ‘The Humanist Exception: Renaissance cosmopolitanism and ars apodemica in England’

Oury Goldman (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), ‘A European reception of French political thought at the time of the Wars of Religion: the English and Italian translations of La Primaudaye’s Académie Française’

Location: B.H05

Chair: Gina Walter (Bristol)

Juliana Beykirch (Newcastle)

Anna Hegland (Carthage College Wisconsin)

Lydia Valentine (KCL and Shakespeare’s Globe)

Location: G.H01

Seminar Leaders: Katie Bank (Birmingham) and Rachel Willie (LJMU)

In The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), Bruce Smith illustrated the interconnectedness of sound and place through exploring the distinctive sound signatures of the early modern playhouse and other spaces, and how inhabiting such spaces connected to the embodied experiences of hearing, listening and voicing. Twenty-five years after its publication, Smith’s attention to the aural and oral landscapes continues to influence and provoke a range of debate about the early modern soundscape, how we uncover the sounds of the past, and the myriad ways in which sound acts on the senses.

This seminar aims to interrogate the interconnections between sound and the senses and how these interconnections create a sense of connectedness or disconnect. In examining sound as a multisensory experience, it asks 1) how does environment regulate the experience of sound within particular spaces? 2) what forms of knowledge are created and communicated through sound? 3) how does our attention to the historical phenomenology of sound and hearing enrich our understanding of early modern culture and society? 4) How did early modern people understand sound’s function in creating communities of fellow-feeling 5) How does attention to the ecological, temporal and epistemological factors that inform sensory experience feed into our sense of sound and hearing? 6) Can sound ecologies be exclusionary and break connections instead of being generative?

Location: 1.H029

Chair: Laurence Publicover (Bristol)

Kieron Hoyle (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘Networks and the Improvements to Dover Harbour in the Reign of Elizabeth I’

Javier Ignacio Poblete Pérez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso), ‘Lodovico Guicciardini description of Antwerp: The port as a convergence of the crossroads of world-commerce in the sixteenth-century Low Countries’

María Grove-Gordillo (Universidad de Sevilla), ‘Connected mercantile areas: Bristol, Seville and Lisbon and the circulation of money and Bristolians (1480-1561)’

Location: Priory Road LT (2F9)

Chair: Nailya Shamgunova (UEA)

Pete Morris (Manchester), ‘Bibliographic Data Science and the Harmonization of Heterogeneous Metadata’

Fred Schurink (Manchester), ‘Continental European Books in Early Modern England, 1500–1640: An Overview of Findings’

Anna-Lujz Gilbert (Manchester), ‘Second-Hand Continental European Books in Early Modern England, 1500–1640’

Location: G.H04

Chair: Jane Grogan (UCD)

William Perry (UCD), ‘The “Citie of a Hundred Gates”: Isfahan in the Early Modern English Mind (1600-1628)’

Chloë Houston (Reading), ‘“[U]tterly ignorant in the Art of Printing”: European travel writing about Persia and the material text, 1601-1698’

Location: G.H03

Chair: Janet Clare (Bristol)

Rebecca Bailey (LJMU), ‘“Revellers of fate”: Thomas Salusbury’s “An Antimasque of Gypsies” performed at Chirk Castle on 30 December 1641’

Kate Shaw, ‘Unmasking the Queens in Jonson's Masque of Queens’

Location: G20

Chair: Martin Nixon (Zayed University, Dubai)

Michael Aidan Pope (UCL), ‘Difference in the Atlantic Before the Americas: Canary Islanders, Black Africans and Changing Iberian Cosmographies’

Carolin Schmitz (KCL), ‘The double nature of un-freedom: Enslaved and persecuted Black women in the Canary Islands’

Location: Banton LT (Priory Road)

Chair: Elizabeth Currie (Central Saint Martins)

Emily Averiss (The Warburg Institute), ‘Catherine de’ Medici’s Sartorial Diplomacy: A Renaissance Jewel Connecting France, the Papacy, and the Medici’

Daria Ünver (Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg), ‘A Biblical Love Triangle: Abraham, Sarah and Hagar on the engraving of Georg Pencz’alla

Alla Chernjak (Ben Gurion University), ‘The Artist, Her Maid, and The Chess Game in Light of the Querelle des femmes’

Maria Anastasia Karageorge, ‘Pineapples and Pagodas: Botanical Connections Between China and Spanish America in Embroidered Silk Shawls’