11th Biennial Conference Programme

Linked to 5.1 and 6.1

Chair: tbc.

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

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

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

Kate Hodgkin, ‘Maternal Memory’

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

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’

Chair: tbc.

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’

Chair: tbc.

Kevin Killeen (York), ‘Science and the Poetry of Abortion in Abraham Cowley‚’s Herb Garden’

Chloe Ingersent (Oxford), ‘Miscarriages of justice: trespass and abortion in the Star Chamber’

Olivia Formby (Cambridge), ‘“Moving the Same”: Maternal-Foetal Senses and Passions’

Chair: tbc.

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

Ana Howie (Cornell), ‘Threads of Power: Women, Portraiture, and the Materials of Empire in Early Modern Genoa’

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

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?

Chair: tbc.

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)’

Seminar Leaders: John McTague (Bristol) and Rhiannon Daniels (Bristol)

This seminar is in effect a workshop exploring practice-based and collaborative research into early modern print cultures, involving practical demonstrations using the historical equipment of Bristol Common Press. The seminar leaders are co-founders of this working historical print shop, and are involved in research projects which featurehands-on letterpress work, using historical equipment and materials to expand, revise, or problematise the research questions and answers of desk-based research in the fields of bibliography and the history of the book. These projects look not only at books, but the interconnected materials, processes and people that made them; by actually /making/ books, or parts thereof, they put investigators in new positions and open up new perspectives. Like early modern print shops themselves, these projects are highly collaborative: one of them aims to investigate (by reconstructing) the practice of ‘shared printing’, where the printing of single books is distributed across a number of printers for speed; another brings practical knowledge of early print shop practice to bear on a digital humanities project seeking to investigate the geometry of the page in early Italian printed books. With a mixture of brief presentation, practical demonstration, examination of printed outputs and other materials (i.e. sheets printed on replica wooden hand presses; locked up formes of moveable type), we hope to introduce participants to the interim findings of these projects, explore and demonstrate our working methods and the facilities of Bristol Common Press, and discuss together the challenges and benefits of conducting practice-based and collaborative research into early modern print cultures.

David Parkinson

Lorna MacBean

Jessica Reid

Owen Callan

Brandon Warden

Chair: tbc

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

Domenico Lovascio (Genoa), ‘Ben Jonson’s Defence of the Classics in Lovers Made Men as a Riposte to John Fletcher’s The Mad Lover’

Kate Shaw, ‘Mary More and Intellectual Networks’

Chair: tbc.

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’

Chair: tbc.

Evan Bourke (Maynooth), ‘Networking Spenser in Munster’

Lucy Ruddiman (Bristol), ‘“Sharing our glorious Globe stage”: interconnected hauntings in the modern performance of Shakespearean drama and Greek tragedy’

Rowan Tomlinson (Bristol) and Simon Park (Oxford), ‘Overlooked Interconnections: Canons and Biases in Early Modern Studies’