You are warmly invited to our first event of the new academic year. Dr Roger Mettam is a distinguished historian of early modern France, the author of Government and Society in Louis XIV’s France (1977) and Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (1988). His work has transformed our understanding of absolutism, and this promises to be a very memorable evening.

Please note that this event starts at 7 pm rather than our usual 6.30 pm.

Membership remains a bargain at £5 for the year, and you can join or re-join at any of our events.

This month the group will be reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, cantos 1-4. A verse translation is available online at http://omacl.org/Orlando/. Alternatively, Oxford World Classics publish a good prose translation (tr. Guido Waldman) which is available from Amazon here:  Orlando Furioso (Oxford World’s Classics)
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Wine will be provided and everyone is welcome. If you have any questions, contact Linda Grant.

The group will be reading an extract from Castiglione’s The Courtier. The Hoby translation is available online at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier1.html.

We will be looking at the first half of Book 1 (down to ‘preciseness’ in the Hoby edition) approximately the first 30 pages. Wine will be provided and everyone is welcome. If you have any questions, contact Linda Grant.

The next Early Modern Reading Group will meet on Thursday 4 December, at 6.30pm, in the Skinners Arms, Judd Street WC1. They’ll look at January, February and March (or more if you like) from Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). There’s an edition here: http://uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/shepheard.html
Contact: Adam Smyth

The next meeting of the Birkbeck Early Modern Reading Group will be on Monday December 8th at 6pm in the Tillotson room, 30 Russell Square. They will be reading Seneca’s Phaedra and thinking about the way Roman tragedy influenced the Renaissance, particularly the revenge genre.

The text is available online at http://www.theoi.com/Text/SenecaPhaedra.html, or is available from the library.
Wine will be provided and everyone is welcome. If you have any questions, do email Linda Grant.

This month, the group will be exploring biographical writings: first we will look at some chapters of Suetonius’s colourful biography of the Emperor Nero (Suetonius, Nero 26-31), and then John Aubrey’s Brief Lives: Sir Philip Sidney, and his sister Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

Suetonius in available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, Aubrey doesn’t seem to be available online but is easy to pick up from any library. Wine will be provided and everyone is welcome. If you have any questions, please email Linda Grant.

They will be discussing medicine and surgery in the Renaissance, with the focus on the work of Pare and Vesalius.

Please note, the work of Vesaluis does cover vivisection in a graphic manner, so if you are of a squeamish disposition please do not read any further…

You can find the readings here.

For more information contact Julie Ackroyd.

The readings are:

Chapter one of the Malleus Maleficarum which can be printed out from the link below. The home page of this site links to some useful notes, if you would like to read further.

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/part_I/mm01_01a.html

This will be compared with ‘The Judgment of a Witch’ taken from a Fugger Newsletter which is available here.

This post will stay so that the witch reading links remain.

The Early Modern Reading Group will be meeting on 17 March to discuss readings with a witchy theme.

The readings are:

Chapter one of The Malleus Maleficarum which can be printed out from the link below. The home page of this site links to some useful notes, if you would like to read further.

http://www/malleusmaleficarum.org/part_I/mm01_01a.html

We will be comparing this tract with ‘The Judgment of a Witch’ taken from a Fugger Newsletter which is available here.

This month’s Early Modern Reading Group will take place on Monday 14th January 2008. At 7.30 to 9 pm. Room 502, The Tillotson Room, Dept of English and Humanities, 30 Russell Square.

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF TIME.
This was unavoidable due to room availability.
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Our chosen theme this month is ‘The Country House’, with a selection of poems to focus on.

Ben Jonson
The Forest: II To Penshurst
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/penshurst.htm

Robert Herrick
A Country-Life to his brother Mr. Tho. Herrick
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herrick/thomas.htm

Katherine Philips
A Country Life
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/philips/countrylife.htm