Autumn Term 2011
31 October
Dr Emma Barker (Open University) ‘Il n’y a point de tableau plus charmant que celui de la famille: Constructing domesticity in eighteenth-century France’

14 November
Dr Sabine Chaouche (Oxford Brooks) ‘The Business of the Comédie-Française in eighteenth-century France’.

28 November
Prof Leonhard Horowski (Berlin), ‘Le Duc de Noailles est le premier homme du monde. Dynastic thinking and the logistics of faction-building at the Court of Versailles’

12 December (Torrington Room, Room 104)
Anne Byrne (Birkbeck), ‘Three deathbeds and a funeral: the death rites of Louis XV’

Spring Term 2012
23 January
Charles Gregory, ‘The conspiracies against Cardinal Richelieu, 1636-1642′

6 February
Dr Stephen Brogan (IHR), ‘Marc Bloch and the royal touch revisited’

20 February
Dr Christelle Rabier (LSE), ‘A European Revolution of medical demand? The French case, 1600-1750′ (Provisional title)

5 March
Carmen Fraccia, title tbc

19 March
Prof Rafe Blaufarb, ‘The Politics of Noble Fiscal Privilege’

Stephen Brogan (Birkbeck and President of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society)
Institute of Historical Research, Malet Street, Senate House WC1

Historical Association members free
Visitors £3 – no need to pre-book – join as a branch member (£10 p.a.) on the day and admission refunded

Enquiries:email or tel. 020-7323-1192

You can also find out more about James I/VI and the royal touch in the latest issue of History Today where Stephen has an article. See James I: The Royal Touch for a taster. (The full article is available to subscribers.)

edited by Philip Major

A new publication of early modern interest – and a Birkbeck connection – from Ashgate Publishing:

‘”Exile’” is a condition which places a special kind of strain on every aspect of a person’s life. Nevertheless, what these exiles learned from those they sometimes reluctantly engaged with contributed in important ways to their ways of thinking and writing once they returned. There were, too, continous currents of intellectual exchange between those in exile and those who remained behind. Only if we recognise this and take account of it can the intellectual and cultural history of the British Isles in the second half of the seventeenth century be fully understood. The essays in Literatures of Exile are eloquent testimony to the increased depth and richness to be discovered, if we scrutinise the surviving literary materials from this tumultuous political perion inclusively – from both inside and outside Britain.’

From the forward by Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England’s political and cultural landscape: exile. It considers exile both as physical displacement from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. The essays assembled here demonstrate, among other things, both the shared and highly individual experiences in exile of figures conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance.

Contents:
Foreword, Lisa Jardine
Introduction, Philip Major
Exiles, expatriates, and travellers: towards a cultural and intellectual history of the English abroad, 1640–1660, Timothy Raylor
Disruptions and evocations of family amongst Royalist exiles, Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders
A broken broker in Antwerp: William Aylesbury and the Duke of Buckingham’s goods, 1648–1650, Katrien Daemen-de Gelder and J.P. Vander Motten
A tortoise in the shell: Royalist and Anglican experience of exile in the 1650s, Marika Keblusek
Exile, apostasy and Anglicanism in the English Revolution, Sarah Mortimer
Exile in Europe during the English Revolution and its literary impact, Nigel Smith
Abraham Cowley and the ends of poetry, Christopher D’Addario
‘Not sure of safety’: Hobbes and exile, James Loxley
‘A poor exile stranger’: William Goffe in New England, Philip Major
‘The good old cause for which I suffer’: the life of a regicide in exile, Jason Peacey
Bibliography; Index.

About the Editor:
Philip Major teaches English at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on seventeenth-century literature and is currently writing a monograph on the works of Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax.

Members of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society can claim a 20% discount by downloading the form here: BEMSLiteraturesofExile. (A code is available on the form for online orders.)

For more publication news and offers follow Ashgate Literary Studies on twitter: www.twitter.com/ashgateliterary

This will be followed at 7pm by our first speaker event of the academic year. Dr Marcus Dahl from the School of Advanced Studies will tell us about his exciting new research on Shakespeare authorship in a talk entitled  ‘Shakespeare, Middleton and Macbeth, A Re-Analysis’. Both events will take place in the Council Room, Birkbeck, Malet St Building.

You will also be able to join the society/ renew your membership entitling you to free admission to our speaker events (refreshments included) for the whole of the academic year. (Click here for this year’s programme.) Membership and admission costs are to be ratified at the AGM. Since our inception in 2006 admission has been free to members (annual membership £5 ) and £3 for non members.

To find out more about the Early Modern Society at Birkbeck click here.

We look forward to meeting you if you are new or to welcoming you back if you are not so new!

 Thursday 23 September 2010, 6.30 pm, room tbc, key-note address by Professor Jeroen Duindam, of Groningen University:

‘Exhilaration and Ossification: Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World’.

Prof. Duindam is an expert on early modern rituals and has published Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (New Studies in European History) (Cambridge, 2003) and Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early-modern European Court(Amsterdam 1995). At the moment he is co-editing Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Brill: Leiden, 2010).

 This event is free to attend and open to all, and will be followed by drinks.

The colloquium then takes place on Friday 24 September:

This event is organised by Stephen Brogan and Anne Byrne, for more information please contact ritualandceremony@googlemail.com

This colloquium is generously sponsored by the Royal Historical Society, the Society for the Study of French History, and the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.

It costs £20 to attend the colloquium, which includes lunch and drinks, or £10 if unwaged/student/member of Birkbeck’s Early Modern Society.

To register please click here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/about/conferences/usesofritualcolloquium

Date: Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Time: 15:30 – 20:00

Programme

3.30 Panel: ‘Samuel Wesley: Family, Theology and Mission’
‘None but Presbyterian Baptism: Samuel Wesley and the Lay Baptism Controversy.’ Professor William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University

‘A Critical Analysis of the Theology and Sources of Samuel Wesley’s The Pious Communicant Rightly Prepar’d.’ Dr Geordan Hammond, Manchester Wesley Research Centre

‘Samuel Wesley, Sr.: Man on a Mission’ Dr Arthur Torpy, author of The Prevenient Piety of Samuel Wesley, Sr and visiting fellow in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History

4.30: Tea and Coffee.

5.00-6.30: ‘The Royal Touch: Scrofula, Sin and the Restored Stuarts, 1660-88′ Stephen Brogan, Birkbeck, University of London

Venue: Institute of Historical Research (University of London), Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Time: 5:15 in the Ecclesiastical History Room.

For more British History in the 17th Century Seminars at the Institute of Historical Research visit: http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/108

Venue: Institute of Historical Research (University of London), Senate House, Malet Street, LONDON WC1E 7HU

Time: 5:15 in the Ecclesiastical History Room.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. VIII, 266 pp. (Costerus NS 180)
ISBN: 978-90-420-2808-1 Paper
ISBN: 978-90-420-2809-8 E-Book
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=COS+180

Readers of The Early Modern Intelligencer can claim a 30% discount on this title! Send an email to info@rodopi.nl ,and mention your postal address, the book title and the discount percentage. The discount is offered until February 15th.*

The blurb:
Early modern women writers are typically studied as voices from the margin, who engage in a counter-discourse to patriarchy and whose identities prefigure postmodern notions of fragmented selfhood. Studying a variety of literary forms – autobiographical writings, diaries, mothers’ advice books, poetry and drama – this innovative book approaches early modern women’s strategies of identity formation from an alternative angle: their self-writings should be understood as attempts to establish a coherent, stable and convincing subjectivity in spite of the constraints they encountered. While the authors acknowledge contradiction and ambiguity, they consistently strive to compromise and achieve balance. Drawing on social and cultural history, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and the study of discourses, the close reading of the women’s texts and other, literary and non-literary sources reveals that the female writers seek to reconcile the affective, corporeal, social, economic and ideological dimensions of their identities and thereby question both the modern idea of the unified self and its postmodern, fragmented variant. The women’s identities as writers, mothers, spouses, household members and economic agents testify to their acceptance of contradictions, their adherence to patriarchal norms and simultaneous self-assertion. Their pragmatic stances suggest that their simultaneous confidence and anxiety should be taken seriously, as tentative, precarious, yet ultimately workable and convincing expressions of identity.

Contents
Acknowledgements, Introduction, Writing the Self: Identity through Authorship, Self and Other: Identity and Relationality, The Self under Threat: Self-annihilation, Self-abnegation, Self-loss and Death, The Struggle for Stability: Contradiction and Ambiguity, Private/Public Spaces: Boundaries, Polarities and Transgression, The Search for the “Golden Meane”: Rethinking Marginality and Power, Epilogue, Bibliography, Index

*Please note that this offer is not valid in combination with any other offer

One Day Colloquium at Birkbeck, University of London

 Friday 24 September 2010

As part of Birkbeck’s thriving research culture, this event will bring together scholars to discuss the purpose and reception of ritual and ceremony in the early modern period. Professor Jeroen Duindam, Groningen University, will give a key-note address on Thursday evening, 23 September.  Researchers from all disciplines are cordially invited to submit proposals for 25 minute papers for this colloquium in central London on 24 September 2010. 

Early modern life was shaped by ritual and ceremony.  These rites had many functions, such as marking time, denoting power, place and order, and defining the sacred.  Ritual could provide a temporary release from the hierarchically ordered world or mark an attempt to assert and confirm social categories which were otherwise potentially unstable.

 How do we define a ritual, and is this different from the early modern definition? How does ritual differ from ceremony?  To what extent did rituals remain static despite their rapidly changing social, cultural and intellectual contexts?  How, when, why, and by whom were ceremonies changed?  Did contemporaries notice similarities between rites practised in disparate social or cultural contexts?  How was the success or failure of a ceremony measured?  Could ordinary people affect the performance of rituals which were practiced by the elite, and vice versa?  Preference will be given to papers which tease out issues such as these and seek to engage afresh with the historiography.

 We are interested in hearing about ritual in the broadest sense and from all areas of the early modern world, including the royal courts, the church, universities, corporations, fraternities, sororoties, and guilds, and everyday customs, both rural and urban, as well as special and exceptional occasions.   Papers could address themes such as authority and subversion, order and disorder, reception and perception, and so draw attention to what degree rituals were formal or spontaneous, solemn or riotous, conservative or revolutionary. 

 Please send abstracts of 250 words maximum together with a brief CV to the organisers, Stephen Brogan and Anne Byrne, at ritualandceremony@googlemail.com.  Please send any other enquiries to this address too.  The deadline for submission is 22 January 2010.