Students at this institution, and on other postgraduate Shakespeare programmes, are invited and encouraged to contribute short papers for publication. Each issue of the journal will be themed.

We thought it exhilaratingly inappropriate, and so irresistible, to signal the birth of this journal with an issue looking at death.

Students are encouraged to submit papers, between 1,500 and 2,500 words, on topics relating to death, mortality and religion in Shakespeare’s plays, or elsewhere in the Early Modern period.

Possible topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• Critical examinations of the way that various of Shakespeare’s characters deal with death, or die. This could include close-reading, comparative analysis, and analysis from a specific theoretical position (Marxist, feminist, etc.).

• Historical studies of how mortality or religion was understood in the early Modern period, and of how Shakespeare makes use of (and plays off) those understandings in his plays.

• Considerations of the political, ethical, religious, spiritual and existential significances of mortality or religion in the Early Modern period, and for Shakespeare’s characters.

• Comparisons between how Shakespeare understands mortality, and how other creative artists and philosophers–-of Shakespeare’s time, or before, or after–-have understood it.

• More intensely personal and experientially engaged writing on how Shakespeare’s plays have helped you deal with death–-with your own mortality, or with the death of people that you know. How does Shakespeare make you look at death, and is this vision comforting or distressing? Does Shakespeare get to the truth of death, for you, or not?

• Reflections on metaphysical and spiritual truths that arise from Shakespeare’s plays.

• More provocative reflections on how the writing that is produced by the Modern academy–-writing that is critical, theoretical, historical—does not deal adequately with death in Shakespeare’s plays, and suggestions as to how this inadequacy can be rectified.

Suggestions of other topics will be warmly received.

Papers should be submitted to shakesreview@gmail.com, with a deadline of 20 May 2012.

All submissions will be reviewed by the editorial board, and those submissions that are selected will be published in our first online issue. Please contact us for further information.

Taverns, locals and street corners: Cross-chronological studies in community drinking, regulation and public space

Project
This AHRC Connected Communities pilot study on tavern culture (2012) ranges from early modern Europe to the present day. It investigates whether today’s real and imagined patterns of drinking – people congregating in public spaces at night, sold alcohol and revelling – are recurring practices and representations of drinking and of competing communities. It looks at how public space is used, and how tavern culture produces places and social groupings; how these spaces are regulated in the name of order, morality and health; the rhetorics of drinking and taverns, of pleasure, harm and authority. The project asks if the performance of drinking, and ideas of spectacle and carnival, are still part of modern drinking culture, and if contemporary questions about public policy on drinking and ‘anti-social behaviour’ find resonances in the past.

The participants, co-ordinated by Dr Fabrizio Nevola (PI), are investigating three separate periods and places.

1. Florence in the 16th century
Dr Fabrizio Nevola and Dr David Rosenthal (University of Bath)
This strand starts by using a detailed ownership and rental census of 1561 to map prominent Florentine taverns and the streetscapes (shops, workshops, houses) around them, in order to locate the tavern in urban space and better understand its emplacement within communities and networks. It then looks at the regulatory and, drawing on a range of archival and printed sources, wider discursive regimes surrounding taverns and drinking between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries, as economic instability and the moral imperatives of religious reform combined to make the tavern a fiercely contested site in the shaping of identity and community.

2. London in the 18th century
Dr Jane Milling and Dr Jonathan Owen (University of Exeter)
This strand examines how the outcry against public drinking in 18th-century London was matched by its championing in terms of commerce and sociability. It investigates material on public drinking in Old Bailey records, in regulatory legislation, pamphleteering and in civic society treatises. It also examines theatrical and visual representations of public drinking and disorder (eg Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane, 1751). This study asks what was at stake for the competing communities in these public spaces, and what do representations of communal drinking reveal about it as a creative or destructive force for communities.

3. Bristol in the 21st century
Dr Antonia Layard (University of Cardiff)
This strand focuses on one or more pubs in Bristol in order to investigate modern regulation and governance of drinking. Through interviews with owners, police, users, and town centre managers, it asks what kind of regulatory regime pubs are subject to and the implications of this both for the establishment itself and for its surroundings. It looks at how the law makes the pub a public space, but one in which entry can nonetheless be refused (dress codes, disorderly conduct). It also examines non-legal forms of governance that help to define clientele and behaviour, such as the use of pricing, signage and decor, and security.  The project also asks what the analyses of regulatory strategies from Renaissance Florence and Georgian London might tell us about pubs today.

Visit the project website and blog at http://tavernsproject.com/ to find out more.

Saturday 17 November 2012

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

CALL FOR PAPERS

Art and Its Afterlives aims to address the ways in which the work of art continues to resonate after its creation. While much art history takes as its focus the initial facture of the work of art, this one-day symposium explores what happens to early modern art after the moment of its making. How did early modern works continue to be created in their display, preservation, and reception from the moment of their creation on? Papers will examine how art is shaped by its afterlives – whether these collect, curate, cut up, cut out, copy or correct it – and the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation. Material, technical and social histories as well as theoretical approaches drawn from the discipline of art history and other fields of the humanities are welcome. Accounts from curatorial practice and the field of museology are also encouraged.

The question of afterlife is an pertinent topic for art history in general, where the work of art is uniquely tied to a particular assemblage of materials which inevitably change with time, rendering fraught questions of preservation, the presence or possibility of copies, the idea of original state, and how a work of art is staged for a viewer. Less material but no less concrete, the interactions between the work and the viewer, and between the work and the its assumed referent are not stable but open to change. The question of afterlife is particularly relevant for the early modern period, when emergent art markets and cultures of collection allowed not only the circulation of artworks, but also their appropriation and adaptation. Taking as its point of departure Bourdieu’s encouragement to investigate ‘not only the material production of the work but also the production of the value of the work’, this symposium privileges the afterlives of art and the alternative histories they present.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

• Histories of collection and display – acquisition and the accrual of value; assignment of category or genre; travel and re-contextualization; political appropriation and/or subversion

• Conservation and technical art history – preservation vs. restoration of past state; hidden layers and the discovery of the underneath; changing material support

• Reception and criticism –boundary between art and reception; development of art historical practice; shifting contexts of viewership and viewer negotiation

• Copy and imitation – changing perceptions of a master’s hand vs. workshop; forging and faking; serial reproduction; changing conceptions of emulation and originality; contemporary uses of early modern works and spaces

• Destruction and embellishment – iconoclasm and the religious image; revolution and vandalism; disassembly and remaking; framing and re-framing

Art and Its Afterlives is the fourth symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern Department. We invite proposals from scholars and postgraduates for papers that explore the theme of art and its afterlives in all forms of visual and material culture from the early modern period (c.1560-1848) including painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, performance, print media, graphic arts, and the intersections between them.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words by 1 July 2012 to Laura Sanders and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper.

Further details will be posted when available on The Courtauld Institute of Art website: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml

Organized by Laura Sanders and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper

(The Courtauld Institute of Art)

Places must be booked in advance by Friday 15 June (£15 for the lecture,£50 for supper following).
Booking forms and further details are available from Karen Chester.

Dr Alice Hunt, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Rituals of the Republic’
25 May 2012
6:30 pm
Room B30, Malet Street

Free to Members, £5 Membership, £3 Guests – All Welcome

Alice Hunt explored early modern royal coronation rituals from 1509 to 1559 in her book, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England.

Her current research project, ‘Twixt earnest and twixt game’: Ceremony and Play in Early Modern England, examines the survival of ceremonies and rituals in Protestant England.

Science produces some of the most intriguing and arresting images in modern culture, from wildlife photographs to scanning electron microscope images. Yet the historical links between scientific research and visual representation are not always apparent. This conference brings together historians of science and art in order to examine the relationship between science and visual culture in the first hundred years of the Royal Society. We hope that the meeting will demonstrate how art, artists, and print-makers enabled creativity and innovation in science, and the extent to which naturalists and natural philosophers, in turn, transformed visual resources and strategies into something of their own.

This event is supported by the AHRC as part of an international network on ‘Origins of science as a visual pursuit: the case of the early Royal Society’ (http://picturingscience.wordpress.com). Relevant printed books and manuscripts from the Royal Society’s collections will be on display during the meeting.

For abstracts of papers, a full programme and registration details please visit the Royal Society’s website http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/curiously-drawn/.

For further information please contact Dr Felicity Henderson, Events and Exhibitions Manager, Royal Society Centre for History of Science.  Tel +44 (0)20 7451 2597.  Web royalsociety.org

Call for papers
Deadline Friday 4 May 2012

The Shakespeare Institute invites graduate students with interests in both Shakespearean and Renaissance studies to join them in June for the Fourteenth Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference.

The interdisciplinary conference provides a friendly but stimulating academic forum in which graduate students from all over­ the world can present their research and meet together in an active centre of Shakespearean research and theatre: Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Undergraduate students in their final two years of study are also invited to attend the conference as auditors.

The conference will feature talks by Peter Holland (Notre Dame), Tiffany Stern (Oxford), Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin), Martin Butler (Leeds), Deborah Shaw (RSC), René Weis (UCL), and Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford). Delegates have the opportunity to attend the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III, part of the World Shakespeare Festival, at a group-booking price. Lunch will be provided each day, and delgates are invited to a dance and drinks reception one night.

Abstracts of approximately 200 words for papers twenty minutes in length (3,000 words or less) are invited. Delegates wishing to give papers must register by Friday 4 May 2012. Early registration is strongly encouraged to ensure a place on the conference programme.

The BritGrad website contains more information about the event and venue, including prices and downloadable registration forms: www.britgrad.wordpress.com.

Find them on Facebook:
BritGrad 2012

Contact email: britgrad@yahoo.com

The organisers are also pleased to announce that the conference plenary address will be delivered by Professor John Patrick Montaño (University of Delaware), author of The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

For further information, including details of podcasts from the first conference, please visit the conference website www.tudorstuartireland.com or contact the organisers at info@tudorstuartireland.com.

A warm invitation to our next event. Dr Helen Smith works at the University of York where she teaches early modern literature. Her research interests include the history of the book, women and gender in early modern England, and questions of religious experience, travel, and conversion. She is Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded project Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England, more details here: http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/conversion/, and is currently writing a book called ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England
(OUP).

Membership can be obtained at any of our lectures for £5 for the academic year, or single lectures can be attended for £3 each.

If a lie had no more faces but one, as truth had, we should be in farre better termes than we are: For whatsoever a lier should say, we would take it in a contrarie sense. But the opposite of truth has many shapes, and an undefinite field.

Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Lyers’ (Florio translation -1603)

Can we say that truth has ‘no more faces than one’? Montaigne implies that human relationships with truth are straightforward, whereas our attitudes towards falsehood are complicated by its multiplicity. But how stable is the notion of ‘truth’? Does truth – like falsehood – appear in many forms, and if so, can we ever take it at face value?

Legal, emotional, and spiritual concerns — all vital to truth-telling discourses — are intimately bound in the Renaissance. This conference offers a forum for the exploration of their intersections. The study of legal culture has become increasingly central to the analysis of early modern literary texts, and legal paradigms are inescapable when scholars turn their attention, as many have recently done, to the equivocal power of language to bind people together. We find the legal value of such bonds – in the form of oaths, promises and contracts – going hand in hand with interpersonal relationships and their emotional and spiritual dimensions.

Our objective is to foster debate about the marriage between two clearly connected fields: Law and Literature; and the study of early modern emotion. How do these fields work together? We form bonds; we tell lies; we search for and construct truths: but under what circumstances?

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

- The connections between law, emotion, and obligation, and how the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries engage with these dynamics.

- The formation and evaluation of bonds in the early modern world.

- How public/private spaces affect attitudes towards truth-telling.

- The relationship between faith, truth, and honesty in the Renaissance.

- How belief and trust are generated.

- The binding power of language and rhetoric.

- Transmissions of knowledge, belief, and emotion.

Confirmed keynote speakers are:

John Kerrigan (Cambridge), on Bonds
Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), on Lies
Lorna Hutson (St Andrews), on Circumstances

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include an abstract (of no more than 200 words), 3 keywords, and 3 citations, and should be emailed to earlymodern[at]st-andrews.co.uk. We are happy to consider proposals for panels; in the event that we are unable to accommodate the panel, papers will be considered on an individual basis.

All abstracts must be received by July 31st 2012.

We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their careers, working in departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, History, Languages, Law, Theology, and other relevant subject areas. General questions can be directed to the conference organizers – Rachel Holmes and Toria Johnson – at earlymodern[at]st-andrews.co.uk.

In conjunction with the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL), with generous support from the Society for Renaissance Studies.