Scholarship, Science and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) and Henry Savile (1549-1622)
Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies 6th Annual Conference
T.S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College
Tuesday 1st – Thursday 3rd July 2014
Plenary speaker: Anthony Grafton (Princeton)
Rhiannon Ash (Oxford), Philip Beeley (Oxford), Paul Botley (Warwick), Matteo Campagnolo (Geneva), Andrea Ceccarelli (Padua), Ingrid de Smet (Warwick), Mordechai Feingold (Caltech), Robert Goulding (Notre Dame), Nick Hardy (Cambridge), Scott Mandelbrote (Cambridge), Jean-Louis Quantin (Paris), Paul Quarrie (Maggs Bros.), André-Louis Rey (Geneva), Thomas Roebuck (UEA), Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge), Robin Sowerby (Stirling), Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven), Benjamin Wardhaugh (Oxford), Joanna Weinberg (Oxford).
The conference is co-organized by the University of Oxford (David Norbrook), the University of East Anglia (Tom Roebuck), and the California Institute of Technology (Mordechai Feingold).
Henry Savile (1549-1622) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) were two contrasting giants of late humanism. Savile, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, was a key figure in the history of English science and a formidable presence on the English scholarly and political scene, whose translation of Tacitus led to political controversy and whose editio princeps of Chrysostom in Greek won admiration across Europe. Casaubon, perhaps the leading Greek classical scholar of his generation and a great correspondent within the intellectual exchanges of the Republic of Letters, used his scholarship to become a formidable Protestant polemicist, publishing a vast philological critique of the authorized Catholic ecclesiastical history of Cesare Baronio.
Their lives and works, when considered together, raise vital questions about the history of early-modern knowledge and erudition, the relationship between the histories of science and the humanities, the networks of early-modern intellectual communication, the history of books and archives, the importance of Hebraic scholarship, and the impact of scholarship upon literature. Our conference, timed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Casaubon’s death and the 750th anniversary of Merton College’s foundation (the institution Savile shaped), brings together leading scholars from across the disciplines to answer these questions.
To encourage early registration, reduced registration rates will be offered until the 1st of May 2014:
Full: £100 for three days / £50 per individual day
Graduate: £75 for three days / £40 per individual day
Final conference registration closes on the 19th June 2014.
Graduate bursaries are available upon application.
With thanks for the generous support of: Merton College, Oxford; The Bibliographical Society; the Modern Humanities Research Association; Society for Renaissance Studies; the University of Notre Dame; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford; the Centre for Early Modern Studies; The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.