The Early Modern Intelligencer

Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800

Convenors: Laura Gowing (King’s College London), Kate Hodgkin (University of East London) Michael Hunter (Birkbeck), and Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck).

Seminars will take place in the Bedford Room, G37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1, on the following Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. All are welcome!

10 October
Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)  Generation: is this a useful category of analysis for early modern historians?

7 November
Michael Hunter (Birkbeck) Boyle’s legacy: second sight in English and Scottish thought in the long 18th century

Friday 22 November  Joint session with Women’s History Seminar, in Senate House G21A
Sarah Fox (Manchester) ‘I do most sincerely wish you Dear Madam a Happy Minute’: the experience of childbirth in the long 18th century

5 December
Matt Phillpott (IHR) Tracing the reputation of Polydore Vergil: scholarly debates and cultural change during    the English Reformation

23 January
Lyndal Roper (Oriel College, Oxford) [Title to be confirmed]

20 February
Mark Knights (University of Warwick) Corruption in early modern Britain

20 March
Katherine Hunt (University of East Anglia) Shuffle and play, read and learn: early modern English didactic playing cards

Work in Progress: Bringing Art into Being in the Early Modern Period
Fifth Early Modern Symposium

09.30 – 18.00, Saturday 26 October 2013
(with registration from 09.00)
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Complex narratives spanning months, years or even decades exist behind the single bracketed date attached to artworks to indicate their moment of execution or completion. This one-day symposium will explore the ‘ante-natal’ development of early modern art from its conception to its ‘quickening’ and eventual birth. The process fascinated contemporary theorists and continues to raise questions for modern art historians. For example, when was an artistic project considered finished or unfinished? What terms were used to indicate the various stages of bringing an artwork into being, and what implications did these terms have for authorship and authenticity? The creation of art is not the work of a moment or achieved at a single stroke; it involves a series of transpositions from idea to study or plan, from sketch to painting, from plan to building and so on. How did early modern art reflect on the process of its own making?

Organised by Anya Matthews and Giulia Martina Weston (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Ticket/entry details: £16 (£11 students, Courtauld staff/students and concessions)
BOOK ONLINE: http://courtauld-institute.digitalmuseum.co.uk

Or send a cheque made payable to ‘The Courtauld Institute of Art’ to:

Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, stating ‘Fifth Early Modern Symposium’.

For further information, email ResearchForumEvents [at]courtauld.ac.uk

Download (PDF, 153.95KB)

Autumn/Spring Term Meetings*

• 1 Nov 13  AGM, followed by Nicola Costaras (Victoria & Albert Museum)
  ‘Early Modern Blues’, Room MAL B20

• 22 Nov 13   Andy Kesson (Roehampton University)
  ‘”Peculiar houses”: The Newness of Early Modern Theatres’

• 13 Dec 13   Sir Keith Thomas (All Souls, Oxford)
  ‘What did it Mean in Early Modern England to be “Civilized”?’ (followed by Christmas drinks party)

• 17 Jan 14  Professor Penelope Corfield (Royal Holloway)
  ‘Vauxhall Gardens and the Eroticisation of Mass Entertainments’

*All meetings start at 6.30 except the Annual General Meeting on 1 November 2013 which will start at 6.00pm, preceding Nicola Costaras’s talk at 6.30pm. Further speakers will be confirmed in due course. Unless otherwise specified, each event is free for members free (annual membership £7), non-members £4, donations welcome.

Venues will be confirmed 3-4 weeks prior to the event, please check our Blog, The Early Modern Intelligencer, where you will find out about lots of early modern things: http://www.emintelligencer.org.uk

Please remember that by entering the Amazon website via the link on the top right hand side of our blog, the Society will receive approximately 5% commission from anything you purchase from Amazon.
For further details of our aims and events please see:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/current-students/societies-student-groups/early-modern-society

Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage: New Perspectives
Edited by Philip Major, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Series: Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama

Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and theatre manager, Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683) remains a comparatively elusive and neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume shine new light on a singular, contradictory Englishman 400 years after his birth. They increase our knowledge and deepen our understanding not only of Killigrew himself, but of seventeenth-century dramaturgy, and its complex relationship to court culture and to evolving aesthetic tastes.
The first book on Killigrew since 1930, this study re-examines the significant phases of his life and career: the little-known playwriting years of the 1630s; his long exile during the 1640s and 1650s, and its personal, political and literary repercussions; and the period following the Restoration, when, with Sir William Davenant, he enjoyed a monopoly of the London stage. These fresh accounts of Killigrew build on the recent resurgence of interest in royalists and the royalist exile, and underscore literary scholars’ continued fascination with the Restoration stage. In the process, they question dominant assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and cultural boundaries. What emerges is a figure who confounds as often as he justifies traditional labels of dilettante, cavalier wit and swindler.

Find out more at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409466680

Conveners: Philip Broadhead, Julian Swann, Peter Campbell, Filippo de Vivo, John Henderson, Joël Félix.  Mondays at 17.15 in Room G21A Senate House, Malet Street, LONDON WC1E 7HU.

Autumn 2013

11 November:  Dr Andrea Guidi (Birkbeck) ‘Record keeping and warfare in Renaissance Italy: the Florentine militia, from Machiavelli to the Medici’

9 December:   Dr Marc-André Grebe (Bielefeld), ‘An empire made of paper? The Royal Archive of Simancas and its function under Charles V and Philip II (1540-1598)’

Spring 2014

6 January:  Professor Donald Sutherland (Maryland), ‘’La semaine sanglante’. What happened after the Bastille fell” (Jointly with the Modern French History seminar)

13 January:  Professor Olivier Poncet (Ecole des Chartes), ‘State and notaries in Early Modern France: another way of social-disciplining?’

27 January:  Dr James Shaw (Sheffield), ‘Debt in Venice: Stories from the Archive, 1600-1700’

10 February:  Dr Phil McCluskey (Sheffield), ‘Echoes of the crusade in Louis XIV’s France’

10 March:  Dr Jon Smyth (Birkbeck)  ‘The search for a Republican morality: Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being’

Summer 2014

19 May:  Dr Guy Rowlands ‘The business of war in the age of absolutism: entrepreneurs and the fiscal-military state in the reign of Louis XIV’

2 June:  Dr Silvia Evangelisti (UEA), ‘Gender and Missionary Discourses in Early Modern Spain: the case of Maria de Agred