Northern Renaissance Seminar
Forthcoming Events
Northern Renaissance Seminar: 'Writing the Renaissance North', Sheffield Hallam University, 22 June 2013
This one-day symposium will focus on the ways in which the idea of the north was understood, imagined and represented in the writing of the early modern period. We invite proposals for 20 minute papers that consider early modern literary or cultural engagements with the north, either as a geographical space or an intellectual concept. Also welcome are considerations of the significance of the north in the textual or performance afterlives of Renaissance works. See here for full cfp.
Themes to address might include, but are not limited to:
- Scotland
- Northern England
- Migration to/from the north
- Political ideals associated with the north (e.g. Republicanism)
- Modern dramatic performance
- James VI & I
- Cartography
- Barbarism
Please send 250-300 word abstracts to renaissancenorth@yahoo.co.uk.
Closing date for proposals: 26/04/2013
Northern Renaissance Seminar: 'The Politics of Puritan and Nonconformist writing 1558-1689'
Northumbria University, 20 April 2013
This conference is concerned with re-visiting the politics of religious writing in the 'Long Reformation', a broad chronology of early modern literary and political culture and across an inclusive range of literary genres. Papers will consider puritan and nonconformist writing and its engagement with / impact on a wide range of political and cultural contexts.
Themes to address on the day might include:
- Catholicism and anti-Catholicism
- Separatists and sectarians
- Puritanism, nonconformity and the established Church
- Puritanism and dissent
- Print culture, Puritanism and nonconformity, 1558-1689
- Non-conformity and the stage
- Literature and politics of toleration
- Royalist Puritanism 1642-60
- Satire
- Migration, exile, and non-conformity
- Persecution and propaganda
- Puritan places and literary production
A pdf of the programme can be found here.
Previous Events
Northern Renaissance Seminar: ‘Disability and the Renaissance’
Leeds Trinity University College, 8 September 2012
Keynote speaker: Dr Alison Hobgood (Willamette University)
A successful event was hosted by Leed Trinity University College, considering ways in which disability can be conceptualised in, through and by the Renaissance. A conference programme can be found here.
Genre in the Renaissance
University of Chester • 17th March 2012
Keynote speakers: Professor John Drakakis (University of Stirling) Professor Marion Wynne-Davies (University of Surrey)
This NRS event seeks to explore the field of genre studies in the Renaissance, endeavouring to expose some of the ways in which genres are employed, manipulated, or resisted in Renaissance literature, poetry and drama. Download our poster.
The Winter’s Tale symposium
12 November 2011
Northern Renaissance Seminar series, University of Liverpool
This one-day Symposium is a part of the larger month-long Liverpool Winter’s Tale Festival celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It aims to enhance our understanding of this complex play, and papers presented at the symposium may focus on the text at the moment of production, its relationship with its predecessors and contemporaries, both within Shakespeare’s own writing and beyond, its transmission through editorial processes, as well as its interpretation through contemporary performances and re-readings. Confirmed speakers include Helen Cooper (Cambridge), Subha Mukherji (Cambridge) and Lori Humphrey Newcomb (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Download our poster.
The Price of Peace
10 June 2011
Read further details of this 2011 conference.
Re-reading William Shakespeare Twenty-five Years On: A Colloquium with Terry Eagleton
Saturday 7 May 2011
Download our Call for Papers as a PDF
How do we re-read Shakespeare now? What value do the terms set out by Eagleton: language, nature, desire, law, money, the body, and the work of theorists and philosophers continue to hold for us?... Read more...
One-Day Seminar held on 15 May 2010:
Love and Death in the Renaissance
Northern Renaissance Seminar series, Leeds University
Keynote Speaker, Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University
Click here for full details of the conference and programme.
In this one day seminar event we plan to consider the peculiar pairings of love and death that so often animate the Renaissance mind. Medical opinion, theology, historical memoirs, and drama are among the many kinds of discourse where love and death are thought to come into contact with one another as a matter of necessity. How did this happen? What was the origin of the mating of love and death? What was its purpose? What were its consequences? Long before Freud and the contest between Eros and Thanatos there was, of course, the story of Romeo and Juliet and all its analogues. There was the commonplace that passion could kill, or that, as Shakespeare once put it, ‘desire is death’, and there was another that said that death was to be desired. ‘After so foul a journey,’ George Herbert wrote about life and its passions, ‘death is fair’. Death was the ultimate beloved. Read more about our Love and Death in the Renaissance event.
Events 2007-08
Everyday Life The Idea of Pleasure The Country and the City
'Everyday Life'
10 November 2007
The importance of the everyday for understanding early modern culture and society took its main impetus from the Annales school of historiography in the 1960s and 70s, and it has long since become a main theme of new historicist and related schools of early modern cultural studies since the 1980s. In fact, the everyday has become so common a concern of Renaissance studies that we may well be taking it for granted. What is ‘the everyday’ in the context of early modern Europe? What is its relation to the exceptional event, the ritual moment, the conduct of political life, or the production of literature and art? How was the everyday vertically and horizontally integrated, or non-integrated, in view of regional affiliations and class and status divisions? How did artists and writers represent it – or for that matter, fail to represent it?
'The Idea of Pleasure'
23 February 2008
Following up on our seminar on ‘Everyday Life’, we seek papers discussing how pleasure, and the idea of pleasure, contributed to the organisation and representation of the material world in early modern Europe. What beliefs were held about ‘pleasure’? What relationships between religion and pleasure are developed (e.g. by Erasmus, More, and Rabelais) and beyond? How was pleasure signified in during the period? What rewards and punishments, or delights and dangers, were associated with it? Was pleasure understood as a single phenomenon, experienced across a spectrum of private and public arenas of life, or were there different kinds of pleasures associated with different kinds of experience? How was pleasure related to penitence, or pain? How was it related to class, gender, and ethnicity?
The Country and the City
8 November 2008
The latest in the series of the Northern Renaissance Seminar was held at the School of Arts & Social Sciences, Northumbria University in Newcastle on 8th November 2008. The theme for this session was 'The Country and the City'. This one-day conference was a collaboration between Lancaster University and Northumbria University. Speakers included Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University), Jonathan Hope (Strathcylde University) and Alexander Cowan (Northumbria University).
Department of English & Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University,