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Early Modern Exchanges

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Past Events

Spring 2013 Seminars, Wednesdays.

24th January, *Christopher Ingold G21, Ramsay Lecture Theatre, 6pm*

Special Lecture

Nigel Smith (Princeton), Literature, Politics and the Dutch Republic

Wed 6th Feb, *6pm*, Foster Court 114

Early Modern Women and Drama

This seminar will introduce the performance of Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra to take place on 3rd March (see below).

Alison Findlay (Lancaster), "Ile be my selfe ... And I must bee a Queene": Daniel’s Cleopatra and the performance of sovereignty

Marion Wynne-Davies (Surrey), More Women, More Weeping: Mary Sidney Herbert's Tragedy of Antonie

Yasmin Arshad (UCL) and Emma Whipday (UCL), Staging Daniel's Cleopatra

Chair: Helen Hackett (UCL)

Sunday 3rd March, 2pm

Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra

The Great Hall, Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N 2AB

To book click here.

Daniel's tragedy (composed in 1594) was one of the earliest English plays about Cleopatra, and almost certainly influenced Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Its original performances would have included female actors in country house settings. Our Jacobean-style production will shed light on female participation in drama in Shakespeare's time, and on early modern ideas of female heroism. It will also illuminate the history of perceptions of race; and, since it draws on classical and French sources, the importance of international influences in shaping the English Renaissance.

A DVD of the performance will be available for purchase; details will be announced here in due course.

To learn more about the production and to view rehearsal photos, please visit our blog, Twitter, or Facebook.

See also the European Institute and UCL Events page.

This event is part of the 'Gained in Translation' season of the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction. It is also generously supported by: Oxford Journals: Music and Letters; UCL English Department; UCL European Institute; UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities, including FIGS (the Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies); UCLU Drama Society.

20th March, Foster Court 114, 4.30pm

Social, Intellectual and Political Networks and Exchanges across the Italian Peninsula (1500-1700)

Simone Testa (British Library), Networks and Exchanges in Italy 1525-1700.

Lorenza Gianfrancesco (Royal Holloway), Academies and cultural exchange in early modern Spanish Naples: from intellectual debates to propaganda

For more on the project see The Italian Academies 1525 - 1700 and Italian Academies Database.

21 March 2013, Wilkins Old Refectory, 5 to 6.30pm.

Good Friday, 1613–2013: John Donne’s ‘Riding Westward’ at 400

A workshop open to all.

Daniel Starza Smith (UCL), The intelligence that moves: “Goodfriday” in context
Katherine Rundell (All Souls, Oxford), I am carried towards the West: rethinking Donne’s critical history

Copies of the poem will be provided.

This year marks 400 years since the composition of one of John Donne’s most important poems, ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westwards’, which records the author’s intense religious meditations at a crucial period in his life. Born into a family of Catholic martyrs in a time of heightened religious sensitivity, Donne converted to the Church of England and became one of the most celebrated preachers of his day. A daringly controversial erotic poet and a hot-headed young man whose scandalous marriage cost him a promising career at court, he ended his life as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, a moral compass for the nation. ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westwards’, written around the time Donne decided to take orders, thus marks a turning point in the development of early modern England’s intellectual history. This event will explore some of the current groundbreaking research into Donne’s life, poetry, letters, and sermons that is shedding light on this important poem.

Please direct any enquiries to Dr Daniel Smith.

This event is supported by UCL's Grand Challenge for Intercultural Interaction.

Autumn 2012 Seminars, Wednesdays 4.30pm, Foster Court 114.

In addition to our own seminars detailed below we were delighted to be associated with:

Reevaluating the Literary Coterie, 1550-1825

A series of seminars organised by Will Bowers and Hannah Crumme.

10th October

Erica Fudge (Strathclyde), The Animal Face of Early Modern England

24th October

Shakespeare: Staging the World

Dora Thornton (Curator, British Museum), The British Museum's Shakespeare:Staging the World exhibition

An event at which Dora Thornton and our own Professor Helen Hackett are speaking is taking place in the British Museum at 8pm following the seminar, see The Drama of Nation Building.

28th November

Catholic Archives and Collections

Jan Graffius (Stonyhurst College), Bullworks Against Heresie': Some Relics from the Sodality at St Omers

Fr Peter Harris (Honorary Archivist, English College Valladolid), 'And did those feet in ancient time ...': The archives of exile: the holdings of the Royal English College, Valladolid, Spain

6th December *Archaeology G6 Lecture Theatre, 4pm*

Special Lecture 

Karen Hearn (Honorary Research Professor, UCL), 'Representing Pregnancy in Elizabethan & Jacobean Portraits'

2011 - 2012 Seminars

5th October. Portraiture and Dolls Houses

Maria Loh (UCL, Art History), 'Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye': Early Modern Portraiture, Friendship and Mourning
Hanneke Grootenboer (St Peter's, Oxford), Room for Contemplation: Heidegger, Bachelard and the Early Modern Doll's House

2nd November. Careers in the Early Modern

Lucy Worsley (Historic Royal Palaces) and Laura Massey (Rare Books Seller, Peter Harrington Books). There are no paper titles since the session will be an informal talk about the range of possible careers that expertise in early modern studies can lead to. For more on the BBC series fronted by Lucy see: If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home.

16th November. Guest Lecture

Jeanne Shami (University of Regina), Women and the Early Modern Sermon

18th January. Early Modern Theories of the Soul. Foster Court 114.

Richard Serjeantson,(Cambridge), The soul and the human sciences before the Enlightenment
Guido Giglioni (Warburg), Bacon on the Soul

1st February. War and the French Sixteenth Century. Foster Court 114.

Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, Oxford), Battle-scarred stories: Rabelais and/in Scots translation
Andrea Frisch (Maryland), The French Wars of Religion and the Boundaries of Tragedy

29th February. Borderlands. Roberts Building 110.

Sizen Yiacoup (Liverpool University), Chivalrous Moors: Warfare and Cultural Hybridity in the Castilian Frontier Ballads

Claire Norton (St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill), Blurred Boundaries: the Mediterranean World as a Site of Interaction and Integration

21st March. Catholic Aesthetics. Roberts Building 110.

Peter Davidson (Aberdeen), Rubens's design for the 1635 'Arch of the Mint' and the Virgin of the Andes?
Lilla Grindlay (University College London), ‘“Some out of vanity will call her the Queene of heauen”: polemical representations of the Virgin Mary in early modern religious discourse’

2nd May, 4.30 pm. Theory and the Medieval Animal. Galton Lecture Theatre, 1-19 Torrington Place

Karl Steel (Brooklyn College), On Worms
Bob Mills (KCL), On Animals

Seminar Series 2010 - 11.

20th October: France and England: Medieval to Early Modern

Jane Gilbert (UCL, French), French sans frontières? Translation and Translatio in the 15th Century

Ardis Butterfield (UCL, English), 'Our self-stranger Nation': England, France and period boundaries

Paul Davis (UCL, English), Rochester's French

8th December: Renaissance Virtues: Privation and Manipulation

Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, History), Machiavelli and the Manipulation of Virtue

Angus Gowland (UCL, History), European Melancholy

Jeremy Robbins (Edinburgh, Spanish), The Place of Virtue in Baltasar Gracián's Aphorism

15th December: History of the Book

William Sherman (York, English), Mapping the World of Knowledge: Hernando Colon and the Biblioteca Colombina

Henry Woudhuysen (UCL, English), Buying Continental Books in late 16th- and 17th-century England

19th January. Travel and the Idea of Europe. Drayton Jevons Lecture Theatre.

Wendy Bracewell (UCL, SSEES), Double vision: writing back from Europe's eastern margins

Daniel Andersson (Wolfson College, Oxford), Of books, measurement and coloured shoes: the humanist Orientalism of a Renaissance traveller

Anthony Payne (UCL), Hakluyt, America and the Ancients: a New World or an Old?

9th February. English Catholics, European Contexts. Foster Court Room 243.

Caroline Bowden (QMUL, History), Islands of Englishness? The English convents as centres of cultural production in seventeenth-century Flanders

Helen Hackett (UCL, English), The international perspectives of English Catholics: the Aston family in Spain and elsewhere

Alison Shell (UCL, English), English Catholic Womanhood in Richard Verstegan's 'Odes'

9th March. England and Spain. Foster Court 243.

Alexander Samson (UCL, Spanish), Translating the Reign of Philip and Mary

John Ardila (Edinburgh), The English Reception of Don Quixote in the Performing Arts

Catherine Scheybeler (KCL), Jorge Juan y Santacilia's mission to London: An example of naval espionage in the eighteenth century

8th June. Malet Place Engineering 1.03. *5pm*

Alan Stewart (Columbia), Francis Bacon in International Collaboration

First Guest Talk:

From Bacon to Hobbes: Samuel Sorbiere and the Intellectual Origins of late seventeenth-century French Libertinism

Professor Richard Hodgson, University of British Columbia

Tuesday 11th May at 4.30pm, Foster Court 243.

Centre Launch Event:

Shakespeare and the Inquisition

Professor Brian Cummings, Sussex University

Thursday 29th April 2010, 5pm, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, followed by a reception in the North Cloisters at 6pm.