View all previous Early Modern Exchanges events here. Events are sorted in reverse chronological order.
- 2022
- 2021
Date Event 8 December 2021
EMERG IN-PERSON: Thomas Nashe, 'To the gentlemen students of both universities'
17 November 2021
10 November 2021
3 November 2021
20 October 2021
29 June 2021
EME ONLINE WORKSHOP: Poetic Exchanges at the Cardinals’ Courts of Sixteenth-Century Rome
17 June 2021 8 June 2021–9 June 2021 19 May 2021 4 May 2021
VIRTUAL IAS Festival - Transgender Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
4 May 2021
29 April 2021 MREMS ONLINE: Ridiculing the ‘Patient’ / Nobility & Diplomacy in the Hispanic Monarchy
30 March 2021 Dire Straits: Patagonia and the Magellan Circumnavigation at 500
18 March 2021 17 March 2021 15 March 2021 IAS Book Launch - India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World
3 March 2021 4 February 2021 MREMS ONLINE: Defining Distraction / 'La Guerre avec la Plume'
20 January 2021 - 2020
Date Event 17 December 2020 CSSA ONLINE Book launch: Sujit Sivasundaram's 'Waves Across the South' 8 December 2020 MREMS ONLINE: 'Consoling the Collective' and 'Heavy Weather'
2 December 2020 24 November 2020 IAS Book Launch - Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person's Guide
19 November 2020 MREMS: Confessions of an English Salon; On Arthur and Excalibur
28 October 2020 16 September 2020 30 June 2020 6 March 2020 Print Culture of Indigenous Languages / Cultura impresa en las lenguas indígenas
24 February 2020–25 February 2020 29 January 2020 City-craft and Statecraft: The role of data in spatialising the Myth of Venice
27 January 2020
- 2019
Date Event 6 December 2019 6 November 201 Lessons from the Golden Age: The Dutch Republic and the Future of Conflict in a Warming Climate
23 October 2019 The Spanish Comedias: The Intersecting Identities of Queens / Problematic Status in Dutch Republic
22 October 2019 6-8 June 2019
20 March 2019 Joachim du Bellay’s Roman Poetry / Teachers' salaries in Verona (1407-1515)
13 March 2019 ‘The very verge of his confine’: Cicero, Shakespeare and Attitudes to Old Age
6 March 2019 27 February 2019 Post-medieval Latin verse in English manuscript sources, c.1550-1700: initial findings
20 February 2019 Ovid's Heroides & Early Modern Literary Tradition / Division of Linguistic Labour in Communal Italy
25 January 2019 Digital Launch Event: The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe - 2018
- 2017
Date Event 7 December 2017 6 December 2017 29 November 2017 23 November 2017 20 November 2017 Binding the frontier: networking of émigrés in Habsburg Hungary & Kingdom of Naples 16-18th century
1 November 2017 26 October 2017 25 October 2017 Popular Literacies and the First Historians of the First Crusade
18 October 2017 Representing ‘Reality’ in European Travel Narratives of the Safavid Empire
20 September 2017 5-10 June 2017 Gold, Shakespeare, Plague, Monsters and Written Treasures: The UCL Festival of Culture
17 May 2017 23 March 2017 21 March 2017 15 March 2017 8 March 2017 Reflecting on Dante's Aristotelianism / The Renaissance revival of Menippean satire
1 March 2017 23 February 2017 - 2016
Date Event 8 December 2016 Spatial margins and social marginality in fifteenth-century London / Rewriting Modernity
30 November 2016 23 November 2016 13 October 2016
Launch event for The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe
1 October 2016 Mary I (1516-1558). A Conference in her 500th Anniversary Year
9 June 2016 7 June 2016 A discussion about the future of the early modern and adjacent moments at UCL
3 May 2016 24 March 2016 23 March 2016 2 March 2016 2 March 2016 25 February 2016 20 January 2016 - 2015
Date Event 17 December 2015 ‘Popular Piety and Medieval Religious Revivals: The Bianchi of 1399’
25 November 2015 19 November 2015 'What's in a purse? 'Purse hoards' and classification in medieval numismatics
11 September 2015 20 May 2015 6 May 2015 19 March 2015 French Social Identity in 16th and 17th Century Travel Narratives
19 February 2015 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa's 1472 Naval Expedition against the Turks
18 February 2015 5 February 2015 Early Modern Women Translators: A Re-evaluation of Their Creative and Political Agency
- 2014
Date Event 5 December 2014 Travel and Writing in the Global Renaissance: Revisiting the Peregrination of Fernão Mendes Pinto
23 October 2014 3 June 2014 9 May 2014 7 May 2014 28 April 2014 26 March 2014 21 March 2014 19 March 2014 12 March 2014 11 March 2014 12 February 2014 - 2013
Wednesday 11th December 2013, 2 - 4pm, Foster Court 307, SELCS Common Room
Borderlands: From the California Missions to Manila Ivories
Ana Ruiz Guiterrez (University of Granada), Manila Ivories and Transnational Exchanges. Miguel Sorroche Cuerva (University of Granada), Building Frontiers in the Californian Missions. **These talks will be in Spanish**
Wednesday 4 December 2013, 4.30pm, Roberts Building Room 309
Literary Geographies and Roaming Relics
Jaime Goodrich (Wayne State University), Mapping the Literary Geography of Early Modern English Benedictine Convents. James Kelly (Durham), Roaming Relics: English Women Religious and Identity Formation in Counter-Reformation Europe
Sunday 24th November, 1 - 7pm, Wilkins Old Refectory
Iphigenia at Aulis: A Special Performance
A special performance of Lady Jane Lumley's 1555 translation of the Euripides play.
Wednesday 13th November 2013, 2 - 6pm, Foster Court 307, SELCS Common Room
Moving: Pathways, Transport and Place
A workshop on early modern travel writing, historical geography and environmental criticism with a view to exploring how Digital Humanities, in particular the visualisation of data and the interactive mapping of historical information can be employed to produce new ways of seeing the early modern world. We are interested in the relationship between actual and fictional/textual journeys and the ways in which this distorting lens can be represented visually. Speakers: Robin Edwards (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL), Visualisation, Geographical Data and Infographics; Nydia Pineda (Queen Mary, University of London), Mapping Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moon; Andrew Reynolds (UCL, IoA), Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England; Elisabetta Tarantino (European Humanities Research Centre – Oxford), John Rastell's Cosmographical Play; Katherine Parker (University of Pittsburg), Toward a more “perfect knowledge: British geographic knowledge and South Seas exploration in the eighteenth century; Colm MacCrossan (Digital Editor, Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership Subject Specialist, EEBO-TCP Collections: Navigations), Visualising Hakluyt; James Lyon Fenner (Collaborative Doctoral Student with the Science Museum London and University of Nottingham), ‘British Small Craft’: the cultural geographies of mid twentieth technology and display.
Wednesday 23 October, 5.30pm, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, Room 431
Donne's Conversions III
We are delighted to announce the last in our three-part seminar series John Donne’s Conversions, 1613-2013. This seminar will directly address the question of early modern religious conversion, particularly as it pertains to Donne’s sermons. Michael Questier (Queen Mary, University of London), The significance of converts and conversion in writing a narrative of post-Reformation England. Mary Morrissey (Reading), Motives for conversion in Donne’s sermons. Please note that unlike previous events in this series, this seminar will take place in the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, in room 431. Location details are available here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/estates/roombooking/building-location/?id=126 . Attendees are welcome to arrive from 5pm. John Donne’s Conversions, 1613-2013 has been sponsored by UCL Grand Challenges. For information please contact Daniel Starza Smith (ucledsm@ucl.ac.uk).
Wednesday 16 October 2013, 4.30 pm, Foster Court 233
Crying Out in Pain: Understanding Physical Suffering in the Early Modern Period
Guido Giglioni (The Warburg Institute), Raw imagination and Mental Pain in Elijah Montalto’s Archipathologia (1614). Mary Ann Lund (University of Leicester), “The Pain's Nothing”: Relative Perceptions of Pain in Early Modern Literature. Respondents: Tony Dickenson (UCL, Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology) and Maria Fitzgerald (UCL, Developmental Neurobiology). Organised by Anna Corrias (The Warburg Institute) and Angus Gowland (History Department, UCL)
10 September 2013, 5.30pm, Foster Court 114
Dennis Flynn, Donne's Enclosures: the etiquette of privacy and secrecy in his correspondence
Dennis Flynn will reveal some of the key findings from his ongoing work on the ground-breaking Oxford edition of John Donne’s letters. Remarkably, the Oxford Letters will be the first scholarly edition of this major author’s correspondence. This paper will begin with an introduction to the project, explaining why Donne’s letters have proved so trenchantly difficult to edit. It will then focus on the question of enclosures in these letters, in order to demonstrate the ways that Donne understood and played with courtly conventions of epistolary etiquette. Respondent: Jeanne Shami, University of Regina Dennis Flynn and Jeanne Shami are co-editors, with M. Thomas Hester, of The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, and are both senior editors of the forthcoming Oxford edition of Donne’s letters. This seminar is part of the series ‘John Donne’s Conversions, 1613-2013’, sponsored by UCL Grand Challenges. For information please contact Daniel Starza Smith (ucledsm@ucl.ac.uk).
29th May, 4.30pm, Foster Court 225
Gabriel Harvey's Reading
Mathew Symons (UCL, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters), Matching up the Margins: Across Gabriel Harvey's Books; Chris Stamatakis (UCL, English), How Gabriel Harvey Read His Castiglione.
Respondent: Lisa Jardine (UCL, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters).16th May, 6.30pm, Roberts Lecture Theatre 106, Roberts Building
Staging Daniel's Cleopatra
Professor Helen Hackett in conversation with one of the directors of the world premiere of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra, Yasmin Arshad, as well as two of the actors from the show. It will include live performance and extracts from the DVD made of the production. The event is free but ticketed, book at Eventbrite.
24th April, 4.30pm, Foster Court 132
*Special Guest Lecture* Stephen Pender (University of Windsor, Ontario), Heat and Moisture, Rhetoric and Spiritus
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.
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.
Sunday 3rd March, 2pm, The Great Hall, Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N 2AB
Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra
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. 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.
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)
24th January, *Christopher Ingold G21, Ramsay Lecture Theatre, 6pm*
Special Lecture: Nigel Smith (Princeton), Literature, Politics and the Dutch Republic
- 2012
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.
6th December *Archaeology G6 Lecture Theatre, 4pm*
Special Lecture: Karen Hearn (Honorary Research Professor, UCL), 'Representing Pregnancy in Elizabethan & Jacobean Portraits'
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;
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.
10th October
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde), The Animal Face of Early Modern England
2nd May, 4.30 pm. Galton Lecture Theatre, 1-19 Torrington Place
Theory and the Medieval Animal.
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College), On Worms; Bob Mills (KCL), On Animals
21st March. Roberts Building 110.
Catholic Aesthetics.
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’
29th February. Roberts Building 110.
Borderlands
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
1st February. Foster Court 114.
War and the French Sixteenth Century.
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
18th January. Foster Court 114.
Early Modern Theories of the Soul.
Richard Serjeantson,(Cambridge), The soul and the human sciences before the Enlightenment; Guido Giglioni (Warburg), Bacon on the Soul
- 2011
16th November
Women and the Early Modern Sermon
Guest Lecture with Jeanne Shami (University of Regina)
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.
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
8th June. Malet Place Engineering 1.03. *5pm*
Francis Bacon in International Collaboration
Alan Stewart (Columbia)
9th March. Foster Court 243.
England and Spain.
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
9th February. Foster Court Room 243.
English Catholics, European Contexts.
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;l Alison Shell (UCL, English), English Catholic Womanhood in Richard Verstegan's 'Odes';
19th January. Drayton Jevons Lecture Theatre.
Travel and the Idea of Europe.
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?
- 2010
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
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
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
11th May at 4.30pm, Foster Court 243.
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
29th April 2010, 5pm, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, followed by a reception in the North Cloisters at 6pm.
Centre Launch Event: Shakespeare and the Inquisition
Professor Brian Cummings, Sussex University