CALL FOR PAPERS: Early Modern Wales: Space, Place and Displacement

Cymru Fodern Gynnar: Gofod, Lle a Symudiad

An interdisciplinary symposium hosted by the National Library of Wales, 6-7 July 2016, organised by Bryn Williams and Rachel Willie (Bangor University)

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Sarah Prescott (Aberystwyth University)
Professor Philip Schwyzer (University of Exeter)

[Henry VIII] deliuered [the Welsh] wholy from all seruitude, and made them in all poynets equall to the Englishmen. Wherby it commeth to passe, that laying aside their old manners, they, who before were wonte to liue most sparingly: are now enritched and do imitate the Englishmen in diet, & apparell, howbeit, they be somedeale impatient of labour, and ouermuch boastying of the Nobilitie of their stocke, applying them selues rather to the seruice of noble men, then geuynge them selues to the learnyng of handycraftes.
                          Humphrey Llwyd, The Breviary of Britain trans. Thomas Twyne (1573)

In The Breviary of Britain, Humphrey Llwyd laments the acculturalisation processes that he perceives to have led to the anglicisation of the Welsh gentry. The Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 formally annexed Wales to the Kingdom of England and thus changed the relationship between the English and the Welsh. Tudor kingship used the space of Wales to claim a right to the English throne and some Welsh gentry held prominent places at court, but what was Wales and how does the space of Wales connect to England? The ‘geographic turn’ in early modern studies has led to renewed interest in space and place and perennial concerns regarding national identity, memory and language have drawn attention to the landscape of Wales. This interdisciplinary symposium, organised in partnership between the National Library of Wales, the Society for Renaissance Studies and the School of English Literature, Bangor University, brings together scholars working in the fields of Welsh History, Literature, Philosophy, Art History and Musicology to interrogate what we understand by Wales in the early modern period.

Topics addressed may include (but are not limited) to:

• Space or place
• Wales and the cartographic imagination
• Topography
• Language and rhetoric
• Politics
• Identity
• Migration
• Exile
• Memory and remembering the past
• Welsh landscape
• Liminality
• Wales and visual culture 

We welcome abstracts of no more than 250 words for twenty-minute papers, to be sent to emwales@bangor.ac.uk by 29 February 2016.

The symposium will be followed by the Society for Renaissance Studies’ Annual Welsh Lecture: Professor Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex), 'William Thomas (d.1554): A Welsh Traitor in Italy'

CALL FOR PAPERS: Green Britain: Nationhood and the Environment 1500-1750

25th June 2016, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon

CfP deadline: 31st March 2016

Abstracts of 250 words for papers of no more than twenty minutes in length to be sent to greenbritain2016@gmail.com

Keynote speaker: Professor Karen Edwards, University of Exeter

During the early modern period, national identity was increasingly defined by the dynamic between people and the environment they populated. While many still longed for the pastoral ideal of Britain as the ‘Eden of Europe’, the looming threat of pollution, natural disaster, resource depletion, and urbanisation beset the thoughts of contemporary writers, theologians, and politicians. Though it had been long held that the environment had an observable influence on the fortunes of a nation and the character of its citizens, the inhabitants of early modern Britain now became gradually conscious of their impact on the natural world. Environmental issues of increasing variety and scale plagued early modern Britain as society struggled to sustain a rapidly expanding population. From changes in agricultural land use and poor forestry management, to the increasing reliance on the smog-inducing ‘sea-coal’ for fuel, many feared adverse effects on the minds, bodies, and souls of British citizens. Against this backdrop of environmental degradation, Britons were also forced to contend with the harshest decades of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ and a series of extreme weather events that were habitually seen as acts of divine retribution against the Lord’s elect nation. Further to this, new scientific developments in meteorology and geography, and the rise of Baconian methodology, increasingly affected the contemporary theory and practice of environmental governmentality. Differences in race, ethnicity, and national character were explained according to climate and colonies judged on their suitability to the British complexion, with climatological observations acting as an incentive for colonial exploitation.

Beyond vague collocations of Merry England’s ‘green and pleasant lands’, ‘Green Britain’ therefore aims to explore the complex relationship between national identity and the environment in a period of tumultuous ecological change. What conclusions can we derive from the study of early modern environmental issues, and how can we apply these to the complex idea of the early modern identity? To what extent is nationhood defined by the dynamic that exists between people, space, and place? And furthermore, is it possible to define an early modern attitude toward green issues? To this end, we invite proposals for both panels and papers based on the themes of nationhood and/or early modern ‘green’ issues for our one-day interdisciplinary symposium on 25th June, 2016.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Travel writing
• Emerging scientific discourses
• Climate theory
• Pollution
• Space and place
• Cartography and map-making
• Seascapes and maritime history
• Town and country
• Cultivation and Agriculture
• Geography and Meteorology
• Astrology and Cosmology
• Enclosure and land ownership
• Colonialism and Empire
• Providence and providential disaster
• Natural philosophy
• Ecological issues
• Diseases and cures
• Vegetarianism
• Animals and animal rights

https://greenbritain.wordpress.com/
@greenbritain16

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Early Modern Literary Geographies

Early Modern Literary Geographies
Oxford University Press

Series Editors: Julie Sanders, Newcastle University and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Pennsylvania State University.

Influenced by the work of cultural and human geographers, literary scholars have started to attend to the ways in which early modern people constructed their senses of the world out of interactions among places, spaces, and embodied practices. Early Modern Literary Geographies will feature innovative research monographs and agenda-setting essay collections that partake of this “spatial turn.” The term “literary geographies” is to be understood capaciously: we invite submissions on any form of early modern writing that engages with the topics of space, place, landscape and environment. Although English literature is at its centre, Early Modern Literary Geographies will feature scholarship that abuts a range of disciplines, including geography, history, performance studies, art history, musicology, archaeology and cognitive science. Subjects of inquiry might include cartography or chorography; historical phenomenology and sensory geographies; body and environment; mobility studies; histories of travel or perambulation; regional and provincial literatures; urban studies; performance environments; sites of memory and cognition; ecocriticism; and oceanic or new blue studies.

Advisory Board:
Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick
Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library
Bernhard Klein, Professor of English, University of Kent
Andrew McRae, Professor of English, University of Exeter
Evelyn Tribble, Donald Collie Chair of English, University of Otago
Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge
Lesley Cormack, Dean of Arts, University of Alberta
Dan Beaver, Associate Professor of History, Penn State University
Steven Mullaney, Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan

Enquiries to: julie.sanders@ncl.ac.uk and gas11@psu.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Early Modern Line: A Symposium

Friday 18th September 2015 - Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

The Early Modern Lines Research Network is hosting a discursive symposium with keynote presentations from Dr Matthew Eddy (Durham University), Matthias Garn, Master Mason, and carver Kibby Schaefer, alongside an exhibition of items from the Library’s Special Collections.

We invite proposals for 10-minute lightning papers on any topic considering the ‘early modern line’, conceived of in the broadest possible sense. Papers should be designed to provoke discussion, raise problems, puzzle out ideas and ask questions rather than provide answers, and should present work in progress rather than polished research.

Abstracts should be 150–200 words, outlining some of the main points you wish to discuss. Please email them - or any queries you might have - to earlymodernlines@york.ac.uk by Monday 10th August 2015. Travel bursaries, generously provided by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities, are available to all postgraduate students attending the symposium. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for a bursary .

Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• Lines as organisational technologies; e.g. tables, diagrams and brackets
• The importance of the line in scientific, philosophical and mathematical disciplines
• Architectural and artistic lines
• Poetic lines
• Framing devices in early modern books
• Conceptual, metaphorical or figural lines
• Genealogical lines
• The line in three dimensions
• Cartography, trade and travel routes
• The line in military strategy
• Chronological lines and histories
• Decorative lines and pattern
• Folds, cuts, tears and creases
• Typography
• Plotlines
• Weaving, stitching and knitting
• Lines of influence
• Applying modern theories to early modern lines

Michael Drayton's ‘Poly-Olbion' and the Writing of Britain

‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain’, at The Royal Geographical Society

Programme

Thursday 10th September

10.00-10.30 Registration, Main Hall

10.30-11.00 Session 1: Introduction
Andrew McRae (Exeter), ‘The Poly-Olbion Project’

11.00-12.45 Session 2: Forms of Nationhood
Sara Trevisan (Brunel), ‘National Ancestry and Cultural Geography in Poly-Olbion’
James Loxley (Edinburgh), ‘Jonson, Drayton and the Mythography of a Binational Britain’
Sukanya Dasgupta (Calcutta), ‘Imagining Britain: Reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles and Poly-Olbion’

12.45-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.20 Session 3: Waters
Sandra Logan (Michigan State), ‘Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Maritime England and the Free Seas Debate’
Shannon Garner-Balandrin (Northeastern), ‘Curls to Curled Waves: the Poly-Olbion and Michael Drayton’s Female Rivers’
Bernhard Klein (Kent), ‘Poly-Olbion and “those Rough Gods of the Sea”’

3.20-3.45 Tea

3.45-5.30 Session 4: Localism & Regionalism
Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster), ‘Of merry Robin Hood, and of his merrier men’: Anti-Curial Chorography and Michael Drayton’s ‘Robin Hood’s Story’
Todd Andrew Borlik (Huddersfield), ‘Poly-Olbion, Bio-Regionalism, and the Beating of the Bounds’
Steph Mastoris (National Waterfront Museum), ‘Choices in chorography: Inclusion and omission in Drayton’s account of Nottinghamshire’

6.00 Exhibition opening & preview

FRIDAY 11 SEPTEMBER

9.10-10.40 Session 5: Contexts
Daniel Cattell, ‘Michael Drayton and Britain’s Religious Past’
Robert Smith, ‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain in John Trussell’s Touchstone of Tradition’
Esther M. J. van Raamsdonk, ‘British Consciousness and the Travelogue’

10.50-11.10 Coffee

11.10-12.30 Session 6: Cartographies
Rab MacGibbon (National Portrait Gallery), ‘William Hole: Drayton’s engraver in the context of Prince Henry’s court’
William Porter (Harvard), ‘“By his spatious Maps”: The Cartographic Poly-Olbion’

12.30-1.15 Lunch

1.15-2.30 Session 4: John Selden’s Poly-Olbion
Sjoerd Levelt (Bilkent), ‘John Selden’s Medieval Chronicles’
Philip Schwyzer (Exeter), ‘Drayton and Selden in Dialogue’

2.30-2.50 Tea

2.50-4.10 Session 7: Poetics
Angus Vine (Stirling), ‘Drayton’s copious chorography: catalogues, lists and names in Poly-Olbion’
Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), ‘The Problems of Reading The Landscape’

4.10 Closing remarks

Venue: The Royal Geographical Society
1 Kensington Gore,
London,
SW7 2AR
For all booking enquiries please contact: Mandy Bedford

University of Exeter
College of Humanities
Research Office
Queen's Building
The Queen's Drive
Exeter
EX4 4QH
Tel: +44 (0)1392 726145
Email: hums-conferences@ex.ac.uk

Cartography between Europe and the Islamic World, 1100–1600

September 8–9, 2014, Queen Mary University of London 

Registration is now open for the conference of the international Leverhulme Network ‘Cartography between Europe and the Islamic World, 1100–1600’. The conference aims to promote comparative, cross-disciplinary scholarship on Islamic and European cartography by bringing together experts in these two fields. 

Partners: Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten (LMU Munich), École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), The Bodleian Library, Factum Arte,Warburg Institute, British Library.

Monday September 8

9.15-10.30 Welcome and Plenary
Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Oxford): Title tbc

Respondent: Jerry Brotton (Queen Mary) 10.30-11.00 Coffee

11.00-12.15 Session 1 Chair: Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary)
Jean-Charles Ducène (Ècole pratique des hautes études): The Map entitled Geography

used by Ibn Sa‘îd (13th c.) and al-‘Umarî (d. 1348) as Source

Stoyanka Kenderova (Sts Cyril and Methodius National Library Bulgaria): The Balkan Peninsula Represented on Al-Idrisi’s Maps

12.15-1.00 Lunch
1.00-2.00 Session 2 Chair: Alfred Hiatt (Queen Mary)

Technology/Innovation in the History of Cartography (Pelagios, Factum Arte) 2.00-3.45 Session 3 Chair: Alessandro Scafi (Warburg Institute)

Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller (Archivo de la Corona de Aragón):

Stefan Schröder (University of Helsinki): Transcultural Knowledge and Latin- Christian Cartography in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century. Impact and Function of Arabic Elements in the World Map of Pietro Vesconte.

Robin Seignobos (Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne): The Nile in Arabic and Latin Cartography (14th Century): The “Idrisian” Model and their Latin Adaptations

3.45-4.15 Coffee
4.15-5.30 Session 4 Chair: Ingrid Baumgärtner (Universität Kassel)

Emmanuelle Vagnon (Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris): The Islamic Sources of the Catalan Atlas (1375)

Piero Falchetta (Marciana National Library Venice): Influences of Islamic Geographic Knowledge in Fra' Mauro's World Map, ca. 1450

Arabic Roots of Hybrid Late Medieval mappae mundi: A Reconsideration of the On the Proposed Evidence


5.30 Reception
7.30 Conference Dinner (invited guests and conference speakers)

Tuesday September 9

9.00-10.15 Session 5 Chair: tbc
Elly Dekker (Independent Scholar): The Pair of Celestial Maps in MS Schoenberg LJS 057. A Case of Transmission from the Islamic World to Europe?

Ilana Wartenberg (University College London): Geographical Elements on the Medieval Hebrew Scientific Bookshelf

10.15-10.45 Coffee
10.45-12.30 Session 6 Chair: Peter Barber (British Library)

Pnina Arad (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Maps of the Holy Land: Objects of Devotion

Zur Shalev (University of Haifa): Geography and Orientalism: The Cippi Hebraici of Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1659)

Joachim Gierlichs (Qatar National Library): From Claudius Ptolemaeus to Carl Ritter: Qatar and the Gulf in Early European Maps

12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30-2.45 Session 7 Chair: Jerry Brotton (Queen Mary)

Zsolt Gyözö Török (Eötvös Loránd University): Opposite Views: Source, Audience and Cartographic Representation of the 1566 Siege of Sziget in Hungary

Marian Coman (Nicolae Iorga Romanian Academy): Turks and Sea Monsters in Renaissance Cartography

2.45-3.15 Coffee
3.15-4.30 Session 8 Chair: Tony Campbell

Jeremy Ledger (University of Michigan): Geographies of Conquest: A Maghrebi Chart of the Western Mediterranean, ca. 1350

Dimitris Loupis (Harvard University): Exploring the Exchange of Skill and Style in Mediterranean Nautical Cartography. Piri Reis’s Bahriye and its Sources.

4.30-5.30 Concluding Round Table: Comparative Approaches to the History of Cartography

Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary), Alessandro Scafi (Warburg Institute), Hilde de Weerdt (Leiden)

To register, see http://www.cartography.qmul.ac.uk/.

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS: Maps, Spaces, Cultures

Edited by Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University) and Asa Simon Mittman (California State University, Chico). Editorial board: Ricardo Padrón (University of Virginia), Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University) and Dan Terkla (Illinois Wesleyan University). Publisher: Arjan van Dijk (Brill).

This innovative series seeks monographs and essay collections that investigate how notions of space, geography, and mapping shaped medieval and early modern cultures. While the history of cartography has traditionally focused on internal developments in European mapping conventions and technologies, pre-modern scribes, illuminators, and printers of maps tended to work in multiple genres. Spatial thinking informed and was informed by multiple epistemologies and perceptions of the order of nature. Maps, Spaces, Cultures therefore integrates the study of cartography and geography within cultural history. It puts genres that reflected and constituted spatial thinking into dialogue with the cultures that produced and consumed them, as well as with those they represented.

The editors welcome submissions from scholars of the histories of art, material culture, colonialism, exploration, ethnography (including that of peoples described as monsters), encounters, literature, philosophy, religion, science and knowledge, as well as of the history of cartography and related disciplines. They encourage interdisciplinary submissions that cross traditional historical, geographical, or methodological boundaries, that include works from outside Western Europe and outside the Christian tradition, and that develop new analytical approaches to pre-modern spatial thinking, cartography, and the geographical imagination.

Authors are cordially invited to write to either of the series editors, Surekha Davies (surekha.davies@gmail.com) and Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@mail.csuchico.edu), or to the publisher at Brill, Arjan van Dijk (dijk@brill.com), to discuss the submission of proposals and/or full manuscripts.

For Brill's peer review process see here:
http://www.brill.com/author-gateway/publishing-books-brill/propose-your-publication

On Kings and Cannibals: Ethnography, Ethnology and Mapping the Americas in Early Modern Europe

The Institute of Historical Research, and the University of Notre Dame present a series of seminars in GLOBAL HISTORY at the London Centre of the University of Notre Dame, 1 Suffolk Street, SW1Y 4HG (off Pall Mall East, west of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery) on Wednesdays at 5.30 p.m.

Registration essential; please email Charlotte Parkyn (cparkyn@nd.edu).
Forthcoming Programme for 2012

15th February: Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), “On Kings and Cannibals: Ethnography, Ethnology and Mapping the Americas in Early Modern Europe”

Dr Davies´s articles on early modern cartography, ethnography, and mirabilia have attracted much admiration. Having completed a book on New World ethnography and maps, she is working on the global history of colonial science.

The University of Notre Dame invites seminar-goers to wine at or after the seminars. Seminar-goers who would like to dine with the speaker should send a cheque for £40 to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, UND, 1 Suffolk Street, London SW1Y 4HG at least a fortnight in advance. Men wear suit and tie to the dinner parties and women are kindly asked to dress accordingly. Steering group: William Clarence-Smith (SOAS), Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Notre Dame), Geoffrey Hosking (SEES, UCL). N.B: Seminar-goers should register with cparkyn@nd.edu. Enquiries to FELIPE.FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO@nd.edu.

The Uses of Space In Early Modern History 1500-1850, Seminar Series

International History Department, LSE

The study of space and place is an increasingly important research-field in the humanities and social sciences. This series explores how spatial ideas and approaches can be used to understand the societies, cultures and mentalities of the past. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines will reflect on the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be employed by or applied to the study of history; and how particular spaces were used for practical and ideological purposes in specific periods

Series Organiser: Dr Paul Stock p.stock@lse.ac.uk

Place: LSE New Academic Building, room 2.14 Time: 18.00 All welcome

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalHistory/events/theUsesOfSpaceinEarlyModernHistory1500-1850/homeTheUsesOfSpaceInEarlyModernHistory1500-1850.aspx

9 February 2012: Prof Michael Heffernan (Nottingham) 'Disciplining Space: Geography and Cartography in the Paris Academy of Sciences 1666-1793'

The Uses of Space In Early Modern History 1500-1850, Seminar Series

International History Department, LSE

The study of space and place is an increasingly important research-field in the humanities and social sciences. This series explores how spatial ideas and approaches can be used to understand the societies, cultures and mentalities of the past. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines will reflect on the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be employed by or applied to the study of history; and how particular spaces were used for practical and ideological purposes in specific periods

Series Organiser: Dr Paul Stock p.stock@lse.ac.uk
Place: LSE New Academic Building, room 2.14 Time: 18.00 All welcome
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalHistory/events/theUsesOfSpaceinEarlyModernHistory1500-1850/homeTheUsesOfSpaceInEarlyModernHistory1500-1850.aspx

24 November 2011: Dr Rachel Hewitt (Oxford) 'Mapping History: Cartographic Revolution in the Eighteenth Century'