Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Aberystwyth/Bangor) Biennial Conference.
3rd-5th September 2015, Bangor University
Registration is now open:
http://travelandconflict.bangor.ac.uk/register.php.en
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Michal Biran (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway)
Judith Jesch (University of Nottingham)
The meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict are numerous. Travel can be a conflictual experience; in medieval Europe, movement may be perceived as being restricted to travel motivated by the exigencies of piety, pillage, or trade. It would however be too easy to suggest a clear binary between a medieval state of stasis and the more leisurely travel and exploration in the early modern period. Until relatively recently, domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings.
Utopian fiction and travel writing are two genres that have been closely aligned by scholars who recognise how these genres reshape medieval discourses on the ideal state for an early modern audience. Weary travellers arrive at geographically unspecified places comprising ideal societies, but these ideal societies occupy a liminal space between fiction and reality: these spaces are ultimately unattainable due to the imprecision and prevarication present in the narrative. This draws to focus tensions within documenting imaginary travel and the material world. Far from being a site of concord, they become spaces of conflict. Travel – whether it is real or imagined, or if it has been implemented for public or private purposes - can be obstructed by conflicts; it remains often restricted and always bitterly debated.
This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in the fields of medieval and early modern studies to interrogate the relationship between travel and conflict.
Thursday 3rd September 2015
09.00-09.45: Registration and Coffee
09:45-10:00: Welcome (LR4) Raluca Radulescu
10.00-11.00: Panel 1
Room LR2: 1A Contact zones I
David Wilson (Strathclyde): The Birth of a Crown Colony: Woodes Rogers and the Pirates of New Providence
Sarah O'Malley (Nottingham): Conflicting Identities and the Production of Geography: An Exploration into the Transportation of Landscape Narratives from Greater East Anglia to New England
Room LR5: 1B Habsburg lands
Virginia Mosser (Southern Virginia): The Pilgrim as Traveller: Miracle Reports as Travelogues in the Early Modern Habsburg Monarchy
Kirsty Rolfe (QMUL): The coast of Bohemia: John Taylor's journey to Prague, 1620
11.00-11.30: Elevenses
11.30-13.00: Panel 2
Room LR2: 2A Controlled movement
Sébastien Hamel (La Rochelle): The admiral of France and England and the Safe-Conducts for Sea Travel During the Hundred Years War: a Monopolistic Situation?
Tino Oudesluijs (Lausanne): Travel and migration in fifteenth-century Coventry: moving about during the Wars of the Roses
Amrita Sen (Oklahoma City): Quandaries of Travel: East India Company and Women Travellers in the Sixteenth Century
Room LR5: 2B Conflicts and ideas
David Yorath (Bristol): Perkin Warbeck and Taunton
Bonnie Millar (Nottingham): The Trials and Tribulations of Travel in The Avowyng of Arthur and The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Tarne Wathelyne
Daniela Giosuè (Viterbo): Conflicts of Ideas and Values in the Works of Thomas Coryate, the Odcombian Legge-Stretcher
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14:00-15.30: Panel 3
Room LR2: 3A Contact zones II
Omar Moumni (Rabat): Early Christian Encounters in the Land of Barbary: The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow in South Barbary
Ovanes Akopyan (Warwick): Travelling to Russia in the Renaissance: from Opposition to Cultural and Political Contacts
Eva Johanna Holmberg (HCAS Helsinki): 'With a good heart, and a chearefull gesture': avoiding/inviting conflict in early modern English Levantine travels
Room LR5: 3B Dissimulation and risk
John Gallagher (Cambridge): 'He that cannot dissemble, cannot live': Disguise and dissimulation in Elizabethan and Jacobean travel
Mareile Pfaffenbacker (Lancaster): Travel Dissimulations and the True Observer: Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary (1617)
Sarah Goldsmith (York): 'I am become more desperately military than most things existing': War, Masculinity and Sociability on the Grand Tour, 1700-80
15.30-16.00: Coffee
16:00-17.30: Panel 4
Room LR2: 4A Travel and Religion
John Burton (Trinity St David): The Journey from Desire to Devotion in Davies of Hereford's Sonnet Sequence
Helen Wilcox (Bangor): The Journey of Faith: Robert Southwell, Oliver Heywood and early modern religious travel
Csaba Maczelka (Partium Christian University/University of Pécs): The Utopia of Orthodoxy in Some Tudor Dialogues
Room LR5: 4B Al-Andalus & the Mediterranean world: travel & conflict (9th – 12th centuries)
Elsa Cardoso (Lisbon): The Mediterranean Sea as a ceremonial and political stage: exchange of embassies between Cordoba and Byzantium (9th – 10th centuries)
Ana Miranda (Lisbon): The 11th century scholars in a periphery of the Muslim world: travel and conflict between Gharb al-Andalus, Maghreb and the East
Inês Lourinho (Lisbon): The birth of the Kingdom of Portugal and the conflicts between Christians and Muslims (11th – 12th centuries)
17.30-17.45: Quick Break
17.45-18.45: Plenary 1 (Eric Sunderland Lecture Theatre) Judith Jesch (Nottingham): Remembering and Forgetting Travel in Orkneyinga saga - the British Isles in the Viking diaspora
18.45-20.00: Welcome reception (PJ Hall), followed by dinner (individual arrangements)
Friday 4th September 2015
09.30-11.00: Panel 5
Room LR2: 5A Ambassadors
Aimone Grossato (Venezia/Padua): The perils of envoys in the ninth and tenth centuries between East and West
Amélie Balayre (Paris): Travelling in the name of His Majesty: Being ambassador during the French Wars of Religion
Paul M. Dover (Kennesaw State): Ambassadors as travellers in fifteenth-century Italy
Room LR5: 5B Soldiers
Paper TBC
Emily Buffey (Birmingham): 'Rather like Maskers then Souldiers': Visions of Conflict and the Soldier's Complaint
Stephen Curtis (Lancaster): 'The land by me welcomes thy virtues home to Rhodes, / Thou that with blood abroad buyest our peace.' (The Maid's Tragedy, I.i.12-14) Travel and the Soldier in Early Modern Drama.
11.00-11.30: Elevenses
11.30-13.00: Panel 6
Room LR2: 6A Professions
Céline Bonnotte (Toronto): Interpreters and contact: an analysis of complex interpreter roles in Ricci's account of his travels to China
Elizabeth Merrill (Virginia): Fortification Architecture by ‘Remote Control’ in late-Quattrocento Naples
Haig Smith (Kent): Chaplains overseas and the development of corporate religious governance in the Seventeenth Century
Room LR5: 6B European Transformations
Alexander Sarantis (Aberystwyth): Early Slavs in the Balkans, 520-626: violent raiding and peaceful migration
Giulia Cò (Trento/Innsbruck): A cultivated man who travelled to Constantinople: Anastasius Bibliothecarius and the depiction of the Byzantine world
Kor Bosch (Radboud): Not all roads lead to Rome. Visiting papal courts during the Western Schism, 1378-1418
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.00: Plenary 2 (Eric Sunderland Lecture Theatre) Michal Biran (Hebrew University, Jerusalem): Diplomacy, Travel and Conflict in Mongol Eurasia (13th-14th centuries)
15.00-15.15: Quick break
15.15-16.45: Panel 7
Room LR2: 7A Edition, translation, compilation
Maria Elena Severini (Florence): Giovan Battista Ramusio's Travel through Geography and Politics
Marianne O'Doherty (Southampton): Conflicting Translations: The Book of Sir John Mandeville in the Late-Fourteenth and Early-Fifteenth Century Empire
Gabor Gelléri (Aberystwyth): Conflict of Source and Intention: Jesuit Travelogues re-published
Room LR5: 7B Theatre
Laurence Publicover (Bristol): 'Fathoms Bottomless': Middleton's Vertical Voyages
Régis Augustus Bars Closel (Campinas): Crusade's Remembrances in Post-Reformation Drama
David Nicol (Halifax): Militant Protestantism and the Travel Play: Thomas Drue's The Duchess of Suffolk (1624)
16.45-17.15: Coffee
17.15-18.45: Panel 8
Room LR2: 8A Jerusalem
Marianne Ritsema van Eck (Amsterdam): Conflicting notions of travel in the Early Modern period: Franciscan friars of the custody of the Holy Land in defence of Pilgrimage
Rafat Ali (Jadavpur): Jerusalem and Beyond: The Sacred Geography of The Book Of John Mandeville
Robert Clines (Western Carolina): Fleeing the Omphalos: Missionary Pilgrimage and the Failure of an Ecumenical Jerusalem in the Wake of the Jesuit-Franciscan Rivalry
Room LR5: 8B Trade
Daniele Dibello (San Marino): Necessities, challenges and problems at the base of the North European trade of the Republic of Venice
Laura Branch (NUI Galway): Cross-confessional trade and conflict in Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations
Aske Brock (Kent): 'the English name utterly dishonoured': the influence of Indian conflicts on English trade strategies
19:00-20:00: Reception (Neuadd Reichel)
20:00: Conference Dinner (Neuadd Reichel)
Saturday 5th September 2015
09.30-11.00: Session 9
Room LR: 9A Exile
Silke Muylaert (Kent): 'proponit in Flandriam profectionem': Travelling in the Elizabethan exile communities
Sophie Buckingham (East Anglia): 'In furthest coast of all the earth, farre from our countrye wyde': Travel and Exile in Thomas Churchyard's De Tristibus (1572)
Eduardo Pimenta (UFF, Brazil): The Travels of James Turner at his King's service, or a Scottish soldier of fortune in exile
Room LR5: 9B At sea
Artis Aboltins (independent researcher): Scandinavian colony in Grobin (Seeburg) and maritime expansion in Eastern Baltic during Vendel period
Philippa Woodcock (Warwick): 'Agitée de la tourmente et impetuosité des vents': the perils of travelling in the Venetian Stato da Mar, 1580-1620
Tamsin Badcoe (Bristol): 'Necessity makes me suffer constantly': Travel as Torment in the Writing of the Galley Slave
11.00-11.30: Elevenses
11.30-12.30: Panel 10
Room LR2: 10A Truth and deception
Keagan Brewer (Sydney): Textual Redaction as Evidence for Audience Scepticism towards the Marvels in Medieval Travelogues
Matthew Coneys (Warwick): Telling tales: travel, truth and deception in the Guerrin meschino
Room LR3: 10B Shakespearean journeys
Shua-hua Chung (Taiwan): Colonial Encounter in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Ricardo Cardoso (Sao Paulo): 'Aragon comes this night to Messina': Anglo-Spanish War (1588–1604) and military travels in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-14.30: Plenary 3 (Eric Sunderland Lecture Theatre) Daniel Carey (NUI, Galway): Title tbc
14.30-14.45: Farewells
