CALL FOR PAPERS: Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies: Complaints and Grievances, 1500-1750

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading

10-11 July 2017

The theme of the 2017 Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies is ‘Complaints and Grievances, 1500-1750’. Proposals for individual papers and panels are invited on research relating to this theme in any area of early modern literature and theatre, history, politics, art, music and culture across Britain, Europe and the wider world. Suggested topics for papers and panels include, although are not confined to:

Literary Complaint:

• Material cultures of complaint: production, transmission, reception
• Erotic complaint: narratives of abandonment, grief and loss
• Early modern women writers and complaint
• Voicing others: complaint as prosopopoeia
• Religious complaint: satire and exhortation

Medical Complaints and Grievances:

• Experiencing or witnessing suffering and pain
• Learning to live with disease and disability
• Painful or pain-relieving medical/surgical treatments
• Sensory aspects of medicine and surgery: sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations
• Complaints about medical practitioners, nurses, or patients

Political and Religious Complaints and Grievances:

• Petitioning and pamphleteering
• From grievances to politics: the personal, the local, and the national
• The popular and elite politics of complaint
• Complaint, crime and the law
• Travellers’ complaints: religion, politics and the lived experience of travel

Each panel proposal (minimum of two and a maximum of four papers) should contain the names of the session chair, the names and affiliations of the speakers and 200 word abstracts of the papers together with email contacts for all participants. A proposal for an individual paper (20 minutes) should consist of a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.

Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email by Friday 16 December 2016, with the subject heading ‘2017 Conference’, to the Conference Committee, emrc@reading.ac.uk

Modified Bodies and Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern England

A one-day Symposium organised by the Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies at the University of Sussex

Tuesday 27 May 2014, Arts B, Social Space (B274)

Registration details: there is no charge for attending the symposium; lunch and coffee will be provided.

To register please email Chloe Porter (C.Porter@sussex.ac.uk) or Katie Walter (K.L.Walter@sussex.ac.uk), by Monday 12 May 2014.

The notions of prosthesis and bodily modification increasingly preoccupy contemporary critical discourse, from disability studies to David Wills’ characterisation of the body as ‘a prosthesis’. Such contemporary explorations can preclude or overlook the ‘pre’ or the ‘early’ modern; ‘prosthesis’ itself, as a term for medical or bodily (rather than grammatical) supplementation doesn’t appear until the eighteenth century. Yet a growing body of scholarship recognises both the particular ways in which medieval and early modern technologies modify the body, and the significance of notions of ‘prosthesis’ for literary interpretation and cultural analysis in these periods. This one-day symposium draws together new scholarship on bodily modification and prosthesis, from facial disfigurement and the disabled soldier’s body, to bodily practices –such as kneeling, dress, and the use of charms in healing –which may modify, or become extensions of the body. How can medieval and early modern modified bodies be contextualised in relation to philosophical and theological understandings of the natural human body and the body post-mortem? And how can these historical contexts participate in contemporary critical discourse? Through an interdisciplinary discussion, we will ask what medieval and early modern examples reveal about the historical, philosophical and (literary) theoretical possibilities of prosthesis.


Programme
10.45-11.00

Registration

11.00-12.30 Session 1
Patricia Skinner (Swansea) ‘“My broken nose made me ridiculous”: Unwanted Facial Modifications in the Middle Ages’
Helen Davies (Lancaster) ‘“Nature cannot be surpassed by art”: The Power of Prosthetics in the Body of the Soldier’
Margaret Healy (Sussex) ‘Healing Prosthetics: Word Charms, Amulets and Talismen’

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-2.45 Session 2
Chloe Porter (Sussex) ‘Post-mortem Prosthesis: Modified Bodies and the Early Modern Afterlife’
Naomi Baker (Manchester) ‘“The body of this death”: Paul and Disability on the Early Modern Stage’

2.45-3.15 Coffee

3.15-4.45 Session 3
Isabel Davis (Birkbeck) ‘Kneeling’
Jenny Tiramani (School of Historical Dress) ‘The Rise and Fall of Geometry: The Development of Underpinnings in Early Modern Europe’
Katie Walter (Sussex) ‘Plasticity and Prosthesis’

4.45-5.00 Break

5.00-6.00 Session 4: Response and Round Table with Peter Boxall (Sussex)

Northern Renaissance Seminar: ‘Disability and the Renaissance’

Leeds Trinity University College, 8 September 2012

Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited on the ways in which disability can be conceptualised in/through/by the Renaissance. This seminar is particularly intended to register some of the ways that recent developments in disability theory might be applicable to scholarship on Renaissance literature and culture; to the modern tradition of Renaissance scholarship; or, indeed, might struggle to gain purchase upon the types of material and textual resources available to scholars. To that end, papers which focus on the experience or conceptualisation of disability itself, rather than disability as allegory/metaphor for the human condition in general, will be preferred.

We recognise that this is not an established field within Renaissance studies and we therefore welcome exploratory and open-ended engagements and investigations. Topics may include, but are certainly not restricted to:

• The visibility and invisibility of disability: embodiment, Bedlam beggars, Bedlam and other sites/institutions, taxonomic practices, non-standard bodies, normativity.
• Resistance, conformity, subversion, transgression.
• The mind and mental disability.
• Representations: staging, portraying, discussing disability.
• Models of disability – how do the social and medical models bear on the Renaissance? Does the Renaissance offer further ways of modelling disability?
• Identity, difference, abjection.
• Technologies, adaptation, support.
• The impact of earlier traditions: e.g. Classical formulations of disability; folklore.
• Intersections: childhood; gender; ethnicity; class
• Medical, legal, moral, theological and spiritual understandings/engagements.

We invite proposals (250 words) for papers addressing these questions. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and performance-oriented approaches are welcome, as are submissions from postgraduate students and early career researchers. Please send your proposals or any queries to Susan Anderson: s.anderson@leedstrinity.ac.uk

Deadline for proposals: 30th June 2012