CALL FOR PAPERS: International Conference Splendid Encounters VI: Correspondence and Information Exchange in Diplomacy (1300-1750)

Nova University of Lisbon
28th — 30th September 2017

Splendid Encounters 6 is one of a series of international and interdisciplinary conferences which aim to bring together scholars from the broadest range of perspectives to consider diplomacy and diplomatic activities in the late medieval and early modern period. After successful meetings in Warsaw, Bath, Florence, Budapest and Prague, we wish to invite you to join us for another event, hosted by Nova University of Lisbon.

Collecting and transferring information is a major aim of diplomacy, and one not confined to diplomats strictly speaking. People of different ranks and functions were still connected to diplomatic activity — ambassadors, nuncios, chargés d’affaires, secretaries and agents, members of ambassadorial households, consuls and merchants, and even the aides employed as middlemen or translators.

Just as varied as the agents were the methods used to obtain access to the latest news and information useful to ruler or country. As diplomatic networks grew bigger and bigger in size and reach in this period, so did the need to find reliable sources of news and to develop ways to efficiently deliver them.

These are some of the issues that will be addressed at the upcoming conference, Splendid Encounters VI. The conference will focus on the role of news and information transmitting in diplomatic practices within and outside Europe between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In assessing the role of diplomats and networks in such exchanges, this edition of Splendid Encounters also breaks away from traditional chronological and geographical approaches.

Please email by 15 March 2017 to se6.lisbon@gmail.com your abstract for either 20‒minute individual papers or 90‒minute sessions (to comprisea panel, roundtable, project presentation, etc.).

We especially encourage proposals dealing with:

• Diplomatic correspondence: evolution, importance, cyphers, etc.
• Diplomats and diplomacy as a subject of news
• The languages, forms and performance of (written and oral) communication
• East–West/North–South encounters
• Channels of contact; Europe, Africa, Asia, America
• Diplomatic communication across cultures and the culture(s) of diplomatic communication
• Practices of information exchange in empire, states, regions
• The personnel of news networks
• Continuity and change in the long run: from ‘medieval’ to ‘early modern’

Applicants will be notified of acceptance by 15th April.

Contact for general queries Dr Anna Kalinowska: se6.lisbon@gmail.com and for Lisbon arrangements Dr Tiago Viúla de Faria: tiago.faria@fcsh.unl.pt

Call for Contributions: Literary & Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity

General Editors: Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, and Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University

For more than a decade now, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity, http://www.ashgate.com/LITSCI, has provided a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals that address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic production, utopia—and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual methods of newly emergent 'scientific' fields such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections, and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.

As the series continues to evolve, we particularly seek submissions to do with:

· alchemy
· science in the New World
· meteorology
· knowledge networks
· global science
· machines
· poetics and science
· navigation/mapmaking

To submit a proposal, or for more information, please contact: Erika Gaffney, Publishing Manager with Ashgate: egaffney@ashgate.com

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The Relation of Literature and Learning to Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe

The following sessions will be held at 2.00p.m. (ending by 3.30p.m.) in Hilary Term 2015 in All Souls College, Oxford (except for the first two sessions -- their time and location are different). There will normally be two papers per session.

All very welcome. Convenor: Neil Kenny [neil.kenny@all-souls.ox.ac.uk]

21 January (Colin Matthews Room, History Faculty)Conversation avec ROBERT DESCIMON (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris): L’hiérarchie sociale en France sous l’Ancien Régime
Session to be held in French, at 12.30pm, ending by 1.55pm. Sandwiches will be provided free of charge on a first come first served basis for all attending.

22 January (Maison Française, Norham Road)ROBERT DESCIMON (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris): Les incertitudes des structures hiérarchiques de la société française et le statut des “écrivains” au 16e siècle
Session to be held jointly with the Early Modern French Seminar, in French, at 5.15pm

28 January (Wharton Room, All Souls)WARREN BOUTCHER (Queen Mary, University of London): Sixteenth-Century Vernacular Renaissances and Social Hierarchies
ROBERT BLACK (University of Leeds): Languages and Society in Renaissance Florence

9 February (Old Library, All Souls)COLIN BURROW (All Souls College, Oxford): Poetry and Social Status in Early Modern England
TIM CHESTERS (University of Cambridge): Stealth Tax in a Love Poem by Étienne de La Boétie

25 February (Wharton Room, All Souls)ABIGAIL BRUNDIN (University of Cambridge): “Prayerful reading”: Hierarchies of Devotional Reading in the Early Modern Catholic Home
MARTIN McLAUGHLIN (Magdalen College, Oxford): Alberti’s Humanism: The Family, Cobblers and Renaissance Men

11 March (Wharton Room, All Souls)GIORA STERNBERG (Hertford College, Oxford): Writing Social Hierarchy: Ceremonial Records in Early Modern France
MARK GREENGRASS (University of Sheffield): Antoine de Laval’s Dessein des professions nobles (1605) and the Taxonomy of Élites

CALL FOR PAPERS: Social Networks 1450-1850

The term ‘social network’ has become a prominent part of modern day discourse, and in recent years there has been rapid growth in the field of social network studies. Yet a world in which individuals are connected to one another in multifarious ways—spanning time, place, institutional affiliation, and other social boundaries—is not just a modern phenomenon. In the early modern period, neighbourhoods, villages, cities and continents were criss-crossed with relationships and ties of obligation, through which passed friendship, as well as animosity; money, ideas, information, material goods, and more. The concepts and methodologies of social network analysis, together with new digital technologies, provide the tools to uncover the nature of these communities in the past.

At stake is the very nature of society: how did people connect to one another, to what ends, and with what results? These are questions with relevance to disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. As such, this conference brings together historically minded scholars with an interest in social networks from a range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds.

Proposals for 20-minute papers or panels of three speakers are welcome from a wide chronological and geographical reach, exploring social network concepts, methodologies and findings. For example, papers might consider:

• Methodologies: sources, challenges, and approaches; digital technologies and techniques for the collection, storage, analysis and presentation of data
• ‘Ego-centric’ or ‘whole’ networks
• Familial and kinship networks
• Merchants or trading communities
• Religious, intellectual, literary, political or institutional communities
• The cultural values underpinning social networks: for example honesty, trust, or desire for profit
• How social networks change over time
• The geographical reach of networks: local, regional, national or international; urban or rural

Deadline for submission of proposals: 31 January 2015

For individual paper proposals, please submit a title and 200-word abstract, along with contact details. For panel proposals, please include a title and 200-word abstract for each paper and contact details for one speaker on the panel. Contact: kate.davison@sheffield.ac.uk

Details about postgraduate bursaries will be publicised in due course.