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