CALL FOR PAPERS: Perdition Catch My Soul - Shakespeare, Hell and Damnation

Saturday 8 December 2018, 10.00am
Nancy Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £55 (£45 Members and £25 Students)


Synopsis

This one-day symposium will examine the dramatization of early modern philosophies of hell and damnation. We will ask how Renaissance drama explored the hazards of judgement, damnation, and perdition.

• What did playwrights think it meant to sell one’s soul to the devil?
• What was their definition of sin?
• What role did the devil play in theatre – and in people’s everyday lives?

Papers are invited on (but not limited to) topics such as: hell, damnation, sin, the devil, the demonic, Satan, witchcraft, the supernatural, prophecy, and theological disputes .

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be sent to research@shakespearesglobe.com by Monday 15 October.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Truth and Truthiness: Belief, Authenticity, Rhetoric, and Spin in the Middle Ages & Renaissance

Truth and Truthiness: Belief, Authenticity, Rhetoric, and Spin in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

December 1, 2018
The 26th Biennial Conference of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program of Barnard College

Plenary Speakers: Lorna Hutson (University of Oxford), Dyan Elliott (Northwestern University)

The capacity of language both to communicate truth and to manipulate perceptions of it was as vexed a problem for the Middle Ages and Renaissance as it is today. From Augustine to Erasmus, enthusiasm for the study of rhetoric was accompanied by profound concern about its capacity to mask the difference between authenticity and deceit, revelation and heresy, truth and truthiness. Even the claim of authenticity or transparency could become, some thinkers argued, a deliberate form of manipulation or “spin.”

In our current era when public figures aim to create effects of immediacy and authenticity, this conference looks at the history of debates about rhetoric and, more generally, about the presentation of transparency and truthfulness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this conference considers the role of the verbal arts in the history of literature, law, politics, theology, and historiography, but also broadens the scope of rhetoric to include such topics as the rhetoric of the visual arts and the language of the new science to produce effects of objective access to “things themselves.”

Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words and a 2-page CV by April 30, 2018 to Rachel Eisendrath

London Renaissance Seminar: Early Modern Women and Genre

Christine de Pisan, ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’

Saturday 1st December, 1-5pm
Keynes Library (Room 114), 43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck

Join us for an afternoon of papers on women writers, civil war elegy, modes of translation, female attribution and early modern European epic.

Speakers include:

Hero Chalmers (Cambridge)

Erin McCarthy (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Carla Suthren (York)

Mihoko Suzuki (Miami)


The London Renaissance Seminar (LRS) is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of early modern history, literature, and culture. It meets regularly at Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. Anyone with a serious academic interest in the Renaissance is welcome and no registration is necessary.

For further information about this seminar contact Sue Wiseman or Elizabeth Scott-Baumann .

To join the LRS mailing list, please contact Tom Healy.
Twitter: @LondRenaissance