– MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE · 4-5 APRIL 2019 –
IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN THE IDEA OF THE STATE WAS RADICALLY CONTESTED. REFORMATION, DYNASTIC CRISIS, CIVIL WAR, AND POLICIES OF STATE-FORMATION ALL CHALLENGED ESTABLISHED MODELS OF THE STATE.
Recent decades in literary studies have seen an engagement with politics reflected not just in pamphlets and polemics, but spreading through almost every sphere of early-modern literature. At the same time, though, the status of imaginative literature in the history of political thought remains a matter of debate.
This major two-day conference aims to explore how political writing, broadly conceived, interacts with early-modern theories of state. How did writers participate in the state: by imagining it, articulating it, or even performing some of its functions? What conceptual models and scholarly methods are currently being used to understand the state, and how might they inform each other? What important insights can literary studies bring to intellectual and political histories?
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Thursday 4 April
9.15-9.45: Registration
9.45-10.00: Welcome and opening remarks
10.00-11.20: Keynote Lecture
Mark Goldie, ‘Intertextual Whiggism: Political Aphorisms, Textual Appropriation, and Early Modern British Political Thought, 1590-1790’
11.20-11.30: Coffee
11.30-13.00: Session 1A: Rethinking Royalism
11.20-11.30: Coffee
11.30-13.00: Session 1A: Rethinking Royalism
- Rachel Willie, ‘William Cavendish, Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Image of the Courtier’
- Niall Allsopp, ‘William Davenant and Cromwellian Sovereignty’
- John West, ‘“I think not on the state”: Women Writing and Reimagining the State in Seventeenth-Century England’
11.30-13.00: Session 1B: Pluralism and Party
- Stephanie Coster, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Anglicans: The Politics of Comprehension and Puritan Whig Ecclesiology in the Restoration’
- Paddy Bullard, ‘State Pluralism and Jonathan Swift’s Politics’
- John McTague, ‘“Some Convenient Order”: The Absolute State of the Dunciads’
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.15: Session 2: Imagining the State I
- Paulina Kewes, ‘Translations of State’
- Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Imagining the Early Modern “Deep State”’
15.15-15.30: Coffee
15.30-17.00: Session 3: Crime and Corruption
- Lucy Clarke, ‘“Foreseeing that nothing be done… to the breach of the peace”: failures of local crime prevention in A Yorkshire Tragedy’
- Jason Peacey, ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt: George Wither on Corruption in the Commonwealth’
- Mark Knights, ‘Corruption in Early Modern Literature’
17.00-18.00: Break/visit to the Pepys Library
18.00-19.00: Drinks reception
19.00-21.00: Dinner
Friday 5 April
9.30-10.45: Keynote Lecture
Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Rabelaisian Body Politics’
10.45-11.00: Coffee
11.00-12.30: Session 4A: In Service of the State
11.00-12.30: Session 4B: Drama and Deliberation
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-14.45: Session 5: Imagining the State II
14.45-15.00: Coffee
15.00-16.30: Round Table: Beyond High Politics
10.45-11.00: Coffee
11.00-12.30: Session 4A: In Service of the State
- Edward Holberton, ‘Secretaries and Public Diplomacy: Andrew Marvell and Guy Miège in Muscovy’
- Tom Lockwood, ‘“Differences that arise touching places of service”: Sir John Davies, Antiquarianism, and the State’
11.00-12.30: Session 4B: Drama and Deliberation
- Vanessa Lim, ‘Political Deliberation in Troilus and Cressida’
- Joseph Hone, ‘Julius Caesar in Augustan England’
- David Francis Taylor, ‘Cato and the Crisis of Rhetoric’
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-14.45: Session 5: Imagining the State II
- Lorna Hutson, ‘Does the Body Politic Have Knees?’
- Edward Paleit, ‘Robert Persons, William Rainolds, Elizabethan drama and the circulation of political ideas in 1590s Europe’
14.45-15.00: Coffee
15.00-16.30: Round Table: Beyond High Politics
Nadine Akkerman
Ann Hughes
Susan Wiseman
Susan Wiseman
