CALL FOR PAPERS: An Anatomy of England: Material culture and early modern character sketches

ONE-DAY CONFERENCE: 8 Nov. 2019

Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines – Paris Saclay, Laboratoire DYPAC (Dynamiques Patrimoniales et Culturelles) EA 2449

The early 17th century vogue for the literary genre of the character sketch reached a height in England after the Protestant humanist Isaac Casaubon published his Latin translation of Theophrastus’s Characters in 1592. Many authors engaged in the challenging formal and stylistic constraints of the character sketch and contributed anatomies of early modern English society. While the golden age glorifying the early Stuarts was celebrated in masques, and the iron age was castigated in pamphlets, character sketches turned out to be precious tools, either to celebrate ideal types and the Christian-Stoic ethos, or to shed light on the alteration process within a changing world, if not a poisoned world, as testified by the sensational Overbury murder case in 1613.