CALL FOR PAPERS: Glossing Cultural Change: Comparative Perspectives on Manuscript Annotation, C. 600-1200 CE

Deadline: 28 February 2018
National University of Ireland, Galway, 21–22 June 2018

Glossing, the practice of annotating manuscripts between the lines and/or in the margins, was a widespread cultural practice wherever books were being read, studied and taught. As an indication of this, the Network for the Study of Glossing (www.glossing.org) currently has 75 members with research interests in glossed manuscripts written in Arabic, Breton, Chinese, German, Greek, Egyptian, English, French, Hebrew, Hittite, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Sanskrit, Turkish, and
Welsh.

This two-day conference aims to bring together specialists from a variety of fields to discuss aspects of glossing—in all its forms—from a comparative perspective. A particular focus will be on how glosses engage with and reflect the dynamics of contemporary cultural change, rather than acting merely as passive repositories of inherited tradition. Specific aspects of glossing could include any of the following:

1. Glossing as a revealer of reading practices: e.g. considering the relationship between Classical/cosmopolitan written languages and spoken vernaculars; or different approaches to reading/performing sacred and secular texts.
2. Glossing as a method of interpretation: both linguistic (translation) and cultural (e.g. mediating remote cultures and ideas).
3. Glossing as an instrument of textual authority: mandating how texts should be read and understood; creating and re-shaping canons.
4. Glossing as a vehicle for education: organisation of knowledge; delivery of a particular curriculum.
5. Glossing as an intellectual effort: scholarship for its own sake; the creation of new knowledge.

Papers should last 20 minutes, allowing 10 minutes for discussion.  (Direct comparison between traditions is not expected. This will be facilitated during the event.)

This event follows on from another held at the University of Frankfurt on 2–3 December 2016. We aim to publish a selection of papers from both conferences together in a single volume.

Please send a title and abstract (300 words max) to (Pádraic Moran) by 23 February 2018.

Some limited financial assistance will be available.



Dr Pádraic Moran, Classics, NUI Galway
padraic.moran@nuigalway.ie | +353 91 492587
http://www.nuigalway.ie/classics/people/padraicmoran/
http://www.pmoran.ie

CALL FOR PAPERS: Science, Imagination and Wonder: Robert Grosseteste and His Legacy

The Ordered Universe Research Project in association with the International Grosseteste Society

Conference: 3-6 April, 2018, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Website: Ordered Universe

Papers are invited (for oral or poster presentation) for this conference organised by the Ordered Universe Research Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and the International Grosseteste Society. An interdisciplinary project bringing together medieval specialists and modern scientists, the Ordered Universe project is dedicated to new editions and translation of the scientific works of Robert Grosseteste. The conference will be the Fourth International Grosseteste Conference.

The conference will celebrate the life and works of Grosseteste, especially in their response to natural phenomena. A principal aim of the conference is a confluence of disciplinary perspectives on this remarkable thinker. Submissions are welcome from all disciplines and from all career stages. Some suggested areas for subjects are listed below, but please be in touch with the organising committee to run ideas past us:

• the legacy of Grosseteste’s thought in the later Middle Ages and beyond
• Grosseteste’s predecessors and contemporaries
• textual and editorial issues connected to medieval science
• inter-textual issues across Grosseteste’s writings: pastoral, theological, scientific and literary
• rendering medieval thought in images, diagrams and visualisation
• the extended legacy of the themes Grosseteste raises:
• the order inherent in creation
• questions of morality and science
• definitions of experience, experiment
• attitudes towards authorities
• education and pedagogic practice
• relevant thematic issues in history of science and literature
• modern scientific inspiration from medieval thinkers
• the role of wonder and imagination in science, in the medieval and modern periods

Oral presentations should be of 20 minute length, and the organising committee will also consider applications for sessions of 3-4 papers with potential speakers identified. Posters should be in A0 portrait format (33.1 wide x 46.8 length in inches), to be displayed throughout the conference and at dedicated Poster Sessions where presenters will be available to discuss their work). In all cases please submit a 300 word abstract with a brief academic biography to: Ordered Universe

The closing date for paper or session submission titles will be 1st February 2018, but the earlier the better! Abstracts will be appraised and a decision made on a rolling basis upon submission.

Full details of the conference costs and booking arrangements will be published on the Ordered Universe website in due course. It is anticipated that arrangements will be made for publications from presentations but decisions will be made after the conference.

Presentation: John Wallis (1616-1703) on Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf

Monday 22 January 2018, at 17.15.
Main Hall, Taylorian Institution, St Giles, Oxford OX1 3NA.

Dr Jaap Maat (University of Amsterdam)
John Wallis (1616-1703) on Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf.

This talk is associated with the recent publication by OUP of the book:
The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts; edited and introduced by David Cram and Jaap Maat.

Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf

The talk will be sign-interpreted, and will be followed a wine/soft drinks reception.  All welcome.

Queries to: David Cram

This book presents an edition of a previously unpublished notebook used by the seventeenth-century polymath John Wallis to teach language to the "deaf mute" Alexander Popham. Under the terms of the law Popham would not have been able to inherit his family title and property if he had remained unable to speak. This is one of the most famous cases in the history of deaf education. The notebook, which has recently come to light in the Popham family mansion, provides fascinating insights into the details of the instruction. It is a rare example of a manual tailor-made for the instruction of a known individual and its author is one of the foremost scientists of the period. If it had not been lost the work would have been a key document in the dispute between John Wallis and William Holder, both distinguished fellows of the Royal Society, on whose method had been successful in teaching Popham to speak. The Popham Notebook provides essential evidence towards the resolution of a debate that has been widely discussed ever since.

David Cram and Jaap Maat place the work in its personal, social, and scientific contexts. They include a range of additional contemporary texts and provide a clear text with helpful annotations. The edition provides the means for a thorough reassessment of the work's contemporary value. Their introduction also includes a discussion of the theoretical issues underpinning the teaching of language to the deaf.

John Wallis (1618-1703) was a founder member of the Royal Society, a mathematician and pioneer of calculus, and a linguist whose work included the groundbreaking tract on phonetics, De Loquela (1653).

David Cram is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, formerly Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Linguistics. By background and training he is a theoretical linguist, but the bulk of his research has concerned the history of ideas about language in the seventeenth century, on topics ranging from philosophical languages to linguistic eschatology. He is co-editor, with Jaap Maat, of George Dalgarno on Universal Language: The Art of Signs (1661), The Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor (1680), and the Unpublished Papers (OUP, 2001).

Jaap Maat is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and is a member of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). He has published widely on the history of linguistic ideas and the history of logic. He is a founding editor of History of Humanities and co-editor, with David Cram, of George Dalgarno on Universal Language: The Art of Signs (1661), The Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor (1680), and the Unpublished Papers(OUP, 2001).

Renaissance College: Corpus Christi College, Oxford in Context, c.1450-c.1600

6-9 September 2017

Corpus Christi College, Oxford was founded, on humanistic principles, in 1517. Its fellows included specially-appointed lecturers in Latin literature, Greek and Theology and its new trilingual library featured works in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Throughout the sixteenth century, Corpus was a major centre of learning and religion: it played host to the Spanish humanist, Juan Luis Vives and the German astronomer and mathematician, Nicholas Kratzer; its fellows included the Catholic reformer Reginald Pole and the Protestant thinkers John Jewel and Richard Hooker.

In the College’s 500th anniversary year, we shall be holding a conference to discuss the wider context and implications of this remarkable foundation, exploring the inter-connected worlds of learning and education, prelacy and public service, charity and communal life, religion, literature and the arts, in Oxford and beyond, during a hundred-and-fifty year period of Renaissance and Reformation. 

There will be papers from Susan Brigden, Clive Burgess, Jeremy Catto, Paul Cavill, Alex Gajda, Anthony Grafton, Lucy Kaufman, Nicholas Hardy, Pamela King, Julian Reid, Richard Rex, Miri Rubin, David Rundle, Christopher Stray, Joanna Weinberg, Magnus Williamson, and William Whyte. A round table of Mordechai Feingold, Felicity Heal and Diarmaid MacCulloch, chaired by Keith Thomas, will bring proceedings to a close.

More details will become available over the next few months, but if you would like to make a provisional booking now, please contact sara.watson@ccc.ox.ac.uk; or, for more information about the academic aims and content of the conference,john.watts@ccc.ox.ac.uk

Scholarship, Science and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) and Henry Savile (1549-1622)

Oxford's Centre for Early Modern Studies 6th Annual Conference

T.S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College
Tuesday 1st - Thursday 3rd July 2014

Plenary speaker: Anthony Grafton (Princeton)

Rhiannon Ash (Oxford), Philip Beeley (Oxford), Paul Botley (Warwick), Matteo Campagnolo (Geneva), Andrea Ceccarelli (Padua), Ingrid de Smet (Warwick), Mordechai Feingold (Caltech), Robert Goulding (Notre Dame), Nick Hardy (Cambridge), Scott Mandelbrote (Cambridge), Jean-Louis Quantin (Paris), Paul Quarrie (Maggs Bros.), André-Louis Rey (Geneva), Thomas Roebuck (UEA), Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge), Robin Sowerby (Stirling), Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven), Benjamin Wardhaugh (Oxford), Joanna Weinberg (Oxford).

The conference is co-organized by the University of Oxford (David Norbrook), the University of East Anglia (Tom Roebuck), and the California Institute of Technology (Mordechai Feingold).

Henry Savile (1549-1622) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) were two contrasting giants of late humanism. Savile, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, was a key figure in the history of English science and a formidable presence on the English scholarly and political scene, whose translation of Tacitus led to political controversy and whose editio princeps of Chrysostom in Greek won admiration across Europe. Casaubon, perhaps the leading Greek classical scholar of his generation and a great correspondent within the intellectual exchanges of the Republic of Letters, used his scholarship to become a formidable Protestant polemicist, publishing a vast philological critique of the authorized Catholic ecclesiastical history of Cesare Baronio.

Their lives and works, when considered together, raise vital questions about the history of early-modern knowledge and erudition, the relationship between the histories of science and the humanities, the networks of early-modern intellectual communication, the history of books and archives, the importance of Hebraic scholarship, and the impact of scholarship upon literature. Our conference, timed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Casaubon's death and the 750th anniversary of Merton College's foundation (the institution Savile shaped), brings together leading scholars from across the disciplines to answer these questions.

To encourage early registration, we are offering reduced registration rates until the 1st of May 2014:

Full: £100 for three days / £50 per individual day
Graduate: £75 for three days / £40 per individual day

Final conference registration closes on the 19th June 2014. Graduate bursaries are available upon application.

Educating Women, an inter-disciplinary conference

Thursday 18 July 2013 | Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent UK

There have been issues around women and education since before Christine de Pizan wrote in 1404 that 

"Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did."

Progress since then has been varied. Lady Margaret Beaufort founded two Cambridge colleges in the early 1500s but it is less than 60 years since women were first awarded degrees from Cambridge. In the UK, although STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are integral to our economic success this is still a male dominated sector and in the last 10 years there has been no improvement in the uptake of women in mathematical sciences – 38% of students – or engineering and technology, where just 15% of students are women. Globally while the gender gap has narrowed over recent years, statistics from UNESCO in 2011 showed that girls are still at a disadvantage: in South and West Asia for example only 1 in 2 women can read or write compared with 7 out of 10 men. 

The idea for this conference, which will consider the education of and by women from the middle ages to the present day, came from a mother and daughter’s interests in education and early modern women. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to discuss issues around educating women (and girls) with a view to understanding the realities. 

Guidelines for submission of paper/symposia abstracts 

Abstracts for papers should not exceed 300 words. Symposia proposals and submissions from postgraduate students are welcome. The conference language is English. Possible topics could include (but are not restricted to): 

• informal and formal education of women and girls 
• pre-modern scholarly women 
• attitudes to educating/educated women 
• global inequalities 
• girls, women and lifelong learning 
• women leaders in education 
• feminist/anti-feminist influences on educating women 

All abstracts for papers or other suggested presentations must be submitted by Monday 28 January 2013 to education.research@canterbury.ac.uk. 

Acceptance will be confirmed by Thursday 28 February 2013. 

It is hoped to publish a book of papers from the conference. 

For questions and enquiries about submissions, please contact lynne.graham-matheson@canterbury.ac.uk or helen.graham-matheson.12@ucl.ac.uk. 

Further details about the conference will follow.

Seminar on literature, learning, and the social orders in early modern Europe (various dates, All Souls College)

The following seminars will be given at 2.00 p.m. (ending by 3.30p.m.) on Wednesdays in Hilary Term 2013 in the Wharton Room, All Souls College, Oxford.

Convenor: Dr Neil Kenny

PROFESSOR PETER BURKE, Univ. of Cambridge 16 Jan.: 'The social history of history in early modern Europe'

DR ROWAN TOMLINSON, Bristol Univ. 23 Jan.: 'Method, judgement, and social origin: theories and practices of historia in late Renaissance France'

DR JONATHAN PATTERSON, Univ. of Cambridge 30 Jan.:'Understanding avarice through the social orders in early modern France'

PROFESSOR JANE STEVENSON, Univ. of Aberdeen 6 Feb.: 'Martha Marchina: poetry and social mobility in Baroque Rome'

PROFESSOR HOWARD HOTSON, Univ. of Oxford 13 Feb.: 'Universal education: Comenius' pampaedia and some seventeenth-century critics'

PROFESSOR DAVID NORBROOK, Univ. of Oxford 20 Feb.: 'Gentry and gender: Lucy Hutchinson and the social interpretation of the English Civil War'

DR HELENA SANSON, Univ. of Cambridge 27 Feb.: 'Women, language, and access to learning in early modern Italy: an investigation across social classes'

PROFESSOR STEPHEN MILNER, Univ. of Manchester 6 Mar.: 'Pop go the classics: vernacular humanism and the social world of Renaissance Florence'

Call for Papers: Educating Women, an inter-disciplinary conference

Thursday 18 July 2013 | Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent UK

There have been issues around women and education since before Christine de Pizan wrote in 1404 that 

"Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did."

Progress since then has been varied. Lady Margaret Beaufort founded two Cambridge colleges in the early 1500s but it is less than 60 years since women were first awarded degrees from Cambridge. In the UK, although STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are integral to our economic success this is still a male dominated sector and in the last 10 years there has been no improvement in the uptake of women in mathematical sciences – 38% of students – or engineering and technology, where just 15% of students are women. Globally while the gender gap has narrowed over recent years, statistics from UNESCO in 2011 showed that girls are still at a disadvantage: in South and West Asia for example only 1 in 2 women can read or write compared with 7 out of 10 men. 

The idea for this conference, which will consider the education of and by women from the middle ages to the present day, came from a mother and daughter’s interests in education and early modern women. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to discuss issues around educating women (and girls) with a view to understanding the realities. 

Guidelines for submission of paper/symposia abstracts 

Abstracts for papers should not exceed 300 words. Symposia proposals and submissions from postgraduate students are welcome. The conference language is English. Possible topics could include (but are not restricted to): 

• informal and formal education of women and girls 
• pre-modern scholarly women 
• attitudes to educating/educated women 
• global inequalities 
• girls, women and lifelong learning 
• women leaders in education 
• feminist/anti-feminist influences on educating women 

All abstracts for papers or other suggested presentations must be submitted by Monday 28 January 2013 to education.research@canterbury.ac.uk. 

Acceptance will be confirmed by Thursday 28 February 2013. 

It is hoped to publish a book of papers from the conference. 

For questions and enquiries about submissions, please contact lynne.graham-matheson@canterbury.ac.uk or helen.graham-matheson.12@ucl.ac.uk. 

Further details about the conference will follow.