CALL FOR PAPERS: 13th International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference

The Thirteenth International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference 6-9 June 2019, Trondheim, Norway

HOST: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
THEME: Natures, Pictures: Cavendish and Early Modern Science, Technology, and Creativity

The society welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers on topics related directly or indirectly to the theme, or on any aspects of Cavendish, her work, her family (including William Cavendish, Jane Cavendish, and Elizabeth Cavendish) and her contemporaries, influences, and responses to her work. In particular, we invite panel proposals on the work of Anne Conway and other early modern women scientists and philosophers.

Papers may explore, but are not limited to, the following disciplines:

• art history
• social history
• book history
• digital humanities
• the history of science
• political theory
• literature
• ecocriticism
• gender studies
• philosophy
• translation studies
• pedagogical approaches

The 2019 conference will feature invited speaker Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World (2014):

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poems, four collections of essays, six novels, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction 2014. Hustvedt has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.


Abstracts of 150 to 200 words should be emailed to Lara Dodds (LDodds@english.mssate.edu) and Lisa Walters (walterl@hope.ac.uk) together with a brief CV by December 1st, 2018.

For more information, or to register for the conference, please visit the website of the Margaret Cavendish Society

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Art and the Verdant Earth: The Green Worlds of the Renaissance and the Baroque

Call for contributions to a multi-author essay collection:

The green mantle of the earth! This age-old metaphor casts the greening of the earth as a divine marvel while also calling upon poets and artists to re-fashion the greenness of nature into art. Ecological writers like Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson used the expression as a poetic figure for the terrestrial vegetation we take for granted. The topic of Art and the Verdant Earth is the representation of vegetation in the art of the Old Masters. Its ambition is to reveal the visual poetics underpinning the pictorial expression of greenery in images that are traditionally called landscapes.

We invite essays on the visual poetics of a verdant earth. How did artists in Early Modern Europe compete with poets (and Nature) in the fashioning of natural imagery? How did they manage/ manipulate the infinitude of irregularities that is nature’s way? What can be said of the many types of landscape painting (pastoral, sylvan, rural, wilderness, or even river views, clearings, and distressing wastelands) in light of a poetics of vegetation, and in light of the realities of land use? Artists, we believe, followed a kind of lyrical naturalism, which turns the phenomena of nature into the common themes and recurrent motifs of visual poetry. It also links the inexhaustible treasures of the natural world to the poets whose epithets for green matter served as precepts that directed artists in the discovery of just those traits – be it the obdurancy of an oak or the pliancy of a willow- that turn vegetation into eloquent depiction.

This collection of essays is being seriously considered by Ashgate Publishing. Edited by Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger and Leopoldine Prosperetti, it will draw from art history, literature, gender studies, emblem studies, environmental studies, natural philosophy, natural theology, and botany to treat ideas of verdancy and vegetation in the Renaissance. 

Topics might include:

• the technical problem of unstable pigments and the difficulty of achieving a durable color green
• from Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander to Goethe: theoretical perspectives on greenery in art
• the Renaissance print and the dissemination of vegetal imagery
• theologies of greenery: the vegetative argument in theology and philosophy
• the role of vegetation in the painted landscape
• the authority of poetry in natural imagery: from Virgil to Goethe
• no Tree, No Pastoral. Trees and pastoral scenery
• women, Luxuria and the color green: vegetative imagery and gender
• masters of vegetal imagery in the European canon
• sylvan moments in European art
• historically envisioning greenery and modern environmentalism

Finally, we welcome articles that address the very topical question, “Was the Renaissance green?”

Art and the Verdant Earth: The Green Worlds of the Renaissance and the Baroque will be an illustrated volume, with individual contributors responsible for any permission and/or art acquisition fees. Final essays, of approximately 8,000 words (incl. notes), and all accompanying b&w illustrations/permissions will be due in spring 2016. For consideration, please send an abstract (max. 500 words), a preliminary list of illustrations (if applicable), and to a 100-word biography to leopoldine@jhu.edu, april.oettinger@goucher.edu, & GoodchildKH@Wofford.edu by August 15. 2015. Acceptance notifications will be emailed by mid-September.

Worlds of Paper Writing Natural History from Gessner to Darwin

A Linnean Society of London meeting supported by the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy

This international conference aims to bring scholars together to discuss how practices of processing written information have shaped conceptions of the natural world in the past. From the sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, naturalists strove to collect, observe and classify animals, plants and minerals, often with their medical and economical use in mind. The printing “revolution” and the discovery of America profoundly transformed literacy and scholarly practices of reading and writing. The day‐to‐day practices of assembling information on natural objects and their medical properties can be glimpsed through the numerous marginalia, commonplace books, notebooks, files and index cards that naturalists, physicians, and apothecaries have left to us. The conference will investigate how these practices acted as powerful tools which changed conceptions of the order of nature. Early modern writing practices ultimately influenced taxonomical procedures, the developing idea of relationships within nature, and, in the long run, concepts of biodiversity and bioprospecting.

For more information about the conference, details of accommodation and directions to the Linnean Society, please contact:

Events, The Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BF Tel.: +44 (0)20 7434 4479 Fax: +44 (0)20 7287 9364 Email: events@linnean.org

For registration please visit www.linnean.org and visit our upcoming events page to download your registration form.

Charity Reference No. 220509