Locating the Ancient World in Early Modern Subversive Thought

12th – 14th April 2018
The Boiler House, Newcastle University

The aim of this conference is to expand on this revived appreciation of the classical influence in early modernity by looking specifically at the role played by the ancient world in that sphere from which it has most usually been excluded: subversive literature. The idea that the texts, philosophies, and exempla of the ancient world might have served as significant tools for those who sought to undermine and challenge political, religious and cultural authority stands in direct opposition to the traditional role assigned to the classics in this period. Emphasising an interdisciplinary approach, this conference will draw scholars together to build a coherent picture of how the classical tradition functioned as a tool for subversion, illuminating a previously neglected aspect of the ancient world in the early modern thought.

Featuring keynote speakers Peter Harrison (University of Queensland) and Marianne Pade (Danish Academy at Rome).

There is no delegate fee for this conference, but if you plan to attend please email Katherine East to register for the event by Monday 9th April.


PROGRAMME

Thursday 12th April

13.30-14.00 Coffee and Registration

14.00-14.30 Welcome Address

14.30-16.30 Panel One: Institutions of Religion

Alasdair Raffe (Edinburgh): ‘Numa in Plaid: Scottish Interpretations of Roman Religion, c. 1602-1759’

John Holton (Newcastle): ‘Thomas Hobbes, Diodorus Siculus, and Early Human Society’

Ashley Walsh (Cambridge): ‘Ciceronianism and the Multitude in the Civil Religion of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’

17.00-18.00 Keynote Address

Marianne Pade (Danish Academy at Rome): ‘Thucydides vs Aristotle: Leonardo Bruni on Popular Government’

18.00-19.00 Drinks Reception

Friday 13th April

9.30-11.30 Panel Two: Rewriting the Natural World

Valentina Zaffino (Pontifical Lateran University): ‘Subverting Aristotelianism through Aristotle: Giordano Bruno’s Interpretation of the Physics’

Karine Durin (Nantes): ‘Dangerous Pliny: Natural Philosophy and the Limits of Christian Orthodoxy in the Renaissance’

Michelle Pfeffer (Oxford): ‘William Coward (1657-1724), the Material Soul, and ‘Undeniable History’: a Physician’s Critical Study of Pagan, Hebrew, and Christian Pasts’

11.30-12.00 Break

12.00-13.30 Panel Three: Pagan Belief

Jonathan Nathan (Cambridge): ‘Orthodox Atheism and the Manuscript Theophrastus Redivivus’

Tim Stuart-Buttle (York): ‘Pagan Philosophy and Early Modern Natural Law Theory: John Maxwell’s Edition of Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (1727)’

13.30-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.30 Panel Four: The Power of Words

Callum Murrell (Durham): ‘The Invention of Subversion: Fiction and Narrative in the Elizabethan Star Chamber’

Julianne Mentzer (St Andrews): ‘“Give me my fee!”: Transgressive Use of Rhetoric in The Dutch Courtesan’

Rowland Smith (Newcastle): ‘The Persecuting Pagan and the Philosophic Protestant: Julian the Apostate in English Reception from Marvell to Gibbon, by way of Hampton Court and Voltaire the Bigot’

17.00-18.00 Keynote Address

Peter Harrison (University of Queensland): ‘The Authority of the Ancients: the Case of Heterodox Religion in Seventeenth Century England’

18.00 Drinks Reception and Conference Dinner

Saturday 14th April

9.30-11.30 Panel Five: Popular Politics

Astrid Khoo (KCL): ‘Subverting Cicero: Roman Republican Polemic in Milton’s Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano’

Dikaia Gavala (Aberdeen): ‘“Rise before the Majesty of the People”: Popular Republicanism in Restoration Drama’

Minchul Kim (St Andrews): ‘War and Patriotism: Roman History and Military Government in the French Revolutionary Debates’

11.30-12.00 Break

12.00-13.30 Panel Five: Epicurean Echoes

Jessica Pirie (Birmingham): ‘Aphra Behn’s The Young King and the Lucretian Revival’

Jared Holley (EUI): ‘Epicureanism and Popular Sovereignty in Rousseau’

13.30 Lunch and Farewells



Dr Katherine A. East
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Newcastle University
Katherine East

CALL FOR PAPERS: Corruption: Deviation, Degradation, and Malfeasance in the Early Modern Period

Postgraduate Conference 28 April 2017, City Campus, University of Worcester

Plenary Speaker: Professor David Roberts, Birmingham City University

Whether perceived or actual, corruption signifies a failure in norms, order and structure, heightens anxieties concerning personal and institutional conduct, and undermines the ideal of the benevolent, disinterested exercise of power. Originally implying bodily decay, the Early Modern period witnessed the term ‘corruption’ broaden in meaning to incorporate the venality of politics, religion, monarchy, society and culture to reflect a variety of highly contested ideological positions: established religious foundations became threatened through the perceived corruption of the Catholic church and emerging religious factions; concerns about royal lineage became exacerbated by the succession of not one but two unmarried female monarchs; an expanding printing press troubled defenders of high-culture and ‘taste’ as literary standards faced apparent threats from the products of the ‘un-polite’ mass in an increasingly commodified society; and notions of gender, sexuality, and purity underwent an unprecedented refashioning in response to this transforming social, cultural and political environment.

How contemporaries of the early modern period experienced and responded to such notions of corruption is the focus of the first postgraduate conference of Worcester’s Early Modern Research Group. We welcome proposals from postgraduate students and researchers (MA, MRes, early PhD stage) for 20-minute papers that consider literary, religious, political, historical, cultural, and social notions of corruption during the early modern period, c.1550-1800. Relevant themes and topics include, but are not limited to:

• Editing and pirating, rewriting of texts, adaptations of films or plays 
• Corruption of genre, form, stage, literary convention 
• Disease, decay 
• Corruptive power – moral, legal, political, institutional 
• Social disorder 
• Corruption of culture, ethnicity, race or class 
• Sexual deviation, perversion and the corruption of normative gender models 
• Corruption of the family unit 
• Sacred or environmental corruption 
• Corruption of the transmission of information 

Proposals for individual papers or complete panels should be directed to Kirsty Driscoll and Lucy Cooper at EMRG by 1st March 2017.

Dacre Centenary Lectures 2014: Ideas and Society c 1600-1800 (17 Oct to 28 Nov)

Venue: Oxford University Examination schools, High St, Oxford.
Time: Fridays at 5pm.

Provisional titles:

17 October: Colin Kidd, ‘Priestcraft, the Devil and the Union of 1707”

24 October: Anthony Grafton, ‘Humanism and History in the Late Renaissance: Isaac Casaubon, Polybius, and the Political uses of the Past.’

31 October: Jonathan Israel, ‘Radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution’

7 November: David Womersley, ‘Ideas and Society in the Pays de Vaud: Edward Gibbon and Georges Deyverdun read the Classics’.

14 November: Michael Hunter, ‘The Enlightenment Rejection of Magic: New Thoughts on an Old theme’.

21 November: Brian Young, ‘Hume and History’

28 November: Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan and Christian Doctrine’.

Call for Papers: “Early modern Baconians: science, politics and philosophy”

This special issue of SOCIETY AND POLITICS aims to gather together articles dealing with the formation, evolution and influence of Francis Bacon’s thought. We are particularly interested in articles exploring the influence of Francis Bacon’s ideas upon seventeenth and eighteenth century European thought: from science to politics, and from religion to the evolution of literary forms and genres. Our purpose is to accommodate a diversity of approaches, coming from different fields. We welcome articles on experiment and experimental science, natural history, medicine of the mind, the Baconian ‘method’, the advancement of learning, religion and theology, politics and the reformation of law, fables and projects for ‘scientific’ or ‘esoteric’ societies (inspired by Francis Bacon’s writings). SOCIETY AND POLITICS welcomes research coming from different fields and strongly encourages cross-disciplinary approaches.

SOCIETY AND POLITICS is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by “Vasile Goldiș” Western University of Arad, Romania. See http://uvvg.ro/socpol/.

Papers no longer than 8.000 words and book reviews no longer than 800 words should be submitted by email to Dana Jalobeanu,dana.jalobeanu@celfis.ro and Oana Matei, oanamatei@yahoo.com by the 10th of February 2013.

For the authors guidelines see:
http://uvvg.ro/socpol/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=53